pinda
पिण्ड piṇḍaA rice-ball offered to the dead in the shraddha rites; over the year after a death the pindas are believed to build the departed a new subtle body, transforming the restless preta into a settled ancestor (pitr).
Where this term appears
- The Nāth Sampradaya Lineages
Its organising category is the piṇḍa , the body understood as a microcosm, a small mirror of the whole universe.
- Why do Hindus cremate their dead? Essentials
…g days and up to a year, come the shraddha rites and the offerings of pinda , balls of rice, which, in the classical account of the Garuda Purana, literally build a new subtle body for the departed, limb by lim…
- The Beings of the Dark Treatise
…orms the śrāddha rites — offering, day by day and month by month, the piṇḍas , the rice-balls, and the water that, the tradition holds, gradually knit for the preta a new subtle body and feed it on its journey.
- The Aitareya Upanishad: the Self that entered through the skull Treatise
Sayana, the fourteenth-century commentator, calls this the virat-pinda , the cosmic lump, the raw form before it is articulated.
- The debt to the dead Treatise
Pinda-dana is the heart of it, and it is the strangest and most concrete of the rites.