Circling to the Right

Pradakshina is the Hindu rite of circumambulation, walking around a sacred object, image, shrine, tree, hill or person while keeping it always on one's right hand. The name itself encodes the direction: the movement is clockwise, so that the honoured centre stays to the auspicious right side throughout. Performed around the inner sanctum of a temple, around the whole temple, or around a sacred site, it is one of the standard components of worship, the devotee tracing a slow circle as an act of reverence and of keeping the divine at the centre of attention and of one's world.

The practice rests on a deep symbolism of the centre. To circle a thing is to acknowledge it as the fixed point around which one turns, and the tradition reads the circling of a deity as an enactment of a life oriented wholly around it. The rite is shared with the other Indian religions, Buddhists circle stupas and Jains their shrines in the same rightward manner, and it has parallels in the circling rites of many traditions.