Brahmarpanam

What the Brahmarpanam is

Brahmarpanam, also called the Bhojana Mantra, is the food prayer said before a meal that opens with Bhagavad Gita chapter 4, verse 24, 'brahmarpanam brahma havih'. The prayer printed here joins two verses that Krishna speaks to Arjuna in the Gita, which stands in the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata. The first, 4.24, takes the parts of a fire sacrifice one at a time: the act and instrument of offering, the oblation, the fire, the one who pours it and the goal reached, and names every one of them Brahman. Said over a plate, it treats the food, the hand that offers it and the hunger that receives it as one offering. The second, chapter 15, verse 14, turns from the altar fire to the fire inside the body. Krishna says that as Vaishvanara, the digestive fire, he dwells in every living creature and, joined with the incoming and outgoing breaths, cooks the four kinds of food. Read in order, the first verse makes eating a sacrifice and the second names who receives it. Both are anushtubh couplets of thirty-two syllables, the ordinary metre of the Gita.

From the sacrificial ladle to the plate

Neither verse was composed as a grace. In the fourth chapter, Krishna has just said that the work of one who acts as a sacrifice dissolves without binding them (4.23); the next verses list kinds of offering, of senses, breath, wealth and study, and end by ranking the sacrifice of knowledge above all of them (4.33). Verse 24 is the hinge of that list. Adi Shankara reads arpanam as the ladle and says the knower sees the instrument as Brahman itself, the way one sees that the silver glimpsed in mother-of-pearl was never there; Ramanuja reads it as Brahman because everything is an effect of Brahman. Older texts had prepared the step to the meal. The Gita itself says that those who eat what remains of a sacrifice are freed from fault, while those who cook only for themselves eat sin (3.13), and that the remnant of sacrifice is nectar (4.31). The Chandogya Upanishad (5.19 to 5.24) calls the first morsel of a meal the first oblation and offers the first five to the five breaths, the rite called pranagnihotra. Commenting on 15.14, Shankara cites the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (5.9.1): the fire within a person that digests food is Vaishvanara. No text records who first set the two Gita verses together; the custom of a mantra before eating is usually traced to the ritual thought of the Mimamsa school.

The mantra, in six scripts

Brahmarpanam lyrics in full

Bhagavad Gita 4.24 and 15.14, in the order they are said before a meal.

All 2 verses, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English, each with its meaning. Choose a script:

The syllable people get wrong

In brahma, and in brahmārpaṇaṃ that opens the verse, the h comes before the m: say 'brah-ma' with a light breath just ahead of the m, not 'bram-ha' with the sounds swapped, and not 'bra-ma' with the h dropped.

Questions