Jagannatha Dasa: Eating as an Offering

The most practically useful section of the Harikathamrutasara, and it is about eating.

The Bhojana sandhi

What it argues: that eating is worship, and not metaphorically.

The mechanism it gives

The divine is present in the body as Vaishvanara, the digestive fire, and food put into the body is therefore an offering placed directly into a fire that is already lit.

Which means the meal is a homa.

And the person eating is not the consumer. They are the one carrying the offering, and the recipient is inside them.

Why this is a good idea, whatever you make of the metaphysics

Because of what it does to a very ordinary activity.

Most people eat three times a day, distracted, standing, on a phone, in a hurry, and without noticing. That is somewhere between one and two thousand occasions a year in which a person is doing something essential and not present for any of it.

A doctrine that says the meal is the ritual converts all of them.

And it does not require any additional time. There is no extra practice to fit in, no separate sitting, and nothing to schedule. You were going to eat anyway.

How it is actually done

In Madhva households and more widely, the practice includes:

• Washing before sitting, which is universal in India and which the doctrine reframes
• A short offering of the food before eating: the divine invoked, the meal offered, and then eaten as prasada
• Sitting, rather than standing or walking
• Silence or restrained talk during the meal
• Not wasting, since what is being discarded is an offering
• Feeding somebody else first where possible

And the food itself becomes prasada, not by a ceremony performed on it but by having been offered.

Which is the general Hindu position on prasada and this app has entries on it, and the Bhojana sandhi is one of the fullest devotional statements of why.

The Matrika sandhi

The other one worth knowing about, and it is stranger.

Its claim: that each letter of the alphabet has a presiding deity.

Which has a consequence.

If every letter is presided over, then every word anybody speaks is composed of divine presences, and speech is therefore also an offering, all the time, whether the speaker intends it or not.

And the practical implication the tradition draws is about what you say: not that swearing is forbidden, but that speech is not a neutral medium, and that a person shouting at somebody is doing it with material that has a different status than they were assuming.

Which is a useful frame and does not require accepting the metaphysics either.

The other sandhis

Thirty two in all, and the range is the point:

• Mangalacharana, the opening invocation
• Karuna, on compassion
• Vyapti, on pervasion, the divine present everywhere
• Taratamya, on the gradation of souls
• Bhojana, on food
• Matrika, on the letters
• Naivedya, on offerings
• Anubhava, on experience
• Datta Svatantrya, on given freedom, which is the Dvaita treatment of the free will problem
• Vibhuti, on manifestation
• And the rest

On the taratamya sandhi, once, honestly

The Harikathamrutasara sets out the hierarchy of souls in detail, and it is one of the sections most studied.

And the note from the Jayatirtha entry in this batch stands and is repeated here in short.

Dvaita holds that souls differ in intrinsic nature, and Dvaita is entitled to hold that.

And nobody can identify anybody's place in it, the hierarchy as set out concerns deities and cosmic functions rather than the people around you, and it is not a tool for ranking human beings.

A teaching that leads to somebody being treated as lesser is being used wrongly, whatever the text says, and this app has now applied that test to five traditions in this series.

Who: Jagannatha Dasa, 1728 to 1809, born Srinivasacharya at Manvi in Raichur district, Karnataka. He was first a Sanskrit scholar of standing, trained in the full technical curriculum of the Madhva tradition, the Nyaya Sudha and the Vyasa Traya and the commentarial literature, and proud of it, and openly contemptuous of the dasas, the Kannada singing wing of his own tradition.

The turn: he fell seriously ill, was told he did not have long, and went to Gopala Dasa, whom he had dismissed. The tradition says Gopala Dasa gave him forty years of his own remaining life and died at forty one. This app repeats the note from that entry once: lifespan cannot be transferred, the claim is made for money in India now to the families of dying people, and paying somebody who says they can extend a life is being robbed. Palliative care is real medicine, badly underused, and available free at many centres.

What he did with the years: took initiation from the man he had looked down on, received the ankita Jagannatha Vittala, and stopped writing in Sanskrit. He did not add Kannada to his work; he had the training, qualification, standing and readership, and he put the whole apparatus into Kannada verse instead, which is a man undoing his own position in front of the people who heard him take it.

The Harikathamrutasara: the essence of the nectar of the story of Hari, in Kannada, in bhamini shatpadi, a six line verse form, across thirty two sandhis and around nine hundred and eighty eight verses. It is the whole of Dvaita in singable Kannada verse, not a summary or a popularisation: taratamya, the pancha bheda, bimba pratibimba, the functions of the deities, the analysis of karma and the senses and the breaths and the cosmos, and the theory of devotion, all in a metre somebody who cannot read can sing. Madhva households call it the Kannada Upanishad, read one sandhi a day so the whole work comes round in a month, hold formal parayanas, and have produced a substantial commentarial literature on it. The Nyaya Sudha requires years of Sanskrit and a teacher; the Harikathamrutasara requires that you can hear, and it contains the same doctrine.

The Bhojana sandhi: the argument that eating is worship, not metaphorically. The divine is present in the body as Vaishvanara, the digestive fire, so food put into the body is an offering placed directly into a fire that is already lit, the meal is a homa, and the person eating is not the consumer but the one carrying the offering. Whatever you make of the metaphysics, it converts one to two thousand occasions a year in which people do something essential without being present for any of it, and it requires no additional time since you were going to eat anyway. In practice: wash before sitting, offer the food briefly, sit rather than stand, keep talk restrained, do not waste, and feed somebody else first where possible.

The Matrika sandhi: the claim that each letter of the alphabet has a presiding deity, with the consequence that every word anybody speaks is composed of divine presences, so speech is also an offering all the time. The practical implication is not that swearing is forbidden but that speech is not a neutral medium, and a person shouting at somebody is doing it with material of a different status than they assumed.

One. He changed languages after he had already won in the first one.

He had the Sanskrit training, the qualification, the readership and the standing, and he had used all of it to be dismissive of people composing in Kannada.

And then he wrote his life's work in Kannada.

Which is not humility as a posture. It cost him the audience he had spent thirty years earning and it required him to be publicly wrong in front of the people who had heard him be certain.

Two. The whole thing, not a simplified version.

The Harikathamrutasara does not water down the doctrine for a vernacular readership. It contains the technical system, in verse, in a metre that can be sung.

Which is a harder thing to do than either writing the technical version or writing a simple one, and it is why the work has the standing it has.

Applied: the test of whether you understand something is whether you can say all of it to somebody who has not had your training, without leaving out the parts that are difficult.

Three. The meal.

Eating is worship, the digestive fire is where the offering goes, and the person eating is carrying it rather than consuming it.

Whatever you think of the metaphysics, the practical effect is available: one to two thousand occasions a year, currently spent distracted, converted into something attended to, at no cost in time.

Wash, sit down, offer it, do not waste it, feed somebody else first if you can.

Four. Speech is made of something.

The Matrika sandhi holds that every letter has a presiding deity, so every sentence anybody says is composed of divine presences whether they meant it that way or not.

Which is a frame rather than a rule, and the application is obvious and uncomfortable: what you say to people at home is being made out of the same material as the mantra.

Five. And the shape of his life.

He was proud, he was publicly contemptuous of people beneath him in the hierarchy he cared about, he got sick, and the person he had been contemptuous of helped him.

And then he spent the rest of his life doing the thing he had despised, better than anybody had done it.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Hari Sarvottama Vayu Jeevottama, the tradition's own formula, or whichever name is yours
• One sandhi of the Harikathamrutasara, if you read Kannada, or a translation. The whole work comes round in a month
• The meal, once today: washed, seated, offered, unhurried, nothing wasted
• And one sentence at home, checked before it is said

Where to go

• Manvi, Raichur district, Karnataka, where he was born and where his brindavana is
• Mosaralu, for Gopala Dasa
• Chippagiri and the Raichur and Bagalkot country, where the eighteenth century revival happened
• Udupi, Navavrindavana and Sode, for the rest of this batch