Nagareesam
The presiding God in the temple is Nagareeswarar. This temple entry is sandwiched between two buildings on the main streets of Kanchipuram and is easy to find as it is near to the bus terminus. As this temple does not have a gopuram noticeable from the entrance, only once you enter the threshold, you know it is a temple. In the threshold of the temple, you will see a sign board describing the temple to the left, and the navagrahas, or nine planetary gods to the right. Looking straight ahead you will see Lord Ganesha in the court of the temple. The courtyard also has murthis of Lords Muruga, Lord Vishnu, Lord Ayyappa, Natraja, and Lord Bairava (a manifestation of Lord Shiva). The threshold to the temple is protected from the outside by a roof, however the other murthis are in enclosed shrines in an open air space, without a roof.
We came to this temple on the sixth day after Diwali. My friend’s family, who consider this their family temple, and affectionately call it “Ganesh Temple”, believes that on this day we should circle any temple with a Murugan murthi in it 108 times. There is a special way of walking around the grabha graha or temple, you need to walk so that with each step your heal touches the toes of your foot already on the ground. We could not walk around the Murugan murthi as this was situated along a back wall, so we circled the Ganesh murthi inside the premises. To walk around this shrine once took me 132 steps in the method described above. In order to know we circled 108 times, we had bought with us 108 camphors and placed one in the fire in front of the shrine each time we passed it. Other devotees had other interesting ways of knowing they went around 108 times; some had 108 sweets which they placed in front of Ganesha with each round, some wrote the number of times on a piece of paper, one devotee had bought a partner who took coins from them until that person counted 108. My friends noted we had bought camphor as with camphor you give it to god, it lights up, and we don’t get anything back, hence we gave everything to god.
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Many people in Kanchipuram perform this ritual. We saw this in grand form in the Sri Kumarakottam Temple later this same day. This temple is very large, and to circle the grabha graha 108 times on a non-festival day would easily take five hours. However, as today was a festival day, and there was so much crowd that it was impossible to see your feet, it must have taken twice as long for this to be completed. Though we did not circle the graba graha at this temple, we did come to participate in the puja at sunset. Due to the crowd, my friend’s father reserved our place in the crowd and prasadam for Rs. 50 earlier this morning. The murthi used for this puja was Arumurugan, which is the form of Murugan with six faces. We had collected the prasadam in a special yellow temple bag and returned home after attending the puja.
End of Part 4 of 8
1. Introductions | 2. Sri Kacchapeswarar Temple | 3. Sri Kamakshi Amman Temple | 4. Nagareesam | 5. Sri Vazhakkaruntheswara Temple | 6. Ekambareswara Temple | 7. Sri Varadharaja Swamy Temple | 8. References
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