Prayer Role Model Essay-Dalai Lama

Prayer Role Model Essay - Dalai Lama For the last decades, two world wars within fifty years and countless terrorist attacks, genocides all over the globe creates one of the bloodiest era in human history. Due to the violence, competitive human nature, most individuals nowadays are controlled by the pace and pressure of society, hence, impotent to achieve inner peace, “a state of harmony, the absence of hostility” (Self Growth). However, a few were able to successfully manage a peaceful mentality and spirituality, and one is the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Eighty years old Tenzin Gyatso, originally named Lhamo Thondup came from a small peasant family in the village of Taktser, east of Tibet. Thondup grew up as the fifth son out
Gyatso once said: “We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves” and it directly reflects his calm and placid nature. Just like any other devoted Buddhist, Gyatso had his own form of prayer, which is “a wholehearted faith response to God (in this case Buddha), who loves us without conditions and is with us in every moment of our life” (Celebrating Sacraments, 57). Prayer had three traditional forms. In vocal prayer, the person is attempting to connect with Buddha by physically talking to Him. Contemplation, “a state of mystical awareness of God’s being” by “concentrating on spiritual things as a form of private devotion” (Merriam Webster). For His Holiness, he believed by doing meditation or focusing one’s “attention on an idea, a story, or a particular object” (Celebrating Sacraments, 62), that the individual can best achieve inner peace to communicate with Buddha. The process of meditating and praying stretches throughout His Holiness daily routine. By praying three different times a day, from 3 am until 5 am after he woke up, from 6 am to 9 am before spending time reading Buddhists texts and studies, and after drinking tea at around 5 am, His Holiness was able to uphold a harmonious attitude. Stated in his book Illuminating the Path to Enlightenment, His Holiness punctuated the importance of meditation, he said: “[...] in my daily life, meditation is also a method for relaxation. In meditation, we think about and analyze life, mind and self. If your analytical meditation goes well, you feel relaxed; if it doesn’t, you just get more tired” (Prologue, XIX). During meditation, the Dalai Lama usually combined the uses of imagination and the body to sustain reconciliation. Buddhists in general and the Dalai Lama in particular usually meditate by closing their eyes, sitting in an upright posture with a relax state