The Treasury of Sacred Sound
My greatest weapon is mute prayer.
--Gandhi
In theistic religions, prayers are addressed to a supreme being or higher power. In nontheistic Buddhism, as we pray, we are not petitioning for something so much as we are reaffirming our intentions and asserting our vows. The word we translate as prayer in Tibetan is Monlam. It roughly translates as aspiration-path or wishing-path. In the Dzogchen tradition, prayers are like the self-resound of Buddha-nature, Dharmata, a spontaneous display of innate wisdom mind—as prayers to the primordial Buddha in the Dzogchen tantras say.
The following, my own daily morning loving-kindness prayer, is based on an original Buddhist scripture called the Metta Sutra. It’s an excellent example of how we can cultivate benevolent intentions and bring them forth through the speech door in the form of a prayer of affirmation that can be chanted, sung, or spoken. This kind of meditational prayer helps us develop more loving, kind, warm, constructive, and positive mental habits and external behavior.
May all beings be happy, content, and fulfilled.
May all beings be healed and whole.
May all have whatever they want and need.
May all be protected from harm, and free from fear.
May all beings enjoy inner peace and ease.
May all be awakened, liberated, and free.
May there be peace in this world, and throughout the entire universe.
The Buddha himself said that if you repeatedly practice this mediation and recitation—with a forgiving, loving heart, while relinquishing judgment, anger, and prejudice—great benefits will definitely ensue: You will sleep easily, wake easily, and have pleasant dreams; people will love you; celestial beings will love you and protect you; poisons, weapons, fire, and other external dangers will not harm you; your face will be radiant and your mind concentrated and serene; and you will die unconfused and be reborn in happy realms.
Through the karmic laws of cause and effect, praying for peace will certainly help bring peace about. We pray for peace for the sangha and the community of all beings, but we recognize that peace begins with oneself; thus we also pray for our own outer and inner peace as a member of that sangha. In this way we learn to better love, forgive, and accept ourselves; the prayerful phrase “for the benefit or all beings” should not exclude ourselves.
Page 183-4, Awakening the Buddha Within. Lama Surya Das. Broadway Books, New York, 1997.