The Vishnu Purana: Book III: Chapter XVI | Internet Sacred Text Archive

CHAP. XVI.

Things proper to be offered as food to deceased ancestors: prohibited things. Circumstances vitiating a Śráddha: how to be avoided. Song of the Pitris, or progenitors, heard by Ikshwáku.

AURVA continued.--"Ancestors are satisfied for a month with offerings of rice or other grain, with clarified butter 1, with fish, or the flesh of the hare, of birds, of the hog, the goat, the antelope, the deer, the gayal, or the sheep, or with the milk of the cow, and its products 2. They are for ever satisfied with flesh (in general), and with that of the long-eared white goat in particular. The flesh of the rhinoceros, the Kálaśáka potherb, and honey, are also especial sources of satisfaction to those worshipped at ancestral ceremonies. The birth of that man is the occasion of satisfaction to his progenitors who performs at the due time their obsequial rites at Gaya. Grains that spring up spontaneously, rice growing wild, Panic of both species (white or black), vegetables that grow in forests, are fit for ancestral oblations; as are barley, wheat, rice, sesamum, various kinds of pulse, and mustard. On the other hand, a householder must not offer any kind of grain that is not consecrated by religious ceremonies on its first coming into season; nor the pulse called Rájamásha, nor millet, nor lentils, nor gourds, nor garlick, nor onions, nor nightshade, nor camels' thorn, nor salt, nor the efflorescence of salt deserts, nor red vegetable extracts, nor any thing that looks like salt, nor any thing that is not commendable; nor is water fit to be offered at a Śráddha that has been brought by night, or has been abandoned, or