Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Fasting

Fasting is refraining from bodily nourishment. Fasts vary according to degree, duration, and purpose. A complete fast is one in which all food and liquids are refused. More often, fasting is refraining from food, or limiting its amount, while continuing to drink water. A kind of selective fasting, sometimes called abstinence in technical religious terminology, is abstaining from only certain types of food or drink, such as meat or alcohol. Avoiding things other than food or drink is also sometimes called fasting, as in “fasting from television,” but this usage goes beyond the typical definition of fasting.

The duration of a fast may extend from a single eating event to a few days to a lifetime. Fasts may be seasonal, such as Jewish Yom Kippur, Christian Lent's 40-day fast, or Muslim Ramadan's lunar month, or fasts may be tailored to more individual needs.

Fasting is an almost universal spiritual impulse usually tied to public or private religious observances. Of the ascetic spiritual practices, fasting is the most common and universal. Religions from all over the world, including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Native American religion, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, practice fasting as an ascetic discipline of self-denial.

Fasting as a Spiritual Practice

Most fasting worldwide has been and is practiced for spiritual reasons, but not all fasting is motivated by spiritual concerns. Dieters fast to lose weight or to purge the body of impurities. Persons go on hunger strikes to obtain political goals. Certain illnesses are associated with fasting, such as anorexia nervosa. As religious observance has declined in parts of the modern world, fasting for nonreligious goals has increased. Of course, fasts may include a combination of motives.

For Purification. Perhaps the most ancient purpose for fasting is purification through loosening the grip of physical matter on the spirit. Many religions, old and new, hold a dualistic view of reality. Spirit is good; matter is bad. Fasting within this context is a means to free the spirit from the body and the food and drink upon which it depends for nourishment.

In its most extreme form, the dualist purification motive may allow religiously sanctioned fatal fasting. In Hinduism, the rare and conditional practice of fasting to death is called Prayopavesa, salekhana is its counterpart in Jainism, and heretical Christian Albigenses of the Middle Ages practiced a life-ending fast called the endura.

The Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are not dualistic in nature. In these faiths, fasting is a means of being purified from evil or wrong-doing, but not by separation from the body, a part of God's good creation to be purified as well.

For Protection and Self-Control. Another ancient reason for fasting is protection from evil. Mourning and fasting are closely related in many religious traditions. The origins of this connection lie in purification that comes from fasting, protecting from the evil spirits associated with death.

This protection motif in fasting applies as well to assistance against internal destructive passions. The fourth century Christian monk John the Dwarf compared the effects of fasting upon inner passions to a king cutting off food and water to his enemies through a siege. Such internal victories increase one's power and self-control.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution