Ekadashi observance

The observance of Ekadashi is the Hindu practice of fasting and heightened devotion on the eleventh day of each half of the lunar month, the eleventh day after the new moon and after the full moon, making it a fortnightly discipline that falls roughly twice a month throughout the year. The day is sacred above all to Vishnu, and its observance is especially central to the Vaishnava devotional traditions, for whom keeping Ekadashi is among the most important of regular religious duties. The tradition holds the fast to purify body and mind, to burn away accumulated sin, and to advance the devotee toward liberation, and a rich body of story literature attaches particular merits and origins to the many named Ekadashis of the year.

The fast takes various forms according to the strictness of the observer: some abstain from all food and even water for the full day, others take only fruit, milk or water, and a widespread rule forbids grains and pulses on Ekadashi, so that even those who do not fast completely alter their diet. The day is given to increased worship, the repetition of Vishnu's names, the reading of scripture and the keeping of vigil. Some Ekadashis are held to be especially potent, among them the Vaikuntha Ekadashi, on which the gate of Vishnu's heaven is said to open to the faithful, and are observed by great numbers with particular devotion.

Vaikuntha Ekadashi at the Srirangam temple in Tamil Nadu, one of the largest and most important Vishnu temples in South India, shows the observance at its fullest festival scale rather than as an individual fast alone. The temple opens its Paramapada Vasal, the Gate of the Supreme Abode, only on this single day of the year, a gate ordinarily kept shut that devotees believe grants a symbolic passage to Vishnu's heavenly abode to anyone who passes through it during the narrow window it stands open, drawing enormous crowds who queue for hours, sometimes overnight, for the chance to walk through it, a scale of pilgrimage that turns an individual dietary observance into a mass communal event lasting several days of associated festivities at the temple.

Vaishnava sampradayas, the distinct devotional lineages within the wider Vaishnava tradition, differ somewhat in exactly which additional rites and readings accompany the fast beyond the basic abstention, some emphasising all-night kirtan and continuous recitation of Vishnu's names through the fasting period, others centring the day on formal temple ritual and scripture reading, and the various regional Ekadashi names and associated stories, of which there are twenty-four across a full year, are kept with differing degrees of local elaboration depending on the sampradaya and region, so that the twice-monthly fast that looks uniform in outline, abstention and devotion to Vishnu, carries genuinely different local content depending on which lineage and temple tradition a devotee follows.