Prasad

Prasad is food, most often sweets, fruit or a simple cooked dish, that has first been formally offered to a deity during worship and only afterward distributed to and consumed by worshippers, a sequence that transforms the food's religious status entirely: what began as an ordinary offering becomes, once the deity is understood to have received and, in a devotional sense, partaken of it, a form of grace returned to the worshipper in edible form. Buhnemann's study of smarta puja procedure situates the offering and subsequent distribution of food as a standard, recurring element of the wider puja sequence, structurally comparable to the offering of light, incense and water that surrounds it, rather than as an occasional add on to worship performed only on special occasions.

Particular temples across India have developed prasad traditions distinctive enough to be recognised well beyond their immediate region, most famously the laddu sweets distributed at the Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh, produced in such enormous daily quantities that their preparation constitutes one of the largest food production operations tied to any single religious site anywhere in the world. Even a very small portion, sometimes no more than a single grain of rice or a crumb of a sweet, is considered a complete and effective share of prasad, so the practice never depends on the quantity any individual worshipper happens to receive.

Though the term and its most elaborated practice belong to Hindu worship, closely related concepts of consecrated, redistributed food offering appear in neighbouring South Asian traditions as well, including forms of food offering within Buddhist and Jain devotional practice that share the same basic logic of offering first and consuming afterward, even where the specific term prasad is not always used to describe them. Distribution of prasad is generally understood as an act of generosity extending beyond any single worshipper's private benefit, since temples and home shrines alike commonly prepare prasad in quantities meant to be shared with family, neighbours and, at larger temples, with anyone present regardless of their own means, making the practice as much a vehicle for communal charity as for individual blessing.

Buhnemann's account of household and temple ritual treats this redistribution as inseparable from the theological point of the offering itself, since prasad that is offered but never shared would, in the logic of the practice, defeat the purpose of an act whose meaning depends on grace passing outward from the deity through the offering and back into the worshipping community rather than terminating with the offering alone.