Incense

The Babylonians used incense while offering prayers to divine . Incense spread from there to Greece and Rome. Incense burners have been found in the Indus Civilization.

At around 2000 BCE, Ancient China began the use of incense in the religious sense, namely for worship.Herrera, Matthew D. (2012). Holy Smoke: The Use of Incense in the Catholic Church (2nd ed.). San Luis Obispo: Tixlini Scriptorium. Page 1. Incense was used by Chinese cultures from Neolithic times and became more widespread in the Xia dynasty, Shang dynasty, and Zhou dynasty dynasties. The ancient Chinese employed incense composed of herbs and plant products (such as cassia, cinnamon, styrax, and sandalwood) as a component of numerous formalized ceremonial rites.

• Coil: Extruded and shaped into a coil without a core, coil incense can burn for an extended period, from hours to days, and is commonly produced and used in Chinese cultures.

• Cone: Incense in this form burns relatively quickly. Incense cones were invented in Japan in the 1800s.
• Cored stick: A supporting core of bamboo is coated with a thick layer of incense material that burns away with the core. Higher-quality variations have fragrant sandalwood cores. This type of incense is commonly produced in India and China. When used in Chinese folk religion, these are sometimes known as "joss sticks".
• Dhoop or solid stick: With no bamboo core, dhoop incense is easily broken for portion control. This is the most commonly produced form of incense in Japan and Tibet.
• Powder: The loose incense powder used for making indirect burning incense is sometimes burned without further processing. Powder incense is typically packed into long trails on top of wood ash using a stencil and burned in special censers or incense clocks.
• Paper: Paper infused with resin or oils extracted from fragrant material, folded accordion style, is lit and blown out. Examples include Carta d'Armenia and Papier d'Arménie.
• Rope: The incense powder is rolled into paper sheets, which are then rolled into ropes, twisted tightly, then doubled over and twisted again, yielding a two-strand rope. The larger end is the bight, and may be stood vertically, in a shallow dish of sand or pebbles. The smaller (pointed) end is lit. This type of incense is easily transported and stays fresh for extremely long periods. It has been used for centuries in Tibet and Nepal.

Moxa tablets, which are disks of powdered mugwort used in Traditional Chinese medicine for moxibustion, are not incenses; the treatment is by heat rather than fragrance.

Incense sticks may be termed joss sticks, especially in parts of East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Among ethnic Chinese and Chinese-influenced communities these are traditionally burned at temples, before the threshold of a home or business, before an image of a religious divinity or local spirit, or in shrines, large and small, found at the main entrance of every village. Here the earth god is propitiated in the hope of bringing wealth and health to the village. They can also be burned in front of a door or open window as an offering to tian, or the devas. The word "joss" is derived from the Latin deus (god) via the Portuguese deus through the Javanese dejos, through Chinese pidgin English.

Certain proportions are necessary for direct-burning incense:

• Oil content: an excess of oils may prevent incense from smoldering effectively. Resinous materials such as myrrh and frankincense are typically balanced with "dry" materials such as wood, bark and leaf powders.
• Oxidizer quantity: Too little oxidizer in gum-bound incense may prevent the incense from igniting, while too much will cause the incense to burn too quickly, without producing fragrant smoke.
• Binder: Water-soluble binders such as "makko" ensure that the incense mixture does not crumble when dry, dilute the mixture.
• Mixture density: Incense mixtures made with natural binders must not be combined with too much water in mixing, or over-compressed while being formed, which would result in either uneven air distribution or undesirable density in the mixture, causing the incense to burn unevenly, too slowly, or too quickly.
• Particulate size: The incense mixture has to be well pulverized with similarly sized particulates. Uneven and large particulates result in uneven burning and inconsistent aroma production when burned.

"Dipped" or "hand-dipped" direct-burning incense is created by dipping "incense blanks" made of unscented combustible dust into any suitable kind of essential or fragrance oil. These are often sold in the United States by flea markets and sidewalk vendors who have developed their own styles. This form of incense requires the least skill and equipment to manufacture, since the blanks are pre-formed in China or South East Asia.

Incense mixtures can be extruded or pressed into shapes. Small quantities of water are combined with the fragrance and incense base mixture and kneaded into a hard dough. The incense dough is then pressed into shaped forms to create cone and smaller coiled incense, or forced through a hydraulic press for solid stick incense. The formed incense is then trimmed and slowly dried. Incense produced in this fashion has a tendency to warp or become misshapen when improperly dried, and as such must be placed in climate-controlled rooms and rotated several times through the drying process.

Traditionally, the bamboo core of cored stick incense is prepared by hand from Phyllostachys heterocycla cv. pubescens since this species produces thick wood and easily burns to ashes in the incense stick. In a process known as "splitting the foot of the incense stick", the bamboo is trimmed to length, soaked, peeled, and split in halves until the thin sticks of bamboo have square cross sections of less than 3mm. This process has been largely replaced by machines in modern incense production.

In the case of cored incensed sticks, several methods are employed to coat the sticks cores with incense mixture:

• Paste rolling: A wet, malleable paste of incense mixture is first rolled into a long, thin coil, using a paddle. Then, a thin stick is put next to the coil and the stick and paste are rolled together until the stick is centered in the mixture and the desired thickness is achieved. The stick is then cut to the desired length and dried.
• Powder-coating: Powder-coating is used mainly to produce cored incense of either larger coil (up to in diameter) or cored stick forms. A bundle of the supporting material (typically thin bamboo or sandalwood slivers) is soaked in water or a thin water/glue mixture for a short time. The thin sticks are evenly separated, then dipped into a tray of incense powder consisting of fragrance materials and occasionally a plant-based binder. The dry incense powder is then tossed and piled over the sticks while they are spread apart. The sticks are then gently rolled and packed to maintain roundness while more incense powder is repeatedly tossed onto the sticks. Three to four layers of powder are coated onto the sticks, forming a thick layer of incense material on the stick. The coated incense is then allowed to dry in open air. Additional coatings of incense mixture can be applied after each period of successive drying. produced in this fashion and burned in of Chinese folk religion can have a thickness between 2 and 4 millimeters.
• Compression: A damp powder is mechanically formed around a cored stick by compression, similar to the way uncored sticks are formed. This form is becoming more common due to the higher labor cost of producing powder-coated or paste-rolled sticks.

In Japan and China, a similar censer called a egōro in Japanese, or a shǒulú (手爐) in Chinese, is used by several Buddhist traditions. The egōro/ shǒulú is usually made of brass, with a long handle and no chain. Instead of charcoal, makkō powder is poured into a depression made in a bed of ash. The makkō is lit and the incense mixture is burned on top. This method in Japan is known as sonae-kō (religious burning). For direct-burning incense, the tip or end of the incense is ignited with a heat source such as a flame until the incense begins to turn into ash at the burning end. The flame is then fanned or blown out, leaving the incense to smolder.

Along with the introduction of Buddhism in China came calibrated incense sticks and . The first known record is by poet Yu Jianwu (487–551): "By burning incense we know the o'clock of the night, With graduated candles we confirm the tally of the watches."Schafer, Edward H. (1963). The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, a Study of T'ang Exotics. University of California Press. p. 155. The use of these incense timekeeping devices spread from Buddhist monasteries into Chinese secular society.

Incense-stick burning is an everyday practice in traditional Chinese religion. There are many different types of sticks used for different purposes or on different festive days. Many of them are long and thin. Sticks are mostly coloured yellow, red, or more rarely, black. Thick sticks are used for special ceremonies, such as funerals. Spiral incense, with exceedingly long burn times, is often hung from temple ceilings. In some states, such as Taiwan, Singapore, or Malaysia, where they celebrate the Ghost Festival, large, pillar-like dragon incense sticks are sometimes used. These generate so much smoke and heat that they are only burned outside.

Chinese incense sticks used in popular religion are generally odorless or only use the slightest trace of jasmine or rose, since it is the smoke, not the scent, which is important in conveying the prayers of the faithful to heaven. They are composed of the dried powdered bark of a non-scented species of cinnamon native to Cambodia, Cinnamomum cambodianum. Inexpensive packs of 300 are often found for sale in Chinese supermarkets. Though they contain no sandalwood, they often include the Chinese character for sandalwood on the label, as a generic term for incense.

Highly scented Chinese incense sticks are used by some Buddhists. These are often quite expensive due to the use of large amounts of sandalwood, agarwood, or floral scents. The sandalwood used in Chinese incenses does not come from India, its native home, but rather from groves planted within Chinese territory. Sites belonging to Tzu Chi, Chung Tai Shan, Dharma Drum Mountain, Xingtian Temple, or City of Ten Thousand Buddhas do not use incense.

The basic ingredients are the bamboo stick, the paste (generally made of charcoal dust and joss/jiggit/gum/tabu powder – an adhesive made from the bark of litsea glutinosa and other trees),

A similar utilitarian use of incense can be found in the post-Reformation Church of England. Although the ceremonial use of incense was abandoned until the Oxford Movement, it was common to have incense (typically frankincense) burned before grand occasions, when the church would be crowded. The frankincense was carried by a member of the vestry before the service in a vessel called a 'perfuming pan'. In iconography of the day, this vessel is shown to be elongated and flat, with a single long handle on one side. The perfuming pan was used instead of the thurible, as the latter would have likely offended the Protestant sensibilities of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Incense is also often used by people who smoke indoors and do not want the smell to linger.

Papier d'Arménie was originally sold as a disinfectant as well as for the fragrance.

Incense clocks are used to time social, medical and religious practices in parts of eastern Asia. They are primarily used in Buddhism as a timer of meditation and prayer. Different types of incense burn at different rates; therefore, different incense are used for different practices. The duration of burning ranges from minutes to months.