Buddhist worship

For the Buddhists, it doesn’t matter, if they worship at home or in a temple, you don’t need to go to a temple. At home most of the Buddhists have a shrine with candles and statues of the Buddha. The temples all have a statue of the Buddha, and are built to represent the five elements:

·         Fire

·         Air

·         Earth

·         Water

·         Wisdom

One of the most famous temples is the Stupa, which represent the teachings of the Buddha and the believes of the Buddhist.

The process of worshiping works in the following way: They worshipping Buddhist sits barefoot (which is maybe, because they want to show how poor they are compared to the Buddha) in front of a Buddha statue and prays. Furthermore they listen to music from religious texts maybe accompanied by some instruments.

The Mantras and prayer aids (wheels)

A Mantra is like a short prayer, but can also be a just a word or a phrase, which is spoken once or a couple times. It can also be thought. The Buddhists use these phrases to get a spiritual effect on theirselfs.

Prayer wheels in a Buddhist monastery in Dharamshala

One of the most used is called “Avalokiteshvara”. If you translate the mantra it would mean something like “Behold! The jewel in the Lotus”, which is not really useful to understand the real meaning of the Avalokiteshvara.

Prayer wheels are small or huge wheels, where the Buddhists wrote down a mantra. When you walk by one of these mantras you spin it.

The Buddhists use mental- and physical worships. I think for a Buddhists it is not only important to think about the things they have in mind about the Buddha, they also do it in and physical way with the shrines and the prayer wheels, with music and group prayers.