Pradakshina

(“toward the right”) Circumambulation
of an object or person as a sign of worship, reverence, or respect. This is
always done in a clockwise direction, so
that the walker’s right side (considered
the purer and more auspicious side) is
always turned toward the object or person being circled. Just about anything
can be so circled—one’s parents or
teacher, the image of a deity, a temple,
a city, or the entire Indian subcontinent. In many larger temples, particularly in the Nagara architectural style,
the pradakshina is the name for one of
the architectural features. In this case,
it is a semicircular processional passageway surrounding the temple’s
main image, so that people can circumambulate the main image either
before or after worship. Pradakshina is
also the fifteenth of the sixteen traditional upacharas (“offerings”) given to
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Pradakshina
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada was the founder of ISKCON,
a religious community devoted to the god Krishna that is popularly known as the Hare Krishnas.
a deity as part of worship, on the model
of treating the deity as an honored
guest. The underlying motive here, as
for all the upacharas, is to show one’s
love for the deity and to minister to the
deity’s needs as one would to a living
person’s needs.