by Joseph S. O'Leary

Popular actors in the fourteenth century performed in works that richly
incorporated Buddhist faith and doctrine. While being entertained,
audiences simultaneously learned the ideas of Buddhism.

Today our spiritual reading of scriptures requires a critical discernment between what is obsolete in the old texts and what can still speak to us and challenge us.

Sacred scriptures are a terrifically unwieldy inheritance from the past. Even the most beloved scriptures - be it the Gospel of Luke or the Bhagavad Gita - will have many problematic aspects: fantastic and incredible incidents, morally shocking claims, extreme remoteness from present outlooks. I wish to propose that scriptures really exist as scriptures only when they are being used by the community today, and used in such a way as to demonstrate their wholesome efficacy as skillful means. They are "inspired" and "inerrant" only when the community uses them in an inspired and unerring way. This means that scriptures are prayer texts and exist as such only when they are being recited, sung, or listened to contemplatively, and when they elicit a response of prayer from the community. Such a take on scriptures is the antidote to fundamentalism, which fetishizes the dead letter of a scripture, manhandling it with such violent purpose that it never gets a chance to breathe, to become a vehicle of the "Spirit that gives life" (2 Cor. 3:16), and to open up the wide horizons of prayer.

The prayerful appropriation of scripture includes a dimension of critical discernment, as we see already in the way it quietly overcomes fundamentalist tendencies. One way that scripture was handled prayerfully, discerningly, in the past was by the use of allegory. This could lend deep significance even to the most unpromising texts. It could smooth away the scandal caused by other texts, such as those recording divinely sanctioned genocides (Num. 31, 1 Sam. 15), and now be read as spiritual tales about Christ's conquest of evil passions. Today we have a more realistic grasp of the historical background of scriptures, and our spiritual reading of scriptures takes on a critical discernment between what is obsolete in the old texts and what can still speak to us and challenge us. This discernment is already implicit in the selection the community makes of texts for actual use. Vast tracts are left to the curiosity of scholars, while particularly meaningful texts are given prominence, often becoming familiar landmarks in the life of the community.

The prayerful reception of scripture also implies critical discrimination in that it is a struggle to overcome oppressive religious ideas and to know God or the Buddhist Dharma as forces of liberation. Zen meditation is perhaps the most famous form of critical prayer, for it exposes the very texture of religious thinking to a serene analysis, bringing it back to bedrock reality again and again. "If you meet the Buddha, slay the Buddha!" The burden of false religious perceptions, coming from obsolete or misunderstood scriptures, must be overcome so that the true perceptions these scriptures convey can be recovered. Scriptures are themselves critical interventions within their traditions - consider the role of the Gita within the Mahabharata, and more generally within Indian spirituality, or consider how in the vast library of books we call the Bible, later authors and redactors are constantly correcting the work of earlier ones, led by a deeper grasp of the divine as liberating. If a history of the Mahayana sutras can ever be written, it will reveal not only how the Mahayana in general corrects or enlarges earlier Buddhist vision but also how among these sutras themselves and among the earlier and later layers of a given sutra, such as the Lotus Sutra, this critical self-corrective dialectic is going on, led by prayerful attention.

Prayer of Petition

The simplest and most basic form of prayer is petition. Indeed the Greek word for prayer, euche (more commonly proseuche in New Testament usage), means precisely a wish or demand (though it was originally a cultic word, carrying also the sense of "vow"). In the Synoptic Gospels, prayer of petition is the only kind of prayer Jesus teaches, and he urges strongly that the disciples should never give up bothering God with their requests. This may seem a far cry from the mindful attention taught by Zen, but in fact prayer of petition can lead one further than one expects, opening up horizons of wisdom.

Humans are always in a situation of need, want, suffering. Prayer of petition lights up this situation, makes one better acquainted with the First Noble Truth. Then it connects one with one's fellow sufferers in a bond of compassion, as in the case of the woman who came to the Buddha asking to have her child restored to life, only to discover that death is universal and that all of her neighbors had suffered similar bereavement. Prayer of petition sets right one's relations to friends and enemies, establishes a perspective, brings one close to a God's-eye view of things, to a sense of harmony with the loving purposes of the Creator. Texts for such prayer abound in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, notably in the Psalms. In Mahayana scriptures, bodhisattvas live by the petition "May all living beings be free from suffering." Here prayer for others becomes an act of devoting oneself to others. Prayer of petition thus develops into something like practice of the four Brahma-abodes (brahmavihara) of early Buddhism: benevolence or loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

Equanimity would be called in Christian terms "resignation to the will of God." Prayer may not win what it begs, but it may enable one to bear with the lack of it, turning a loss into spiritual gain. Yet the Bible does not urge easy reconciliation, the cool Stoic idea of prayer as accord with an impersonal destiny; angry complaint against a highly personalized God fills long chapters in the Book of Job. Perhaps one might speak of a pedagogy of trust: a naive childlike trust in the Father who will grant all of one's wishes is the beginning of a path that ends in Job's awe before the inscrutable but still trustworthy God, who speaks from the heart of the whirlwind. Job would never have made that progress unless he had the freedom to struggle with God, in questioning and even revolt.

In Buddhist piety, too, a childlike belief in Kannon, who reaches out to help everyone everywhere, may ripen into an internalization of the bodhisattva spirit, so that to pray is to become one with Kannon, "perceiver of the world's cries," reaching out in imagination to all those in need. Buddhist prayer does not seem to involve a Job-like wrestling, though we see something like this in the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna in the Gita. Perhaps this is because Buddhism takes personalized representations of transcendent figures lightly. However, there is a wrestling in Buddhist prayer, reflected in the subtle dialectics of the sutras, whereby one learns to leave behind a childish clinging to substantial security as one becomes more thoroughly acquainted with the truths of impermanence, nonself, dependent co-origination, emptiness, and thus freer to think and act in a compassionate and enlightened way. Both the Bible and the Buddhist sutras offer a long apprenticeship in paths of spiritual thought, paths followed not in sophisticated cogitation but in the thorough enactment of each stage of thought in prayer and meditation.

Prayer is not a hit-or-miss affair, a technique that sometimes "works" and sometimes fails. "We know that the prayers offered by a practitioner of the Lotus Sutra will be answered just as an echo answers a sound, as a shadow follows a form, as the reflection of the moon appears in clear water, as a mirror collects dewdrops, as a lodestone attracts iron, as amber attracts particles of dust, or as a bright mirror reflects the color of an object" (Nichiren, Kito-sho). Yet the certainty of prayer is shot through with uncertainty, just as one might take a medicine, confident in its virtues, but with no clear vision of what the effect will be. Even the simplest prayer of petition is a leap in the dark. For no matter how well our theology and religious culture have defined the images of those to whom the prayer is addressed - be it the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the Blessed Virgin or Amida Buddha or the bodhisattvas Kannon or Jizo - the fact remains that all of these are invisible presences and that in the eyes of a skeptical observer we will seem to be holding colloquy with fantasies or talking to ourselves.

Flimsy Rafts

It may be that mystics in former times had a more secure, unquestioning relationship to the addressee of their prayer. Saint Jean-Marie Vianney used to feel that when he prayed, it was Christ dwelling in him who was praying to the Father. Modern believers may tend, in contrast, to think of their gestures of prayer as a skillful means, effective and energizing, but of obscure import. It is clear that our images of the addressees of prayer are very largely the product of imagination and that our gesture of calling on these addressees is an act of confessed inadequacy, of which one might have to say, with a sigh of resignation: "It's the intention that counts." We boldly claim the space of imagination that the scriptures have opened for us and take up our dwelling therein. This enriches the resources of prayer immensely, and one is grateful for any useful props that can get prayer going. But we may also feel that our clutching at these scriptural traditions is a makeshift business, that they provide only a flimsy raft, liable to break down at any moment.

And yet the raft does seem to be navigable. Adopting the postures of prayer the scriptures prescribe, we sense that they connect us with a beyond. Just as most airborne travelers cannot explain what keeps a flimsy machine moving so powerfully through the vast sky, so we cannot explain why or how prayer works. The image of a divine ear turned to every prayer is very much at odds with our habitual secularized image of the cosmos. Yet we persist, persuaded that there are modes of reality to which prayer attunes us, and using for that purpose whatever traditions or methods come to hand.

Even if modern culture tends to wear down habits of prayer, whether individual or communal, a nostalgia for prayer remains, a sense that prayer puts us in touch with the core truth about ourselves and the world. "We are always praying in the depths of our soul," the philosopher Proclus claimed. If so, prayer is the native language of the soul, and when we are able to pray we feel we are coming home. The English poet George Herbert (1593-1633) caught this in his sonnet "Prayer":

Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angels's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth. . . .
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

Scriptures claim to speak from that home ground, proclaiming the core truth about God and the soul, with a great panoply of stories and metaphors and hyperbolic claims. Contemporary prayer, in more critical and questioning style, will pick up the nub of those claims, internalize them in a quieter way, and thus give the scriptures a new lease on life under conditions vastly different from those of the ages of faith in which they were composed. Today we can see all scriptures in historical and interreligious perspective with unprecedented clarity. This vision is likely to impinge increasingly on the prayer life of believing communities. Scriptures are products of human cultures, vast textual machines creating a scenario enabling transcendent entities to speak to us and enabling us to speak to them. Viewed from one aspect, all of this is a "supreme fiction"; viewed from another, it is a rich reservoir of skillful means, energizing and liberating the human spirit when put into practice, and conveying a sense of a gracious power at work in our lives.

Some people are afraid that the fantastical worlds of scripture involve them in magical thinking, and they seek to replace prayer with a mental hygiene, simply attending to the indubitable phenomena that present themselves to consciousness. Prayer then becomes basic mindfulness, and ideas and words flowing from religious imagination are set aside. The accompanying physical gestures are no longer a ploy to call the attention of deities but become a wholesome exercise justified by its benefits to mind and body. A humanitarian value is added through the cultivation of positive mental attitudes.

But even such a minimalist idea of prayer lies open to epiphanies that fill one with joy or enlightenment and that are a kind of secular analogue of what believers experience when they are addressed and claimed by the words of a scripture. The flamboyancy of scriptures is not all that far from the sobriety of mindfulness. Read in the key of mindfulness, scriptures become pointers to phenomena that are manifesting themselves, phenomena that are often of a "sublime" order or what Jean-Luc Marion calls "saturated phenomena," which overwhelm the receptive capacities of the rational mind. The words of the scripture can resound in one's mind with an unbearable pregnancy of meaning, or can flood the heart with light, as one is brought into accord with the spiritual phenomena they name. Perhaps it is because of such experiences that scriptures continue to be treasured, rather than because of their dogmatic claims or their venerable traditional status.

Moreover, as beautifully translated or illustrated or set to music by artists throughout the centuries, scriptures are encrusted with familiar associations that give them a hold on the heart. Scriptures are landscapes shaped by practices of prayer, channels in which the waters of contemplation may again flow if one can find the right access to them. The barriers that translation and hermeneutics must struggle to overcome can sometimes seem so formidable that people prefer to rely on modern prayer texts, with the risk of enclosure in the pious jargon of a narrow, willful religious culture (that of Catholic devotions in the Tridentine centuries, for example). Scriptures justify their exalted status by the claim to be the very word of God, or the very word of the Buddha, but nowadays we are more likely to seek their justification in their practical worth as building up a habitable universe of faith. We are learning to use them and appropriate them freely, as powerful skillful means, putting aside old worries about canonicity, authority, or infallibility. If the essence of a scripture lies in its effective use, then one might say that a scripture is really a scripture only when it becomes prayer.