Deepavali Diya

There is a mouse in the Skanda Purana. It gets about four lines.

A lamp had been left burning somewhere in the month of Kartik, and the mouse came to it and drank the oil - not as an offering, not as devotion, not knowing what the lamp was for. By drinking the oil it made the flame burn a little longer. And for that, the text says, the mouse was saved.

A few verses earlier there is a woman the same chapter calls a great sinner, who lights lamps and is liberated. The point the chapter keeps making, in story after story, is that the merit of a lamp is not in the cost of it, or the make of it, or the piety of whoever happened to be standing nearby. It is in the light.

That is the Kartika Mahatmya of the Skanda Purana, Chapter 7 - the chapter on the gift of lamps and it is the oldest written answer we have to almost every question people ask about diyas.

A diya is a shallow open bowl, usually fired clay, with a lip at one side where the wick sits so the flame leans out over the rim rather than drowning in the oil. It is thrown in thousands, dried in the sun, and sold by weight. It is not built to last.

Four materials are in common use and each carries a different logic. Clay is the oldest and commonest — it dissolves back into the earth it came from, and it is cheap enough that anyone can light a hundred without thinking about it.

Cow dung is pressed and dried, and is being made again after a long decline; it burns without the soot of a mineral oil, returns entirely to the soil, and uses something a household already has rather than something it must buy. Brass and metal are kept, cleaned and reused across generations. They do not dissolve but are inherited, in which the diya outlasts the person who lit it. Decorative and moulded forms, often lotus-shaped, are craft as offering, where the making of the vessel is part of what is given.

What cow dung does not do is purify the air or work as a small havan. That claim attaches itself to this material constantly and there is nothing behind it. The arguments for cow dung are agricultural and economic, and they are good enough that they do not need help.

In the sixteen-service puja sequence, deepa light is an offering in its own right, standing alongside water, flowers and food rather than lighting them.

The Kartika Mahatmya of the Skanda Purana is where the month’s lamps are set out at length. Chapter 7 opens by saying that lamps offered in Kartik destroy sins the way sunrise dispels darkness, and then spends most of its length on the akashadeepa - the beacon lamp raised on a pole, tall enough to be seen from a distance, burning sesame oil. Chapter 9 covers the Dipavali days themselves.

And here is the part usually stated too strongly, including by us. It is often said the texts say nothing at all about what a lamp is made of. They say one thing. Describing those beacon lamps, Chapter 7 recommends lanterns of mica or glass. That is the only lamp material named anywhere in the chapter and it is not clay, not cow dung, not brass, and not a moulded lotus. The single material recommendation in the source applies to none of the four, and to a form of lamp almost nobody keeps any more.

Ghee is widely preferred and mustard or sesame oil is widely used, and households differ sincerely about it. It is convention rather than prescription and the only oil the chapter actually names is sesame. Ghee appears nowhere. Use what you have.

On how many: there is no number.

The counts that circulate: eleven, twenty-one, a hundred and eight are household practice and none is prescribed. What the text says instead is better. Describing the lamp arrangements for Deepavali, it says to make them according to one’s means. The instruction to light what you can afford is in the source. It is not a modern concession to people with less money; it is the original terms.

On where: the chapter is unusually specific, and almost none of it is your own house. River banks. Gardens, stables, village bylanes. Places where people sleep. The homes of poor people. Inaccessible and rugged places, where a lamp would be seen by whoever is out there. And it counts just as much, the text says, to hand someone else the wick or the oil, or to light a lamp that is not yours.