8.5 mins read.
There’s a scaredy cat staying with me at the moment who I’m slowly taming with the help of a play pen and some love. Alice has either developed Stockholm syndrome or is genuinely warming up to her captor because she now won’t get off my lap.
And, like you do, while she was staring at me curiously yesterday I started to wonder whether I’d be this prepared to help her if I knew she was Putin in her past life (if the timing worked out, that is, hypothetically).
I found that I think I would be. Perhaps I’d even want to help her more because I do care for her and would be very worried about her karma.
This all reminded me of the importance of equanimity in broadening our mental horizons so we can develop love and compassion for all beings without exception. In that meditation we think about the impermanence of our relationships to stop clinging at the false distinctions of friends, enemies, and strangers.
Also, if we can find it in our hearts to pray for everyone, not just the people who are on our side right now, I think our prayers have a great deal of power.
The main reason our prayers are going to work is because there is no world outside of our minds, as explained in this last article: Our job is to pray. I will share remaining ideas on prayer in this and the next article.
What is prayer?
According to Dictionary.com, the definition of prayer is:
A solemn request for help or expression of thanks. An earnest hope or wish.
And, even deeper, we commune with enlightened beings in a mixing of minds:
A spiritual communion with God or an object of worship, as in supplication, thanksgiving, adoration, or confession.
In Buddhism, the word for prayer is “monlam”, which literally means “wish path”.
Venerable Geshe-la introduced a practice called Prayers for World Peace some years ago, encouraging all the Kadampa Centers to do these weekly if possible:
I would like to suggest that every center organizes prayers for world peace at any time when local people can gather and pray for world peace. ~ 2001.
And recently in response to the invasion of Ukraine he also said when asked which prayers to do:
Of course, we engage in Prayers for World Peace.
How do prayers work?
I was thinking just now that I have prayed my whole life! And never really questioned why it works — as far as I am concerned it just does. But Geshe-la does explain why prayer works:
Our prayers work for three reasons. First is our pure intention. Second, the power of the prayers themselves. Third, the powerful blessings of the holy beings.
I am going to start with the third, blessings.
THE POWER OF BLESSINGS
Prayers bring blessings or inspiration into our minds and into our world. And blessings are transformational, as explained in a bunch of articles here.
Generally in Buddhism we learn how to meditate on love, compassion, and wisdom; and with prayer we are meditating with blessings. Effectively, by connecting our own Buddha nature with the enlightenment of all Buddhas, we greatly accelerate our own spiritual practice and are also able to affect others’ minds, even bless them ourselves by emanating our love throughout the world.
Our minds are not independently existent and so they are not all discrete and separated out – we are interconnected on so many levels. We can intuit this when we have a calm mind that naturally calms others or vice versa. When we walk into the presence of Geshe-la for example, the peace is palpable.
It is not just theist religions that involve prayer — we pray a lot in Buddhism. Our longest “puja” of the month, Melodious Drum, for example, involves 3.5 hours of hanging out with enlightened beings and countless sentient beings!
Holding the space
An ex who was a civil rights activist used to tell me that my meditation practice was “holding the space” for him and everyone else, instrumental in their getting results and staying sane. Holding the space, as I googled it, means attuning ourselves to others. My friend also understood it to include attuning ourselves to holy beings and bringing their blessings to others. I do think of prayer in this way.
In prayer we are attuning ourselves to the suffering of others. We can do this with concentration, by quietening down our own relentless inner monologues and cherishing others.
Most effective is to develop compassion within an understanding that all suffering is mistaken appearances. When people have nightmares we know that they are not actually that dream persona, and that the scary world, however vivid, is not their real world. There is far more to this person than that, their root mind goes very deep; and all the pain they are experiencing in that nightmare is another dream-like chapter of mistaken appearance. They don’t necessarily see it that way, but nor do dreaming people see that they are dreaming.
If we realize the true nature of things and help everyone else do the same, we can wake them from their recurrent nightmares. The more wisdom we have, the more qualified is our compassion because we realize there is a solution that lies within the power of our own creative minds. As soon as we generate compassion and wisdom we are already beginning to change the world.
Kadam Morten Clausen, the Kadampa Buddhist teacher in New York City, said this the other day:
The central conflict in Buddhism isn’t good vs evil, it’s wisdom vs ignorance. Which is reality vs hallucination. Reality will win. But there is no way out unless we run into a manifestation of a Buddha because samsara is a self-reinforcing hallucination.
So in prayer we are also attuning ourselves to Buddhas or enlightened beings, the reality of bliss and emptiness. We understand everyone’s suffering in that context and therefore there is infinite hope.
One way to pray
We probably all know how to pray already, to be honest, and people pray all over the world. But here are some steps that might help us get us in the mood.
We can begin by remembering that inside of us is this source of peace, sanity, and clarity, and we can grow it. Which is what meditation is designed to do — to focus on and grow the peace, compassion, love, and wisdom we already have the seeds for. We connect to that.
And we also recognize that through this experience of peace we’re already tuned in to the supreme peace of enlightened being — we’re getting a taste of the non-deluded reality of a Buddha’s mind, which pervades all phenomena, all the time.
Within those blessings we can meditate on compassion for whoever we want to pray for, and then request the Buddhas for their blessings to enter those situations.
Right now a radio station is playing beautiful music in your room — can you hear it? You can if the receiver is turned on. It’s like that with blessings. They’re everywhere all the time because Buddha’s mind is everywhere, all the time. In an ordinary state of mind, we’re just unaware of this because we’re not turning on the receiver of our faith. We’ve not even thinking about it, much less believing and tuning in. We’re not turning our attention to enlightenment.
Therefore, in our prayer, when we experience even a little bit of peace or bliss, we feel that this is already connected to the unfathomably deep bliss of all those who’ve mastered their own minds, developed their compassion and wisdom to perfection, and gotten rid of all their ignorance, hallucinations, suffering, and limitations. We can get onto that wavelength.
Then we can imagine those blessings flowing through us and reaching everyone. Whether you visualize this as lights or just imagine it’s happening, our prayers will invoke that enlightened power and bring about those transformations. The Tibetan word for blessing, “jin gyi lob,” in fact means “transformation through inspiration.”
In her recent talk on prayer, Gen-la Dekyong said:
You imagine everywhere in the war-torn countries of this world at the minute getting powerful blessings from all the Buddhas, their minds of anger subdued, temporarily. Inner peace, peace of mind will come. They’ll question what they’re doing. People don’t want to harm each other. Delusions do. So we can have confidence that our prayers work.
The role of faith
For prayers to work, we need faith. Faith really starts with an understanding that nothing, including us, is fixed. We can get rid of our delusions and hallucinations and increase our good qualities, and so can everyone else – and if we keep doing that, we’ll end up enlightened. From this we can deduce that other people have already done that – and in Buddhism we call them “Buddhas” or “Awakened Ones”. Buddhas can appear in any tradition, so if we recognize the good qualities of our object of refuge we will be tuning into profound blessings and bringing these into our world.
The three types of faith taught in Buddhism are very straightforward. Believing faith is when we just believe in the existence of enlightened beings, or the value of a teaching, or that our Spiritual Guide has good qualities, or that universal compassion is possible, and so on. It is belief in something that is that is going to take us out of the ordinary — something that we can’t always see with our own eyes, but that we can infer. We believe in pure states of mind. We believe in pure beings. We believe in pure worlds beyond the worlds of suffering. Not blindly, but because we’ve reasoned our way into it and our basing it on some personal experience – this is how we grow our faith; it is not static.
Admiring faith is when we just feel admiration for those good qualities – for enlightened beings, for Dharma, for Sangha, and so on. We think they’re beautiful, one way or another, and we rejoice or feel happy about them.
Wishing faith is wishing ourselves and others to gain those good qualities: “I want that compassion. I want this good quality I see in my Sangha. I want to be a Buddha.”
We’re out of time. Carrying on with this subject in the next article.
These articles on prayer are all dedicated to peace in Ukraine, Russia, and the world. May everyone be happy and may our world be peaceful.
Next installment: The power and purpose of prayer.
Your comments are so welcome!!!
2 Comments
Thank you Luna,
May everyone be happy and may our world 🌎 be peaceful 🙏🏻😊
🙏🏻😊 😁😇