How Buddhism Informs one’s Christianity: How to Pray

The quintessential passage on prayer in the Christian tradition can be found in Matthew 6:5-15.

Here Jesus looks out on his followers and says “when you pray…pray like this” and then proceeds to give them the formula for the Our Father (Pater Noster) prayer that so many Christians know.

Growing up as a Roman Catholic and then in my twenties falling in with a nondenominational church in the Protestant tradition, I have had the opportunity to experience two radically different approaches to prayer. My Roman Catholicism made it a token recitation and a mark of being in and a part of the community. My nondenominational church never recited it, said it was meant merely as a model, and encouraged us to avoid such vain repetitions because we should always pray in our own intimate individualistic way to God. What I missed in both of these traditions is not what to pray but how to pray. This is perhaps the most significant blind spot in Christian ecclesiology. And even where we would expect to find answers, teaching one to pray is a foreign notion in scripture. We might look, for example, at Paul and Jesus who assumed that we should know how to pray and appear to be confident in our ability to carry out a proper prayer. And why shouldn’t they be? Both Paul and Jesus were Jews. Prayer was second nature and meant for communal consumption. Most encounters with prayer in the Bible are public. Yes, I know Jesus tells us to pray in private to our heavenly father but in context of Matthew 6 it was a response to situations in which we are tempted to make a show of our prayer. Even the Psalms, which suggest in our modern interpretation some of the more heartfelt and intimate prayers of the earlier writers were actually meant as congregational prayers.

Public or private, however, there is no instruction on how to pray. Through the years I have heard more sermons on what to say and ask for during prayer then I can count. Still, when I was faced with how to pray, the practice always remained left to me, though I admit much of what my community prayed and the words they used found their way into my personal prayers. And so this leads me to the topic of this article. Buddhism with its meditative practices and Christianity with its emphasis on public and private prayer may be worlds apart, but, I would add not incompatible. The notion of meditation, which is the clearing of the mind to focus oneself, seems to me an indispensible component of one’s prayer life. The writer of 2 Corinthians (let’s assume Paul) hints at something like this. The kenotic mind (or the empty mind if I may call it this) is the one that casts down or brings every thought into captivity to obey Christ. Paul seems to be saying that when one finds his mind straying while he is in prayer, he is to take control of those thoughts. (2 Co 10:5) But how? Paul answers : by bringing them into obedience to Christ. How does a thought become obedient to Christ? When I was in a nondenominational church, I often referred to this verse by Paul. In prayer, I would often fall asleep or my mind would stray to the events of the day. I would easily lose focus. My mind was always in motion. And so I applied Paul’s formula. I would invoke the name of Christ to capture those thoughts that easily derailed my concentration, even the ugly ones. I would stand up and walk around, keep my eyes open, everything based upon personal experimentation. But it never quite worked and I always found myself back in the same place.

For the Buddhist, the very act of praying is given as much, if not more attention, then what is being said. Clearing one’s mind during Sādhanā is a discipline that is so integral to the Buddhist frame of mind, that the recitation of the sacred syllable ॐ is often considered an afterthought. Yet, there is something important here, and it communicates that preparation, frame of mind, peace of mind, presence, and one’s physical being are as important if not more than what is being said. We know from the gospels that Jesus had a problem with the amount of words being offered in prayer. This is particularly why he encourages people into their prayer closets, to avoid the temptation to put on a show. I think it is instructive to remember that prayers were not performed silently in the ancient world, and the first intimation of silent prayer does manifest in Christianity until the mid-fourth century when St. Augustine stumbles upon Ambrose praying in silence. That Augustine found this behavior odd at least suggests that even two centuries later many Christians must have been praying out loud. One’s prayer closet was suggested by Jesus not as an act of private prayer where one silently projects his prayers to God, but as a way to protect the genuineness of one’s prayer against the temptations that may come with seeking out favor or public approval. It most likely continued that people were praying out loud and to suggest anything else is a modern interpolation.

One can learn from the practical significance of Buddhist meditation techniques. Breathing, Vajra positioning of the body, visualization, even verbalizations that do not translate into comprehensible language (think of Glossolalia in the Pentecostal tradition) are ways of supporting spiritual worship. All these things may deepen rather than hinder a profound experience of prayer in any tradition.