Snana

(“bath”) Bathing is arguably the single
most commonly performed Hindu religious act, and it is a necessary one
before performing any rite or worship.
An early morning bath is the norm for
just about all Hindus, and this has been
true for centuries. The earliest European
visitors invariably remarked on this
practice, since some of these visitors
bathed only a few times in their lives.
For Hindus, bathing not only keeps one
clean but is a way to regain ritual purity
by using water (most commonly) to
remove any source of defilement.
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Snana
Snana, or bathing, at a festival in Rajasthan. Before performing any ritual, one must obtain
purity by bathing.
Bathing is normally the last part of one’s
morning rites, preceded by cleaning
one’s teeth and tongue, rinsing the
mouth (achamana), and (immediately
before bathing) voiding one’s bladder
and bowels. These latter acts are a necessary part of life, but they also render
one ritually impure, a state that the bath
removes. People generally perform any
daily worship immediately after
bathing, while this ritual purity is
still unbroken.
Most people bathe only in the morning, although those scrupulously concerned with purity (generally brahmins
or ascetics) will bathe more often. The
bath itself is usually quite brief and
some in cases consists of simply
immersing oneself in a natural body of
water, or pouring a bucket of water over
one’s head. In modern times people
often use soap, but the traditionally prescribed cleansing medium is earth. It is
preferable to bathe in running water,
since the bath purifies by removing the
impurity (ashaucha) and carrying it
away and although bathing in a large
pond is seen as acceptable, bathing in a
bathtub is seen as simply spreading the
impurity around rather than getting rid
of it. Although the most common medium
for bathing is water, when this is impossible one can ritually cleanse oneself
with oil, or one can perform ritual
cleansing with mantras by using sacred
sounds to remove defilement and bring
one to a state of ritual purity.
In the context of worship, snana is
the sixth of the sixteen traditional
upacharas (“offerings”) given to a deity
as part of worship, on the model of treating the deity as an honored guest. In this
offering, the deity is bathed, either literally or symbolically. The underlying
motive here, as for all the upacharas, is
to show one’s love for the deity and minister to the deity’s needs.