Some Particulars about Prayer Wheels.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 352, 20 March 1889, Page 4

Some Particulars about Prayer Wheels.

Ojs'e of the strangest contrivances for religious purposes ever invented by any people is the prayer wheel of Tibet. Thomas Wanning, the only Englishman that over saw Lhassa, who visited Tibet at the commencement of the present century, desciibes these wheels, which he calls ' whirligigs,' as cylinders turning treely on an axi,«, with sacred sentences and prayers inside. Turning the whirligig is equivalent to reciting the sentence, and is a substitute for it. The hand wheel is carried always by pious peisons, and is constantly turned, whilo another kind is fixed on an axis on the ground, around which it revolves. In the a\enues of the temples, he says, there aie hundreds of them, which good souls twist one after another as they pass along. Others contain rolls of printed prayeis, and are fixed in rows on the Avails of temples, near villages, and in streams to be turned by water power. They are said fcoha\ebeen in use for more than 1,000 years. Mr Andrew Wilson says that the Tibetans are the most pre-eminently praying people on the face of the earth. ' They have praying stones, praying pyramids, praying flags flying over every house, praying 1 " wheels, praying mills, and the universal prayer, ' Cm mani padme hann 1 is never out of their mouths. ' A German writer on Lamaism says of this sentence, which literally means ' 0 God ! the jewel in the lotus,' that those six syllables are, of all the prayors of earth, that which is most frequently repeated, written, printed, and conveniently offered up by mechanical means.