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PRAYER WHEELS
finds its way to the ear of the gods. The turning
of a prayer-wheel, whether in the hand, or by the
agency of water, wind or fire, is the best illustration
of this. The peregrinations round the Ling-kor or
the Jo-kang at Lhasa are other examples of an acted
prayer. Attention is not necessary; merit is acquired,
whether the mind be fixed or not, and Claudius
truism, “ Words without thoughts, never to Heaven
go,” would be scouted as foolishness by the piety of
this land. Nor would the Lamas be inclined to agree
with the counsel which deprecates repetition, for
some of the larger prayer-wheels contain the sacred
mantra^ “ Om mani padme hum,” repeated to an extent
that almost defies calculation. Very thin sheets of
paper made from the Daphne Cannabina, as thin as
Oxford India paper, are printed with symbols of this
invocation as closely as the space permits. Many
hundreds of sheets of this paper are compressed
into every inch within the great revolving tub. The
contents remain in a tight hard block, even if the
outer covering is broken. A prayer-wheel eight feet
in height may contain this same mantra about a
hundred million times. Every revolution of a wheel
like this adds considerably, therefore, to the- credit side
of the Tibetan’s account in Heaven. So easy is it to
add a thousand billion or so of these ejaculations to
one’s account in a five minutes visit to the nearest
gompa, that the plain mind of the occidental wonders
why, if all this is really necessary, the Tibetan does
not accumulate his merit in this easy fashion, instead of
wandering all day long, uneconomically twisting in his
hand the comparatively inefficacious hand wheel, or
moving the still less expeditious lips. But here we soon
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