The household shrine is where most Buddhists meet their religion, and the offerings are carefully chosen to be useless. Nobody believes the Buddha eats the rice or smells the incense — he is gone, as everything goes, which is the whole doctrine. What the offerings do is train the giver: flowers are set out precisely because they will be brown by Thursday, and the practitioner who replaces them is rehearsing impermanence with their hands. The water bowls in the Tibetan version are the cheapest offering possible, deliberately, so that generosity is never gated by wealth. Where the shrine sits in a house, and who tends it, tends to be a family's most reliable signal of how religious it actually is.