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prayer wheel

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prayer wheel

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Tibetan prayer wheel, gilt silver, 18th–19th century; in the Seattle (Washington) Art Museum.
(credit: Courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum, Washington, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection)
In Tibetan Buddhism, a mechanical device used as an equivalent to the recitation of a mantra. The prayer wheel consists of a hollow metal cylinder, often beautifully embossed, mounted on a rod and containing a consecrated paper bearing a mantra. Each turn of the wheel by hand is considered equivalent to orally reciting the prayer. Variants to the handheld prayer wheel are large cylinders that can be set in motion by hand or attached to windmills or waterwheels and thus kept in continuous motion.


prayer wheel
Buddhism (esp in Tibet) a wheel or cylinder inscribed with or containing prayers, each revolution of which is counted as an uttered prayer, so that such prayers can be repeated by turning it


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Examples from the exhibits include texts from Hebrew manuscripts, the Qur'an and an illuminated manuscript from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; a medieval map of the Holy Land and pilgrims' aids including Buddhist prayer wheels.
It can take an hour to breathlessly reach the valley floor, where rectangular glassless windows frame endless views: a monk passes unheard, but in his wake leaves a line of tin-can prayer wheels slowly turning.
Dillard loves the challenge of seeing a poem as a game; I like to imagine her delight at the challenge she took on in a poem that plays a very different sort of trick with Jesus: "The Man Who Wishes to Feed on Mahogany" (this and subsequent quotations are from Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, University of Missouri Press, 1974).
 
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