Do we need to dress and bathe our home Deities daily to treat them personally?
To treat the deities as persons should we bathe and dress them everyday just as we bathe and dress ourselves everyday answer in bhakti different devotees are inspired by different things and accordingly they will emphasize those things some devotees may say that to treat Krishna as a person we should pronounce his name clearly and that is why we should not rush through the Hare Krishna Mahamantra but we should chant it slowly and lovingly just as you would address the name of a person whom we love and if we do it that way chanting 16 rounds will take us 4, 5, 6 hours at times so are we addressing Krishna impersonally by chanting him faster no, we follow the Acharya Prabhupada and Prabhupada chanted fast so we follow him in that with respect to deity worship Prabhupada started the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and at one level his focus was always on the holy name and inspiring people to chant their holy names and temple and temple worship was important of course but it is not the Yugadharma its glorification of Krishna that is the Yugadharma so if someone is inspired by deity worship and they want to in their home dress their deities everyday, bathe their deities everyday that's perfectly fine but if their inspiration in Krishna Bhakti is coming from some other sources then they might as well focus on those sources because that is their connection with Krishna and let them focus on their connection with Krishna instead of worrying about or imposing that connection on others we also have to see how we feel reciprocation of Krishna and how others feel reciprocation of Krishna if we are feeling his reciprocation in a particular way let's continue that if someone else is feeling his reciprocation in particular let them continue that there is no need to impose there is no need to overemphasize certain things that Prabhupada didn't overemphasize so there is absolutely no need to consider it as mandatory or to do anything less than that as impersonal Prabhupada would quote his Guru Maharaj saying that anybody who chanted less than 64 rounds has fallen. Prabhupada himself didn't chant 64 rounds everyday so there are statements made in particular context and they apply in particular context not beyond those contexts so we are we are at diverse moment with many different devotees whom Krishna inspires in different ways and naturally we want to share their inspiration with others but that does not necessarily mean that others would be inspired necessarily by the same thing if different people are inspired by different things that's perfectly fine we focus on connecting with Krishna and growing in our relationship with Krishna in the way that Krishna is revealing himself to us.