A lot of South Indian Temples require men who enter the main part of the temple or the whole temple to come shirtless. Men wear the dhoti for the bottom and just a towel on the top – angavastra. There are a lot of reasons for this. Here are a few of them.
• To cultivate the thought of equality. Everyone is equal before god. The amount of money you have doesn’t define your position in front of the lord.
• Hair on our body is a source of static electricity and temples are places of high positive energy. Thus when males enter into temples they remove their upper garment, so that those surrounding positive energy gets attracted towards them easily, and that too when they are near to the god’s deity, maximized positive energy can be grasped by the human body easily.
• Heat will be dissipated continuously due to burning of camphor, lamps, human metabolism etc, which results in increase of ambient temperature. Despite all this, wearing a lot of clothing will yield discomfort and let the humans divert from being devotional.
