Most of a Hindu's religion is not performed in a temple. It is performed in a doorway, at a dining mat, in the way a book is picked up from the floor or a glass of water is handed to a visitor. These gestures are learnt before they are explained, so that many of us do them without quite knowing why, and newcomers watch them without quite knowing what they mean.
None of them is a law. Nearly all vary by region, community, family and generation, and a diaspora household may keep three of them and drop the rest. But each carries a thought, and the thought is usually the same one: that the ordinary world is holy, and the body can be taught to say so.
Namaste and touching the feet
The joined palms
The palms are brought together at the chest, fingers upward, and the head bows slightly. The word is namas, bow or homage, plus te, to you: "I bow to you." Namaskar and namaskaram are the same word in different mouths; pranam is the general term for any reverent salutation.
The gesture is the anjali mudra. An anjali is a cupped double handful, the shape of the hands when one offers water or flowers, so the greeting is literally an offering of oneself. The hands rest at the heart, and the explanation most often given today, that the divine in me greets the divine in you, is modern in its wording but faithful to the older idea that every person carries the same Self. The same gesture raised to the forehead is used before a deity; raised above the head, it is the salute of complete surrender.
Charan sparsh
A younger person bends and touches the feet of an elder, a teacher or a holy person; the elder touches the younger's head or shoulder in return and speaks a blessing. In Hindi this is charan sparsh, the touching of feet. In many South Indian families men go further and prostrate fully, sashtanga, with eight parts of the body on the floor, while women bow with five, kneeling and touching the forehead down.
The feet are the humblest part of a person, and the act says: I place myself below the lowest part of you. The blessing that answers it is the elder's duty, not a courtesy. Common ones are ayushman bhava, may you live long; saubhagyavati bhava, to a married woman, may your good fortune endure; and chiranjivi bhava, be long-lived. The Manusmriti promises four rewards to the one who habitually greets and serves elders: life, learning, fame and strength (2.121).
Who touches whose feet varies. Some families cross the hands, right to the elder's right foot and left to the left; some do not touch the feet of a married daughter, who is now the Lakshmi of another house; and the etiquette between a son-in-law and his wife's parents differs from district to district.
At the threshold: shoes, hands and feet
Shoes come off at the door. The reason is practical and religious at once: the floor of an Indian home is where people sit, eat and sleep, and the dust of the street has no place there; and the house holds a puja shelf, which must not be approached in street shoes. Behind this lies a morning prayer that children are taught, addressed to the earth before the feet first touch the floor:
O Goddess clothed in the oceans, with mountains for your breasts, consort of Vishnu, I bow to you. Forgive me for touching you with my feet. (morning prayer to Bhumi Devi)
If the ground is a goddess, one does not drag the gutter onto her.
The right hand gives, receives, eats and offers. The left is kept for washing after the toilet and for the humbler tasks. Food is eaten with the right hand alone; money, a gift, prasad or a glass of water is passed with the right, often with the left hand touching the right forearm as a mark of respect. Feet carry the opposite charge. One does not point the soles at a person, a deity, a book or a lamp, and one sits cross-legged or with the feet tucked away in a temple or at a meal. If your foot touches someone by accident, you touch them quickly with your hand and then your own forehead or heart, a small apology that every Hindu recognises.
Receiving a guest
Treat your mother as God, your father as God, your teacher as God, your guest as God. (Taittiriya Upanishad 1.11.2)
Atithi devo bhava, the guest is God, is the most quoted of these. An atithi is literally "one without a date", a person who arrives unannounced. What survives of the old hospitality is the shape of a welcome: water first, before any conversation, then something sweet, then the meal. The sequence is the same as the opening of a puja, where the deity is offered water for the feet, water for the hands and water to sip. The guest is received as the god is received.
At a festival or family occasion a guest is also marked with tilak, a dot of kumkum or sandalwood paste on the forehead between the brows, often with grains of unbroken rice pressed into it. The spot is the seat of thought; the mark is a blessing placed on it, and a sign that the person is now part of the gathering.
The lamp at dusk and the goddess in the books
At the hour the cows once came home, godhuli, the cow-dust hour, a lamp is lit in the puja corner and often at the door. In Marathi homes and many others the children recite:
I bow to the light of the lamp, which brings auspiciousness, welfare, health and wealth, and destroys the enmity of the mind. (the shubham karoti verse)
It is often the first Sanskrit a child learns. It marks the turn from the day's work to the evening's rest, and in houses that keep the old ways nothing is swept or lent after the lamp is lit, since Lakshmi is said to visit at that hour and should not find the house being emptied.
A book that falls is picked up and touched to the forehead. A child who steps on a sheet of paper is told, at once, to say sorry to Saraswati. Books are not left on the floor, stepped over, sat on or used as a doorstop, because the goddess of learning lives in them. Anything by which one learns or earns gets the same regard: musical instruments, a tailor's scissors, a mechanic's spanners, which receive their own worship on Ayudha Puja or Vishwakarma day each autumn. The habit teaches a child that knowledge is not a possession but a presence.
Going round, the thread and the tuft
In a temple one walks round the shrine clockwise, keeping the deity on the right hand; this is pradakshina, from dakshina, the right side. The same movement is made round a sacred tree and round the fire at a wedding. The number of circuits differs by deity and temple; one is always enough. Around a Shiva lingam the circuit is traditionally a half-turn, stopping at the channel that carries the bathing water away and returning the way one came, rather than stepping across it.
Two visible marks of a man's religious life need a word. The yajnopavita, the sacred thread, is a loop of three cotton strands hung over the left shoulder and under the right arm, given at the upanayana ceremony that our article on the sixteen samskaras describes. Its three strands are explained variously as the three debts, the three gunas or the three Vedas; it is moved to the right shoulder for rites to the ancestors. The shikha, the tuft of hair left at the crown when the rest is shaved, is kept by many priests and traditional Brahmins and tied during rituals; it marks the point through which the tradition says the soul departs. Both are less common than they were, and neither is required of anyone who has not taken them on.
Eating with gratitude
Before a meal many families say the Gita's verse:
Brahman is the offering, Brahman the oblation, poured by Brahman into the fire of Brahman. Brahman is reached by the one who sees Brahman in every act. (Bhagavad Gita 4.24)
Food is cooked in a clean kitchen, a portion is offered to the deity, a little is set aside for the cow, the crow or the ants, and only then does the household eat, sitting on the floor if the house keeps the old way. The Gita says that those who eat what remains after offering are freed from faults, while those who cook only for themselves "eat sin" (3.13). In Maharashtra and Gujarat the meal ends with the words annadata sukhi bhava, may the giver of this food be happy.
A simple way to begin
Do not try to adopt all of these at once; nobody keeps all of them. Choose three. Take your shoes off at the door and say the earth verse once in the morning. Offer a glass of water to anyone who comes in before you ask them anything. Light a lamp at dusk and say the shubham karoti verse, or simply sit with it for a minute. These are small, and they are meant to be. Their work is to let the sacred into the hours that nobody thinks of as sacred, which is most of them.