The Achaar as Prasaad Theory
posted by saurabh in G_d, Levity, Religion |Since my sister brought it up, I suppose I might as well cover my “achaar as prasaad” theory in big, bold letters so everyone can read it.
The first obstacle in appreciating this theory will be unfamiliarity with its components. So, let me review, briefly.
“Achaar” is simply the Hindi word for “pickle”. You’ve probably consumed an Indian pickle before - they’re usually made with fruit of some sort and are heavily spiced, quite salty, usually tart and sometimes make your tongue burn with a righteous fire. I have been a fan of savory foods my whole life and enjoy eating achaar a great deal.
“Prasaad” is the Hindi word for “oblations”, and refers to a bit of food offered as a sort of sacrifice to God during prayer. There’s many problems with this arrangement, such as:
- Why does God need to eat?
- Even if God does need to eat, why can’t he/she/it take care of him/her/itself?
- Is there really any value in symbolically offering food to an omnipotent deity, especially when you’re going to eat it anyway right afterwards?
However, these are only problems for cantankerous individuals such as myself who just can’t wrap their heads around the idea of why God needs or wants to be worshipped in the first place.* Anyway, that’s not the point: when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and when hanging around with normal, devoted Hindus, play along, even if you don’t find yourself quite believing in everything. Social utility is something I can appreciate.
Prasaad is usually something sweet. In fact, it is nearly always something sweet. Indians are quite fond of sweets and have managed to produce a dizzying number of variations on the theme of sugar, milkfat and flour. The appeal of sweets is quite clear: our biochemistry is based on the metabolism of simple sugars such as glucose or fructose. It’s sensible, therefore, that we’ve evolved a palette that appreciates and even relishes the taste of sugar. Most people love sweets and can gorge themselves endlessly on them.
Not I. I detest sweets. I suspect my palette is a little oversensitive to sugar. I usually react by having strange sugar rushes and mini-seizures when I try to eat something sweet. Un-pleasant!†
Follow, then, my logic:
We’ve already established that anthropomorphic concepts of God are in order. I’m not prepared to accept this premise, but it seems to be the mode, and so we will take it as given. Wisdom suggests that presenting God with sweets is worthwhile because God, like us, would enjoy eating some sweets. Why? Who knows.‡ But if hubris is the way we’re operating, why stop at an anthropomorphic God? Surely I should consider a God even more reflective of my ego - a Saurabh-o-morphic God, as it were.§ I don’t like sweets, I like achaar. Maybe God wants achaar as prasaad, as well.
My theory has merit. There’s almost universal agreement that the world is, generally speaking, a shitty place to live. Most theories of religion blame this on an evil genius of some sort, but it’s at least as likely that the fault is that of endless millions of worshippers, who have for thousands of generations been forcing sweets onto an unhappy and possibly lactose-intolerant God. If we merely corrected our transgression, I predict that a rain of petals would be our reward.
* I previously described my difficulties with worship here. I’m certainly a fan of awe and humility before the vast, beautiful and unpitying Universe, but I still don’t know how to jump from there to the idea of worship as useful.
†You’d think others would enjoy this - more sweets for them, right? But in fact, people seem to perceive it as a strange disease that needs to be cured. The correct way to cure a disease, of course, is to stuff the person full of the irritant until it stops bothering them, or they stand up and vomit over everyone. So far I’ve managed to stave off the second outcome, but my dad’s determined efforts to get me to consume sweets mean that such an event is probably inevitable.
‡ For a likely explanation, see above note about eating it afterwards anyway.
§ Such a god would presumably refuse to be worshipped, would respond to prayer only infrequently, would often leave His stereo blaring upbeat, danceable rhythms across the heavens, and would occasionally manifest in gargantuan, terrifying forms, knocking over buildings and eating random civilians, just to show you-all what’s what.
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Good grief, Saurabh, where do I start. . . .
This is probably a mistake, but. . .
1. Of course He doesn’t need to eat. He wants to eat when someone feeds Him with love. It’s like kisses. I can manage withou kisses, but when I find the right sweetie to give them to me, I want lots of them.
2. See 1.
3. So, I don’t know about anyone else, but when I am cooking for Krishna et al, I actually do frequently take seriously the notion that I am cooking for THEM and not myself. Symbolic is not exactly the right word. But IF you believe in Bhagavan (which clearly, you don’t) AND you believe in Deity worship , then it’s really an almost immediate consequence that you will derive great pleasure from the cooking for your Thakurji and that the pleasure you derive from eating your Thakurji’s prasad is much more so than if you had just cooked for yourself. I don’t know about you, but I don’t enjoy just cooking for myself anyway. Sometimes even when I have a guest in my house, or it’s my family member’s birthday or special arrival, or I’m cooking for a sweetheart, then I mostly cook for them and then feed them first,and only after I’ve fed them do I myself eat with gusto. Feeding someone you love is a very basic joy.
4. All that said, actually, I think it is sound theology to prepare for Thakurji that food which you yourself like to eat. Krishna’s fondness for sweets is well cited in scripture, but so is His fondness for salty things. We Gaudiya Vaishnavs make a big deal out of offering leafy greens to Sri haitanya Mahaprabhu. I’m not really sure I can accept that He’s lactose-tolerant given names like Govinda and Gopal.
5. Temple prasad is usually sweet b/c it’s simple, fairly hard to screw up, dry and less likely to go bad quickly. But Thakurji’s are fed the whole range of foods, and I have myself offered homemade lime pickle. You can get salty prasad at a lot of temples I know. You just have to stick around and ask, probably. The rock candy and sickly sweet fried flour are for the dilettantes who are just passing through.
6. His stereo blaring upbeat, danceable rhythms across the heavens
That is not totally incompatible with my conception of God.
–your neighborhood Roman.
Religion is strongest where the state is aggressively kleptocratic, starts its predations on the lowest runs of the class ladder and eventually eats its way up to the oligarchs who are supposed to benefit from the predation. It therefore makes sense to offer God anything he, she, they or it may wish to eat, even if you don’t know what that might be, even if there’s no threat of an angry, hungry god eating you. Because mostly, it’s harmless sympathetic magic and the state approves of it enough to chew on you less vigorously.
To me, it makes sense to offer God what you might like to eat yourself, once the coast is clear and no one can see the blasphemous feasting.
Ummm… That’s interesting. So, the real purpose a lot of Indian Gods serve is very different form uh.. foreign Gods.
While foreign Gods (primarily the Abraham derivatives) seem to serve is that of answering “why” where science does not and of forgiving sins, the Indian Gods are useful as entities one can have emotional relationships with. You know like they love Jesus, but not the same way a devout Indian loves Krishna and stuff.
So, basically, though most God’s were perhaps primarily invented to serve as answers to fill those gaps in knowledge that the day’s science could point to but could not fill, the Indian Gods did evolve to serve a very unique and different ummm… social or personal purpose.
PS: I am treating gods as the way practical believers treat them as, and not how they were intended to be by those who errr… created them.
Saheli - This whole thing is, hopefully obviously, tongue-in-cheek and not meant to be taken very seriously. I do realize that people offer a range of foods as prasaad, I’m merely speaking of the mode. I’ve just had too many unpleasant experiences growing up having to eat sweets because they were prasaad - this theory is thus born mostly from frustration.
Anon - Hindus have very complex relationships with divinity, and it would be futile to attempt to characterize a single form as typical. Some Hindus do indeed have intensely personal relationships with God, as you might infer from reading Saheli’s comment. Others do not, and prefer to commune with God as more of an abstract, transcendental spirit. Then there’s those like me who just don’t get God at all. Takes all types. Hindus have been thinking about God for thousands of years, and we’ve probably gone through just about every contortion of belief that you can in that time. Since all of the documentation of this variety of belief is still around, Hinduism isn’t particularly orthopraxic, and definitely not orthodox.
I’ve just had too many unpleasant experiences growing up having to eat sweets because they were prasaad - this theory is thus born mostly from frustration.
Yeah, I’m really not a big fan of force-feeding anyone prasad. It should be cherished, not grudgingly gulped.
I know it was somewhat tongue in cheek, but I did want to make the serious comments for the benefit of an audience that might not be familiar with the rest of it. Also, it *is* kind of annoying how some temple prasad is always sugar candy. I mean seriously, of course He would get sick of that after a while. The salted almonds at the Malibu temple were kind of cool.
Anon–well, we would say our personal relationship notions came first but got lost in the murk. ;-). Saurabh is right, you can find everything under the sun. The Abrahamic religions definitely have their own mystical traditions that are deeply similar in spirit if not as physically ritualistic–I still remember the shock of recognition in 8th grade when I first read about Hasidic Judaism’s Bal Shem Tov and his ideas about singing and dancing in communion with one’s Lord. Even though I’m sure most Hasids would disdain me as an idol-worshipper, I still feel some odd affection for their tradition. When I was about 6 I went through one of those kid phases where I insisted on watching the same movie over and over and over again, but instead of being Star Wars or something it was Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun Sister Moon and various aspects of Franciscan devotions, the French Beguines, and similar movements have resonated with me over the years. The intertwining of Sufiism and Hindu mysticism is, of course, old news. I have a couple friends who are devout Native American Hindus, and they feel there was no moment of conversion, and that the Great Spirit conception they grew up with is of a piece with the Gaudiya Vaishnavism they now practice. Conversely, there are vast tracts of Hindu tradition that have the sort of detached, even Atheistic conceptions–very well developed forms of “Hindu” Atheism, in fact–which resonate pretty strongly with a lot of “western” traditions. Obviously a lot of westerners find a strong compatibility between Buddhism and the ideas they grew up with (there’s a whole class of books devoted to being a good Buddhist Jew, for example) and Buddhism is of course strongly related to Hinduism. Generally speaking I’m not a big fan of overextending analytical dichotomies, and you can usually find a little bit of everything everywhere.
once the coast is clear and no one can see the blasphemous feasting.
So this is the reason why I was trying to make serious comments. In my tradition at least, the feasting is not remotely blasphemous, but absolutely essential. We honor prasad, and we honor it with the gusto of our feasting. It’s true that I’m cooking for Krishna, but after I’m thinking about cooking for Krishna I’m thinking about feeding the assembly, and my enthusiasm and pleasure in cooking is very much a function of the idea that I’ll also be feeding the *people* I love–enthusiasm that only grows if I know they’ll view the prasad as prasad and be pleased accordingly. In the Gaudiya Vaishnav tradition there are a lot of stories about Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (an incarnation of Krishna) enthusiastically feeding His devotees with His own hands. Even in the Srimad Bhagavatam and Mahabharat there are stories of Krishna feeding His devotees. Or Lakshmi Devi feeding people, or Sita feeding people. And by extension, one celebrates big occasions–births, weddings, graduations, any reason for being happy and grateful–by giving away food in charity, if possible. Vaishanvs, at least, get immense joy out of feeding people prasad, and also thrill at the pleasure other Vaishnavs have in feeding them as both direct affection and the indirect manifestation of Divine affection.
So Scruggs, while I see that the humor of your classist/kleptocratic analysis is firmly grounded in the idea that I and my compatriots are mostly motivated by fear and economics, I just have to note that I experience this “kitchen religion” in a very different mood.
Saheli, I’m not entirely sure there’s causation in the relation between a rotten state and the strength of faith amongst the religious. There is correlation, often strong. I’m also not convinced that religion is a bad thing or a thing to be too casually belittled. Religious groups have frequently assumed the social welfare, education and cultural transmission roles that healthier societies take on as a matter of good governance. There’s also some plain old survival value to faith and other, more esoteric benefits, like tranquility.
I have noticed that the higher up the food chain (forgive me) you go in religious hierarchies, the more attention is paid to economics and fear, mainly for their utility in purely secular activities, devoid of any relation to, or interest in, what the divine might be. The moral bankruptcy of a pope does not make the folks in the pews villains, however. Moreover, a militant secularism manages to produce people as doctrinaire and nasty as any fundamentalist.
Scruggs, I think I understand what you’re saying, and I appreciate the qualification.
I think I found the words to express and clarify it a little better. The kindest religious people attempt to bring a sense of the divine, or what the divine might be, to the quotidian and to the things that are hard to endure. I don’t really want to look at the mechanisms of that too closely, because the intent and the effect are often joyous.
Scruggs, ummm…. why should one treat any religious matter any differently than any other. If I can belittle String Theory, I should be equally allowed to belittle religion, shouldn’t I?
I am also beginning to get convinced that religion is generally a bad thing. When you ask of some kid while growing up to believe in something that is not based on scientific evidence, you generally leave him vulnerable to believing other such things too. That is to say that from the average religious kid’s point of view, if he has been made to believe that there is a supernatural God, he can also be someday made to believe that this supernatural God’s supernatural will asks of him to kill someone.
Would it not be a much better society where the young impressionable minds of the day are taught the value of a sound scientific attitude - taught not believe in something unless they see sound scientific grounds for it and taught that God is just as much subject to scientific enquiry as anything else and that thought experiments like “achaar as prasad” are great things.
To quote some wise guy, “Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, but for a good man to do a bad thing - now, that needs religion!”