A newly carved or cast Hindu image is, before consecration, understood as a well made object of stone, metal or wood, worthy of craft but not yet worthy of worship, and prana pratishtha is the rite that changes its status entirely: the establishing of prana, the life breath, by which the image becomes a murti, a form the tradition treats as a genuine seat of the deity's living presence rather than a representation or reminder of it.
The rite is performed by trained priests following procedures set out in agamic and puranic ritual literature, and its structure moves through stages of purification, invocation and animation, drawing on mantra, offerings of water, milk, honey and other substances, and a sequence of ritual actions understood cumulatively to draw the deity's power into the physical form. Its most visually striking moment, and the one most often described to outsiders, is the opening of the eyes, chakshu unmilana, at which the image's painted or carved eyes are ritually uncovered or completed as the climactic act of the whole ceremony, the point at which the deity is understood to look out at the world and at its devotees for the first time through the consecrated form, after which the image is treated for as long as it remains consecrated exactly as a living, honoured guest in its shrine.