Prayer without ceasing until the sun goes down...

I arrived in Kathmandu this morning and stood smiling amiably at the Buddhist monk as we waited for our luggage to emerge on the carousel. He was every inch the modern monk with his lap top case and smart baggage.

Welcomed at the airport, I stepped in the car and discovered an array of Buddhas and Buddhist symbols to offer protection from the vagaries of the Kathmandu traffic including a solar powered prayer wheel (as depicted here, and available on Amazon).

'Is this cheating?' I thought but did not ask.

I do remember the poet and novelist, Lawrence Durrell, leaning over his breakfast table at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in France and telling an earnest Australian visitor that indeed you could get battery powered ones now. The Australian apparently had been at risk of repetitive strain injury given the fervor of his hand propelled spinning. But this is the first one I had seen.

St Paul tells us to 'pray without ceasing' to be so attuned to the Spirit's presence that the prayer that is always there in the Spirit's self-offering to Father and the Son is the very reality we as human beings, when aright, inhabit. This was a discipline of intellect, attention and feeling and their integration in the heart. I do not think he had Duracell in mind as an aid.

But it was strangely comforting, as we weaved in and out of the rush hour traffic, to see the mantra turning. It felt an active offering, even if mechanical. No doubt both driver and passenger, from time to time, catch its jaunty revolutions in the mind's eye and remember the mantra themselves and are grateful.

That would be enough.

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

The Beckoning Land that is within

In spite of the fact that all three of Rowena Farre's books were in a certain measure autobiographical, she remains a mystery. The place of her birth, her real name, and ancestry, whether her first book was an autobiography, in fact, or fiction? It is, on reading her last book, a matter on which, beyond a certain notional interest, I find myself wholly and happily agnostic. Whoever she was, she was a person out of sorts with the world she was born into and on, an ever more consciously realized, spiritual quest. In this way, the book leads on from her earlier one about her life with Roma and Traveller communities. There she was following a nomadic impulse that ran in parallel to 'ordinary life' whilst here she is following a nomadic life that enfolds and transforms 'ordinary' life. https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-hopes-realities-and-shadows-of-being.html In this her third book, she returns to places associated with her childhood, Hong Kong, Ceylon, a...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog