THE PRAYER-WHEEL OF THIBET.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2608, 30 March 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE PRAYER-WHEEL OF THIBET.

0 One of the strangest contrivances for religious purposes ever invented by any people (writes the Times of January 4) is the prayer-wheel of Thibet. Thomas Manning, the only Englishman that ever saw Lhassa, who visited Thibet at the commencement of the present century, describes these wheels, which he calls " whirligigs," as cylinders turning freely on an axis, 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 persons, am! is constantly turned, while another kind is fixed on an axis iu the ground, around which it resolves. In the avenues of the temples, he says, there are hundreds of them, which good souls twist ono aftor another as they pass along, Others contain rolls of printed prayers, and are fixed in rows on the walls of temples near villages, and in streams to be turned by water power. They are said to have been in use for more than 1000 years. Mr Andrew Wilson says that the Thibetans are the most preeminently praying people on the face of the earth. " They have praying stones, praying pyramids, praying flags flying over every house, praying wheels, praying mills, and the universal prayer • Om moni padme haun,' is never out of their mouths." A German writer on Lamaism says of this sentence, which literally means " O God ? the jewel iu the lotus," that " these six syllables are of all the prayers of earth that which is most frequently repeated, written, by mechanical means. They constitute the only prayer which the common Mongolos and Thibetans know; they are the first words which the stammering child learns, and are the last sighs of the dying. The traveller murmurs them upon his journey, the herdsmen by his flock, the ivife in her daily work, the monk in all stages of contemplation—that is to say, of Nihilism—and they are the cries of conflict aud triumph. One meets with them every where monuments, utensils, strips of paper, human skulls, skeletons, &c. Thty are, according to the meaning of the believer, the essence of all religion, of all wisdom and revelation; they are the way of salvation, and the on trance to holiness." Mr Wilson observes that the repetition of this prayer, whether orally or by mechanical means, has become a sacred and protecting symbol such as making the sign of the cross is among Roman Catholic Christians.