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prayers?
hey! I have recently found some pretty cool buddhist prayers online.
I am very big into getting a good start to my days, and love reading
inspirational and positive things in the mornings. I was just wondering
if anyone had any prayer suggestions or book of prayers that could
be recommended? Thank you so much!
I am very big into getting a good start to my days, and love reading
inspirational and positive things in the mornings. I was just wondering
if anyone had any prayer suggestions or book of prayers that could
be recommended? Thank you so much!
0
Comments
Thanks.
Really, I'm asking. It just makes me feel really uncomfortable....
I generally visualize the animal and say thanks to it.
Formally? Here's one.
A prayer to say before eating meat:
“Holy One of Love and all Good,
Please bless the animal prepared as meal here for us with our gratitude, peace and love for the life given and nourishment received. Please extend this blessing to all relatives of this animal. We also call on your love and blessing to be upon the person who killed this animal and upon those involved in the keeping and care of this animal. We look now upon this beautiful meal with an understanding and reverence to it’s source and journey. We offer prayers of peace, love and blessing as our thanksgiving. Amen. “
Lots of Buddhists in the world, including Pure Land. To tell you the truth, after all these years of Vajrayana, I was looking at a nice Pure Land congregation in Florida USA to "retire" to from the Midwest USA. I say whatever floats your boat.
because it does help give me focus, I am not
really praying as in "wishing" for something.
I basically enjoy the prayers that provide me a
strong motivational path for the start of my day.
Love and charity towards all beings,
Contentment under all circumstances,
Control of the senses and passions --
The practice of these virtues leads to God.
A graffito on a construction-site fence:
Man without God is like a fish without a bicycle.
And written on a rest room wall in Berlin:
A kiss that lasts forever is a strange gift.
Some things are more uplifting than others, I imagine.
A student writes:
"I am wondering if Pranidhanas are a dedication, a wish, or an invocation? It’s not clear to me."
Lama Shenpen:
They are most like a spell. You say something powerful and by that means make it happen. Like a curse - but this is like a positive spell - may this be or I swear to do this - that kind of thing.
A dedication is a kind of pranidhana and an invocation is calling on some power to add power to our pranidhana
Student:
"I am also wondering if I am (dedicating, invoking, or wishing for) an intention to happen again or a result to happen again."
Lama Shenpen:
'Again'? It could be a pranidhana for both, ‘may I continue with this intention for life after life’ or, ‘may the results of this intention bear fruit forever until all beings are free from samsara’ - it could be either or both.
Student:
"Do I dedicate my wish? Do I wish for my dedication to be of benefit? This is all rather confusing."
Lama Shenpen:
Again we can dedicate the wish - because the wish is the source of all the good that flows from it - or we could dedicate all the good that flows from it - or both or either - depends on the inspiration of the moment!
Student:
"I thought I was making a pranidhana by saying, “may such and such benefit all beings”.
Would I be dedicating something that has already happened or am I wishing for my intentions to benefit all beings?"
Lama Shenpen:
Well we can’t get too precise here because we don’t really understand what we are talking about - lets call it punya - what is that exactly?
Maybe it is timeless - maybe it’s something to do with a timeless connection - but we express it in terms of time - we say it now and the result comes later - but it is easy to show that that kind of causality never happens.
In time there can be no causality - what has gone cannot influence what has not arrived - so the reality behind the seeming reality of time must be quite mysterious and not something we can understand in time language.
Nonetheless relatively speaking we can act as if what we do now influences the future and as if punya was something that we could give to others - and as if punya was some kind of power associated with the good deeds and intentions we have.
It is like saying the sun rises each day - of course it doesn’t really - but for all practical purposes in terms of our daily life it does. If we act as if it does we won’t go far wrong.
But if you then ask by what force is it projected up into the sky and why doesn’t it fall - well the answer is that it is stationary and the earth is turning on its axis - a completely unexpected answer coming from a quite different view of the world.
The upshot is that we can dedicate punya from the past, present and future, and it can be from what we did, what we intend and what we will do and also the results of all that.
Student:
"What does it mean to link into the adhistana of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas?"
Lama Shenpen:
Ah well, that could be understood on all sorts of levels.
This could be the deepest question of them all, or it might just be a matter of intuitively feeling that somehow there is a sense that Awakened Beings don’t go anywhere and so somehow they are therefore here.
That intuition can have quite a powerful effect right here and now - you might notice it beginning to happen and be quite surprised.
I read a recent teaching with great interest; it could almost have been me that asked the question you replied to. You may not remember me, I came to see you at the Hermitage about a year ago, we talked about me going for refuge, and I expressed concerns about the rituals involved. I have since left the Sangha, and feel a bit adrift.
However, I am feeling more positive that I have found the beginnings of my path. I have been reading a lot by Steven Batchelor and feel that a genuinely agnostic approach is right for me at this time.
I do feel that the work you are doing is so good and I love the simple approach of Discovering the Heart of Buddhism, I started to get a bit concerned about some of the aspects of Trusting the Heart of Buddhism.
Is there a place for someone like me within the Sangha, when, if I'm going to be true to myself, can't accept the rituals and prayers etc?
Lama Shenpen replies:
Yes I remember you. I hope you will find a place in the Sangha for yourself that feels right for you. The important quality that we all need is an open mind and deep respect for the Buddha's teaching. Then we listen to the teachings and ponder them for ourselves and notice where our sticking points are.
If we have respect for the Buddha’s teachings and admit to ourselves that we do not as yet understand them, we can simply practise what we can understand and sometimes maybe open out a bit more to what we cannot. There is no need for us to force ourselves to do practices such as rituals just because everyone else does. Neither do we have to exclude ourselves from the Sangha just because there are rituals and practices that others - maybe the majority - do that we are not drawn to and which we cannot understand the point of. It may help you to know that many students come into Buddhism highly sceptical about teachings such as rebirth, karma and ritual (me included).
My advice to you is not to limit yourself by deciding before you start to reduce the Buddha’s teaching to something you already think and believe …. somehow trying to push it into the straightjacket of your preconceived ideas. The Dharma is realised through giving up all 'views' which might perhaps be translated as preconceived ideas in this context. Just because in our modern western society it is regarded as normal to not believe in past and future lives, in the efficacy of rituals and in supernormal powers, beings outside the field of our senses and so on, doesn’t mean that these views are proven, true or even particularly rational. They are part of our conditioning..... that is why they seem so normal and sensible - that is why they are easier to accept.
Next time I see him, I will ask my (our) fully enlightened Tibetan Buddhist Master, AGAIN, how he justifies the McDonald's hamburgers he enjoyed during his early travels to the west and what he thinks of the prayer you so astutely criticized.
"...The purpose of Buddhist prayer is to awaken our inherent inner capacities of strength, compassion and wisdom rather than to petition external forces based on fear, idolizing, and worldly and/or heavenly gain. Buddhist prayer is a form of meditation; it is a practice of inner reconditioning. Buddhist prayer replaces the negative with the virtuous and points us to the blessings of Life...."
What's wrong with that, I don't get why it creeps you out?
Maybe it's my catholic upbringing.
Every time something happened at my convent school, the nuns would tell us to pray to god, we were so naughty....in fact, according to them, everything could be dealt with by praying to God.
I guess it's just a little bit too Theistic-sounding to me.
@Sherab, Thanks, I realise it's pure-land.... my own personal view is that there's a lot of saccharine sentiment there.... but that's just me. I don't take sugar in anything, and I have a strong and violent reaction to artificial sweeteners! (true!)
I try to keep my prayers simple and from the heart.
I say the Refuge Prayer thoughout the day and the "Dedication of Merit" to lock in any good deeds that I may have done. I also try to do as many Mani's ss I can.
This has been a great help to me in dealing with stress
Hope it helps.
Dan