The Śrī Pārtasārati Svāmi Temple is only one of thousands of temples in the state of Tamiḻnāṭu in South India. These temples vary organizationally, ritually, doctrinally, and iconographically. But all these temples, whether large or small, wealthy or poor, share a common cultural and institutional model, although they might reflect it only partially and in more or less truncated forms. This model, composed of a series of beliefs and rules for action, is analyzed in this chapter and contextualized in ethnographic data from the Śrī Pārtasārati Svāmi Temple.

At the moral and iconographic center of the South Indian temple is the deity. This deity, however, is not a mere image. It is conceived to be, in several thoroughly concrete senses, a person. The problem of how a stone figure can be a person has engaged legal and philosophical scholars for almost the last ten centuries and has been a particular subject of contention since the advent of British legal systems in South India. But regardless of the philosophical and legal biases of those concerned with this question, what is clear is that they were faced with a post-Vedic cultural situation in which the worship of deities that were concretely treated as persons had become popular. Both high-level philosophical treatments and popular behavior provide evidence that the deity is considered fully corporeal, sentient and intelligent. The ceremony of vivifying the idol (prāṇa pratiṣṭai) in Puranic and Agamic texts having to do with temples does not seem to imply allegory or metaphor.