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āhāro

āhāra

masc nom sg of āhāra (noun); masc nom sg of āhāra (adj)

1. food (for); fuel (for); sustenance (for); nutriment (for); (comm) condition; lit. taking here
2. eating; taking; feeding on; lit. taking here
3. quotation; lit. taking here

Built from

• ā — prefix · toward, up to
  Reverses or completes motion verbs; here means 'taking toward oneself', bringing fuel or food into reach.
• hṛ — root · carry, take
  Cognate with English carry, Latin ferre, Sanskrit hṛ. The root's concrete sense of grasping and conveying something grounds the word's meaning.
• a — ending · masc sg nom
  Marks masculine singular nominative; substantivizes the root into a noun denoting the action or its object.

Analysis. ā + √hṛ: 'taking toward', the concrete sense of bringing food to oneself, extended to any fuel or nutriment that sustains a process (in Pali Buddhism, the four āhāras are physical food, contact, intention, and consciousness as conditions).

Etymology. ā (toward the speaker) + √hṛ (carry, take): the prefix ā reverses or completes the action of taking, yielding 'taking up, bringing to oneself'. √hṛ cognate with English carry, Latin ferre, Sanskrit hṛ. The spatial image—bringing something near—becomes the abstract notion of any sustaining condition.

Meanings from the Digital Pāḷi Dictionary; morphology and etymology by Claude.

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