Religious use of incense

[1] Incense use in religious ritual was either further or simultaneously developed in China, and eventually transmitted to Korea, Japan, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines.

Incense holds an invaluable role in East Asian Buddhist ceremonies and rites as well as in those of Chinese Taoist and Japanese Shinto shrines for the deity Inari Okami, or the Seven Lucky Gods.

In Chinese Taoist and Buddhist temples, the inner spaces are scented with thick coiled incense, which are either hung from the ceiling or on special stands.

Worshipers at the temples light and burn sticks of incense in small or large bundles, which they wave or raise above the head while bowing to the statues or plaques of a deity or an ancestor.

[4] The smoke of burning incense is interpreted by both the Western Catholic and Eastern Christian churches as a symbol of the prayer of the faithful rising to heaven.

[5] This symbolism is seen in Psalm 141 (140), verse 2: "Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight: the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice."

[7] A server called a thurifer, sometimes assisted by a "boat bearer" who carries the receptacle for the incense, approaches the person conducting the service with the thurible charged with burning bricks of red-hot charcoal.

The thurible is then closed, and taken by the chain and swung by the priest, deacon or server or acolyte towards what or who is being censed: the bread and wine offered for the Eucharist, the consecrated Eucharist itself, the Gospel during its proclamation (reading), the crucifix, the icons (in Eastern churches), the clergy, the congregation, the Paschal candle or the body of a deceased person during a funeral.

[10] Aside from being burnt, grains of blessed incense are placed in the Paschal candle,[11] and were formerly placed in the sepulchre of consecrated altars, though this is no longer obligatory or even mentioned in the liturgical books.

As part of the daily ritual worship within the Hindu tradition, incense is offered to God (usually by rotating the sticks thrice in a clockwise direction) in his various forms, such as Krishna and Rama.