Prayer Wheels, Odd Ideas and Even Odder

Look closely at this illustration, found in a brief chapter on Tartary published in 1741. Engraved by Bernard Picart (1673-1733), it is one of many found in a 7-volume encyclopedia Religious Customs and Ceremonies of All the Peoples of the World. The large central figure is supposed to be a deified ruler of the Tartars (read into the neighboring prose and you find this is supposed to mean the Dalai Lamas, but honestly I would have taken him for Vasco da Gama). Below the smoke billowing out of his matching incense burners are two figures. Figure B is labeled as a Lama saying his prayers, while C, the one I particularly want to point out to you, turns a cylindrical instrument on his cube. To put it in plain terms, one of them is praying, while the other one is there at his service, rolling a cylinder on a cube, as if there were a division of duties.

No need to tell an intelligent person such as yourself that the Wheel of the Tibetan Buddhists isn’t that way. Making this picture even more absurd, observe how the chain-and-ball governor shoots out at an odd angle. The workings of this mechanism are entirely lost on this artist as is Newton’s discovery of 1687. But I’m not eager to belabor the fact, and the engraving is oddly inaccurate in nearly every way: the architecture, the light fixtures, the hats, the outfits, the Chinese characters. Keep looking at it and you will find more and more.

It is still, in 2024, a little too early to award ourselves a good pat on the back, as if now we are all post-colonialist and have gotten over Orientalisms’ many downsides. Well, I’m fairly certain you have one of those few intellects that entirely transcend all ethnocentrisms, but if I may speak bluntly you are not everyone. There are still people around you more than willing to selectively (and, I have to say often absurdly) make this or that aspect of the Wheels practices fit or misfit within Judaeo-Christian ideational contexts. They are likely to find the association of prayer (okay, mantra recitation) with wheel-based mechanisms both intriguing and worthy of ridicule. Instead of looking further into the matter, they find their own ideas about prayer fortified by way of the perceived contrast. This is a textbook case of confirmation bias.  

It may be best to teach your children well, and hope you will never have to defend the use of Wheels to a Baptist pastor from South Carolina. But when it does happen, use it as a chance to practice patience and empathy, while inserting a little softness and doubt into the inevitable talking points. That may prove more beneficial for the both of you than just spinning in the same tired circles. Or rolling in them.

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To read more about what outsiders routinely call “Prayer Wheels,” see the publications listed in the 2020 Tibeto-logic blog entitled “Prayer Wheels Came from Where?” The true ulterior motive for posting today’s brief blog is just to send you to a larger bibliography that includes quite a wide variety of works about Wheels. The link is supplied below.

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Frontispiece:  For the source publication, see the links conveniently provided at Hathi Trust:

Histoire générale des cérémonies, moeurs, et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, représentées en 243. figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picard, avec des explications historiques, & curieuses ; par M. l'abbé Banier ... & par M. l'Abbé Mascrier.

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Should the engraver be somewhat forgiven because some meager description of the scene was all he had to work with when the engraving (or rather etching) was commissioned? Verbal descriptions are unlikely to result in realistic portraits. As much as you might want me to go into this art history problem, I’m not equipped for it at the moment. There are a lot of books written on 18th-century book illustration, so I recommend going to find them if that’s what you want to do with your precious human rebirth.

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Finally, if you are wondering why in the world I would put up this feeble blog, it would be because I want to tell you about a new bibliography just today hung up on the website called Tiblical under the title “Wheel Bibliography.” Go and see it by clicking here:

https://sites.google.com/site/tiblical/wheel-bibliography

and feel free to copy-paste it into a regular file on your own personal devices. You may find a good use for it in the future. I wish it to remain up there on the internet as a resource for all the humans who hope to hone their understanding of humanity.