Murti

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Bronze Chola murti depicting Shiva's most famous dancing posture, the Nataraja, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Modern murtis representing Balarama (left) and Krishna at the Krishna-Balarama mandir in Vrindavan, India.

A murti (Devanagari: मूर्ति) (also spelled murthi or murthy) typically refers to an image in which the Divine Spirit is 'murta', or expressed. A murti becomes worshippable after the Divine is invoked in it for the purpose of offering worship. Thus the murti is treated as the Deity of the Divine and regarded by Hindus and also by some Mahayana Buddhists during worship as points of devotional and meditational focus.

Murtis are sometimes abstract, but more often representations of God in a personal form like Shiva or Ganesh, Rama or Krishna, Saraswati or Kali. Murtis are made according to the prescriptions of the Silpasastra (typically of the alloy Panchaloga) and then installed by priests through the prana pratishtha ('establishing the life') ceremony. Afterward the divine personality is present in the murti but in cases of serious discrepancies in worship may leave the form.

Devotional (Bhakti) practices centered on cultivating a deep and personal bond of love with God often include veneration of murtis. Some Hindu denominations like Arya Samaj, however, reject image-worship.

Critics of murti worship equate the practice with idolatry. Hindus argue that murti worship consists of veneration of the image or statue as the representative of the Divine, or as the "manifest presence" of the transcendent God, while idolatry objectifies divinity as the material object itself.