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food prayers food
prayers significance in world's established religions
Brahmaarpanam Brahma Havir
Brahmaagnau Brahmanaa Hutam
Brahmaiva Tena Gantavyam
Brahma Karma Samaadhinaha
[This is 24th verse from the 4th chapter of Bhagavad Geetha] The act of offering
is Brahman. The offering itself is Brahman. The offering is done by Brahman in
the sacred fire which is Brahman. He alone attains Brahman who, in all actions,
is fully absorbed in Brahman. (As we chant this prayer we are offering the
different types of food to Brahman).
Aham Vaishvaanaro Bhutva
Praaninaam Dehamaashritha
Praanaapaana Samaa Yuktaha
Pachaamyannam Chatur Vidam
[This is 14th verse from the 15th chapter of Bhagavad Geetha] This sloka is a
sort of acknowledgement and assurance to us from Brahman. "I am Vaishnavara,
existing as fire God in the bodies of living beings. Being associated with
ingoing (prana) and outgoing (apaana) life breaths, I will digest all the four
different types of food (that which we bite and chew; that which we masticate
with the tongue; those which we gulp; that which we swallow) and purify them."
Harir Daatha Harir Bhoktha
Harir Annam Prajaapatih
Harir Vipra Shareerastu
Bhoonkte Bhojayathe Harih.
Oh Lord Hari, You are the food, You are the enjoyer of the food, You are the
giver of food. Therefore, I offer all that I consume at Thy Lotus Feet.
Swami's explanation of this prayer
We should partake food with a Sathwic mind. Our ancestors recommended the
offering of food to God before partaking. Food so partaken becomes "Prasad"
(consecrated offering). Prayer cleanses the food of the thre impurities; caused
by the absence of cleanliness of the vessel, cleanliness of the food stuff, and
cleanliness in the process of cooking. It is necessary to get rid of these three
impurities to purify the food; for, pure food goes into the making of a pure
mind. It is not possible to ensure the purity of the cooking process, since we
do not know what thoughts rage in the mind of the man who prepares the food.
Similarly, we cannot ensure the cleanliness of the food ingredients as we do not
know whether it was acquired in a righteous way by the seller who has sold it to
us. Hence, it is essential on our part to offer food to God in the form of
prayer, so that these three impurities do not afflict our mind. The prayer:
Brahmaarpanam Brahma Havir
Brahmaagnau Brahmanaa Hutam
Brahmaiva Tena Gantavyam
Brahma Karma Samaadhinaha
Aham Vaishvaanaro Bhutva
Praaninaam Dehamaashritha
Praanaapaana Samaa Yuktaha
Pachaamyannam Chatur Vidam
Harir Daatha Harir Bhoktha
Harir Annam Prajaapatih
Harir Vipra Shareerastu
Bhoonkte Bhojayathe Harih.
"The food thus offered to God is digested by 'Vaishwanara" in the digestive
system. Since God exists in the form of fire as Vaishwanara, He digests the food
along with the impurities. So, man will not be affected even i the impurities
enter the food."
- Baba
Summer Showers in Brindavan 1993 Page 86
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Other Food Prayers
Just as we pray in the Lord's
Prayer "Give us today our daily bread," it is good to give thanks to God for His
provision to us. Whilst this may often happen at family meals on more formal
occasions, such as Christmas or Thanksgiving, perhaps we need to remember to say
grace, or mealtime prayers, on a daily basis. This can be an easy way for the
whole family to join in, and for those as young as four or so to lead a very
simple prayer. Below there are a number of simple dinner prayers you might like
to use. As far as we are aware, none of these dinner prayers are copyright, but
if we have inadvertently reproduced anything without acknowledgement, please let
us know
For food in a world where many walk in hunger
For friends in a world where many walk alone
For faith in a world where many walk in fear
We give you thanks, O Lord. Amen.
(Anglican Church of Canada,)
Thank you for the world so sweet,
Thank you for the food we eat,
Thank you for the birds that sing,
Thank you God for everything. Amen.
God our Father, God our Father,
Who gives all, who gives all,
Thank you for this dinner, Thank you for this dinner,
Amen. Amen.
(to the tune of Frere Jacques)
Dear Jesus:
Thank you for this food.
Bless us all and keep us from harm.
Guide and direct us, through all our days.
Amen!
Loving Father, we thank you for this food,
And for all your blessings to us.
Lord Jesus, come and be our guest,
And take your place at this table.
Holy Spirit, as this food feeds our bodies,
So we pray you would nourish our souls. Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, As you blessed many with the five loaves and the two fishes,
may we too, know your blessing as we share this food, your peace in our hearts,
and your love in our lives.
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ,
Friend of sinners, we thank you for friendship,
Prince of peace, we ask you that we may be peacemakers.
Lord of all, we thank you for this food.
Bless it to our bodies, we pray. Amen.
Bless, O Lord, this food for thy use, and make us ever mindful of the wants and
needs of others. Amen
Lord, Bless this bunch, while we munch our lunch. Amen.
Top
Bless
Food Prayers prominence in different
religions
The sacred texts of the
world, such as the Bible, the Koran, the Lotus Sutra, the Hindu Vedic corpus,
have a common profound quality. What marks them as sacred is that they are
treated as holy documents possessing supreme authority and power, by virtue of
their divine origin.
Sacred texts are created directly
by God or revealed to humankind or recorded by holy prophets. Through the
centuries, rebbes, monks and saints have orally passed down such sacred texts as
the Pali canon, the sacred Scripture of Theravada Buddhism, and the Torah, which
originally was forbidden to be written and was memorized by tannas, who were
flawless ``repeaters'' of the text. Sacred texts are immutable and are
considered ``closed'' texts, which cannot be altered or revised.
A distinguishing feature of a
sacred text is its beneficence to humanity. While not all food prayers are
sacred (including those in this anthology), they all possess some kind of
beneficial power for humankind.
For those whose intellectual
interest is in what Paul Verlaine called ``mere literature,'' the compelling
beauty of these thanksgiving food prayers reveals the noble spirituality of
humanity. Prayer is how human beings relate to God, nature, and their place in
the divine order of things. Prayer is the principal channel we use in our search
for ultimate meaning. Thanksgiving food prayers embody religious and social
contexts, encompassing myth, sacred doctrine, rituals, and social and cultural
practices.
Sharing food is the most universal cultural experience. Expressing thanks for
food was humankind's first act of worship, for food is the gift of life from
above. In every culture there are sacred beliefs or divine commandments that
require honoring the giver of life--God or the divine principle--through
acknowledging the sacred gift of food. By admitting us to his table, God became
bound to us in a unique relationship. By admitting God to our table, we
experience the love and beauty of that relationship.
The gods command prayers of thanks for food. The Bible has several citations:
``And thou shall eat and be satisfied, and bless the Lord your God'' (Deut.
8:10). The divine origin of the words of the Koran are better appreciated if you
understand that the Koran is to Muslims what Jesus--not the Bible--is to
Christianity.
A verse from the Koran, the words
of Allah, the God of Islam, as recorded under divine guidance by the Prophet
Muhammad instructs Muslims on the sacred origins of food and the requirement for
food prayers: ``Eat of your Lord's provision, and give thanks to Him'' (34:15).
While some people may believe that ``grace'' is a Christian or Western notion,
the etymology of the word shows otherwise. The theological notion of grace
infuses the entire meaning of thankfulness.
Grace is the unmerited love of God
and the presence of God in us. This presence of divine love is gratuitous.
Gratuitous (given freely) comes from the Latin gratuitus (grateful) and derives
from the Latin word for thanks (gratia), found in many languages; Old French,
gratus (thankful); Sanskrit, grnati (sing praise). Grace in Greek is charis
(charisma). Charismata is the power of the Holy Spirit. A grace is the
thanks-to-God utterance before or after a meal.
Food has always been recognized as
the unmerited gift from God. Grace is the divine reality underlying all religion
and faith--that is, God's loving generosity. In the Hebrew Scriptures it is
hesed (loving kindness). In the Tao it is found in the love of the Hindu triad
Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. In Christian theology, grace is the human transcendent
activity of God in every creature.
Whether that expression of thanks (gratia) for the gift of spiritual and
physical food is voiced in a tribal ritualized saying or uttered silently or
sung eloquently, a person's intrinsic spiritual nature imposes a recognition
that the very food before him or her is sacred and mysterious and comes to him
or her from the beyond.
Consider: The first interhuman act of the newborn child is to experience
satisfaction through food. In the first hour of life our senses may transmit
ephemeral sight, sound, or touch quanta, but it is the initial ingestion of milk
from the mother that constitutes the first interhuman act: nourishment.
The immediate response to this
nourishment is a systemic and psychic satisfaction, and the hunger-gratification
cycle begins at that instant and continues throughout life. The just-born
infant's first human experience is a ``gift'' of milk in response to its sucking
instinct and food need, a gratifying experience that has an impact on the
infant's psyche on its deepest level. This gratis experience is irrevocably
imprinted on the newborn's uninscribed mind and is the primordial unconscious
analogue to voiced prayer.
Our first common human emotional
experience is the gratia response for food.
The ritualized saying of food prayers in thanks for God's bounty is an
acculturated experience derived through social and religious practices.
This ``imposition'' of formal
prayer saying is a confirmation of our first primal food experience. It gives
form to expressing thankfulness that reaches immediately back to our first
minutes of life and is something inherently cognate within us.
The gratia experience we encounter
as infants is transformed and intellectualized over time into an appreciation of
food as both spiritual and physical nourishment that is acknowledged in the
gratis prayer.
There are four principal types of thanksgiving grace: the silent grace, the
spoken grace, the sung grace, the signed grace. I thought it would be nice to
include an adult and child's signed grace (prayers 133 and 134). They have a
beauty all their own. See for yourself.
While this book is a collection of blessings that civilization has preserved,
there are other momentous prayers of thanks that are documented but whose actual
words are not known. An intriguing example is two prayers of thanks that,
according to the Bible, Jesus offered at the Last Supper. We don't know if the
prayers were voiced or silent.
Jesus' exact words (if they were
spoken) were not recorded by the authors of the New Testament. In the course of
the Last Supper, the Bible tells us, ``Jesus gave thanks'' to God in heaven. The
first grace was intoned before Jesus drank the wine, and the second divine
gratia before he ate the bread. These two thanksgiving prayers of Jesus are
sacred mysteries.
The Dead Sea Scrolls document another fascinating prayer of thanks that was a
sacred rite of the Essenes, the authors of the scrolls. (Essene means ``pious
one.'') This ancient esoteric Jewish sect existed from the second century
basmalah formula bismi-Llahi-r Rahmani-r-Rahim, ``In the name of God, the
Merciful, the Compassionate.''
Basmalah is never omitted
before a Muslim meal; it is the equivalent of saying grace. The meal is never
ended without uttering the hamdalah, the ``praise God.'' The hamdalah (colloq.
hamdullah) is the required ending response to the basmalah. The Prophet is clear
on the motivation for saying grace: ``If you are thankful, surely I will
increase you'' (Koran 14:7).
In the Hindu belief, food cannot be eaten unless it is first offered to God. It
then becomes prasad (sanctified or observed as holy), something to be eaten that
was blessed by God. Hinduism puts great emphasis on the loving reliance upon
God. An example of this is seen in prayer 5 from the Bhagavad Gita (Song of the
Lord), the most sacred religious text of Hinduism. The Gita is found in the
Mahabharata, an extraordinary Sanskrit epic that dates from the second century.
Eucharist is derived from the
Greek eucharistia (thanksgiving). In the celebration of Holy Communion, the
consecrated bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus
Christ. ``He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I
in him'' (John 6:56).
Food and associated prayers play a central role in religions of the Far East.
Confucianism, founded by Confucius in the sixth century Tao meaning ``the
Way''). Taoism is based on the annual rotation of the seasons and the harmony
and balance of nature. In the Tasze, the great sacrifice in the huge Altar Park
(the largest altar in the world), offerings of food, rice spirits, and other
gifts are placed on the altar and the spirit of heaven is invited by means of a
sacred hymn to descend to the altar.
Sie-Tsih, the gods of millet and
corn, are worshiped in a spring and autumn sacrifice. The modern Chinese
expedient gratia before the banquet meal, Duo xie, duo xie (a thousand thanks, a
thousand thanks), is merely the cultural evolution of worship chanted to the
many food gods of Chinese antiquity: Chi Ming, Ching Ling Tzu, or Chung Tso. A
witty and sophisticated saying in cultural circles that has the elegance of
quoting poetry is (Ren Yi Shi Wei Tian), ``People perceive food to be almost
like God.''
Shinto is the old native religion of Japan that reveres ancestors and nature
spirits. Derived from the Chinese Shen-Tao (way of the gods), Shinto's central
belief is kami, God, the sacred power that infuses animate and inanimate things.
Amaterasu is the most eminent of the Shinto deities. She is the beneficent sun
goddess who taught mankind the cultivation of food. Inari is the grain god.
Norito prayers petition the gods for good harvests.
The Setsubun ceremony celebrates
the start of a new season of seeds and planting. Its rites involve Neolithic
rituals that survive today in technofuturist Japan. A cornucopia of rice, cakes,
fish, and vegetables are sacred treasures placed on the altar expressing thanks
for the bounty of the earth.
Buddhism's history is rich with reverence for food and thankfulness for its
nourishment. The great prince Gautama Sakyamuni experienced full enlightenment
while sipping a cup of milk-rice as he meditated the doctrine of nirvana under
the Tree of Enlightenment, the Bodhi Tree.
Buddhists have used prayers
of blessing and offering in everything from the cultivation of crops to the
dedication of each plate of food to the betterment of humanity. As exemplified
by the Buddhist prayers in this book, food can be truly blessed only when the
one giving thanks has lived a life of service to both the universe that has
given the food and those who suffer and are without food (prayer 97).
Buddhism commands thankfulness for
food by its ``vow to live a life which is worthy to receive it'' (prayer 98).
Native American Indian tribes share a common reverence for the earth and all
that is given from its bounty. Animals, harvests and water must be accepted with
thankfulness in rituals and prayers. Respect for the food gift is often
expressed by asking a plant or animal that must be used for food for its
forgiveness in taking its life and explaining why its death was necessary
(prayer 89). In Native American thought, human beings are dependent upon the
earth, not master over it.
Civilization is synonymous in every sense with the growth of agriculture.
Cultivating crops predated the invention of the wheel and writing. The existence
in the belief of the power of the first fruits or grains has provided the world
with many rituals, beliefs and festivals. The festival calendars of antiquity
are based on agriculture. Our modern calendar descends from ancient agricultural
calendars.
The cultivation of plants for food, as opposed to the use of plants as they grow
naturally in the environment, marked the evolution of humanity from a user of
food to a producer of food.
The three main Israelite feasts recorded in the Bible are in part, harvest
festivals, in which multitudes of Jews brought fruits and vegetables to the
Temple in Jerusalem: Pesach, a feast at the beginning of the barley harvest;
Shavuot, a summer feast of the end of the wheat harvest; Sukkot, the autumn
ingathering of grapes and cultivated fruits. Of the six major sections of the
Mishnah, the first collection of Jewish law (elul, ``to reap, harvest'') is the
twelfth month in the Jewish year.
In the Old Testament the breaking of bread symbolized the immutable bond in
relationships among all people. The Covenant was reaffirmed through deeply
profound meals and feasts. The Hebrew word for covenant (b'rith) has
etymological origins in the Hebrew notion ``to eat.'' The ancient Jewish prayer
(6) has been intoned in Jewish homes over the centuries. It is a grace before
the meal and is recited before eating the first morsel of bread.
The Jewish liturgy is full of the idea of divine grace interceding to aid
humanity. Grace is Ahabah Rabbah and thanksgiving Shemoneh Esreh. The liturgy
requires separate blessings (b'rachot) for various categories of food. The
blessing over bread (the hamotzi) differs from that of cakes and cooked grains;
fruits and vegetables have their own blessings, as does wine and fragrances.
Inviting poor people to have food
with you makes your table an altar and the meal an atonement. Martin Buber helps
us realize that our very table is sacred: ``One eats in holiness and the table
becomes an altar.''
There are many ways to analyze and classify food prayers: by country, by
culture, by language, by religion, by God, by food, by sacred imagery--to name a
few. A definitive analysis of food prayers is beyond the scope of this book.
I have divided the prayers here
into two broad classifications: food prayers honoring God or gods and food
prayers extolling the bounty on earth. All civilizations and all religions
through all ages associate food with God or gods; all primitives nonbelievers
associate food with a supernatural power or spirits. All recognize the earth's
bounty (crops and food) as a reflection of divine goodness.
Food prayers to the gods are created for many reasons: making one's wishes
known, honoring the dead in order to show reverence for life, reconciling God(s)
with humanity in order to bring good fortune on earth or to assure a place in
the afterlife. The recognition of the earth as sacred manifests itself in the
ritual and religious life of communities as petitional prayers by the laborers,
chants for seed planting and crop proliferation, ceremonials for laying out
plots, transmittal of family tradition, and reflection on the concept of home
and hearth.
Central to all cultures and
religions, food is a sacred gift that is the supreme and universal bond of all
friendship.
The world's quest for happiness operates within a context of reverence for God
through an inimitable link to food. In this uncertain age when ethnic
differences divide people, we should strive to embrace our common humanity that
is expressed so succinctly in food prayers. These prayers talk to us with
the wisdom of the ages and teach us that we are all one family, all one mystical
soul. Food prayers throughout history may be seen as evidence of our profound
sense of awe in the face of the infinite.
I have chosen to include in this book texts that are not prayers per se, which
nevertheless have great spiritual quality, literary merit and an eloquence in
expressing mankind's profound debt to God.
By: Adrian Butash
Santa Barbara
June 1993 online
source:http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/butash/bless/introduction.html
© copyright 2004
www.saibabaofindia.com/sathwicfood
