Prayer

In a Zen monastery, the monks gathered every evening for meditation. There was a cat that wandered into the hall and distracted the monks during practice. The master, seeing the disturbance repeated over time, ordered that the cat be tied to a tree outside the meditation hall during the evening sitting. For years, this was done without question. The bell would ring, the monks would prepare the hall, and someone would go and tie the cat to the tree. Eventually, the master died. The cat continued to be tied to the tree. Years later, the cat also died. The monks then acquired another cat so that it could be tied to the tree during meditation. Generations later, scholarly treatises were written in that monastery analysing the spiritual significance of tying the cat to the tree before meditation (Zen teaching anecdote, as cited in de Mello, 1990).

A monk was once asked why he continued to pray for rain after so many dry seasons. The monk heard the question and chose not to explain. Instead he asked the man to sit with him for prayers before sunrise. The man agreed, and they sat together as the monk began his prayer, using words the listener had heard many times before. At first, nothing seemed to change. The sky, the air, the land, all of it stayed as it was. And as the prayer continued, something happened. The monk’s breath deepened, his body grounded, his face softened and his voice lost its urgency. When the prayer ended, he stood up and walked toward the fields, as he did every morning.

Later, the man asked him, “Do you believe your prayer will bring rain?”

The monk said, “I believe prayer brings me fully into this moment, and allows me to hold space for the rain when it comes, and to rejoice when it does.”

Prayer appears wherever human beings have had enough time and safety to notice themselves from the within. Long before belief systems were formed or doctrines were argued over, people paused, gathered, moved together, spoke in repeated patterns, and oriented themselves toward what felt larger than their individual lives. Every civilisation shaped this differently, yet the gesture remains recognisable across cultures and centuries, a pause in ordinary movement, a turning of attention, a patterned use of breath, voice, or silence directed toward something beyond immediate control. Alongside this universality sits a difficult truth, that the same act capable of grounding one person has also been used to harden another, to draw sharp boundaries, to justify exclusion, domination, and violence. This tension cannot be resolved by theology because it does not originate there. It originates in the human psyche, in how people respond to uncertainty and vulnerability. Prayer may not be the first expression of belief. Prayer arises when knowing ends, when certainty no longer helps, and attention turns toward holding uncertainty with care rather than trying to resolve it. Wherever helplessness, gratitude, fear, longing, or awe arise, language begins to gather itself in patterned ways, to contain experience in it may be. What later becomes religion begins as a way of regulating inner life in the presence of forces that cannot be mastered. Long before gods were imagined as figures with names and stories, human beings were already engaging in ritual acts alongside burial practices, seasonal marking, and communal movement, responding to climate, illness, birth, death, hunger, and loss with shared gestures that restored a sense of order when outcomes could not be predicted. Psychologically, the meta structure of prayer functions as a regulatory process, helping the nervous system organise experience when certainty is unavailable, by using repetition, shared meaning, and attention to re-establish orientation and emotional containment. Familiar sounds and movements help the nervous system organise itself. When language became available, it gave people a way to hold what they were living through, instead of being overwhelmed by it. Prayer emerged at the meeting point of fear and wonder, It allowed people to remain internally organised while facing realities that exceeded their capacity to understand them. What draws people to prayer has stayed largely the same across time, safety, reassurance, forgiveness, guidance, gratitude, and contact, needs that are felt before they were defined. Literature has always reflected this without needing to explain it. In the Iliad, prayer appears as plea and lament spoken from the edge of loss. In the Psalms, prayer moves between praise and protest, devotion and complaint, sometimes within the same breath, showing that even despair turns outward when it can no longer be held alone. Philosophy later complicated the picture without dissolving it. Spinoza proposed that what people call God is not a listening figure, but the totality of nature unfolding through lawful order, which reframes prayer as orientation rather than request, a way of aligning oneself with what is already in motion. Kierkegaard suggested that prayer acts within the person who prays, gradually shaping how life is lived and experienced from the inside. This raises a question that cannot be avoided. Are people praying toward something outside themselves, or are they entering states in which something within becomes accessible that is usually obscured by noise and urgency. Contemporary neuroscience offers a quiet confirmation of what contemplative traditions have long observed through practice, that sustained attention, repeated movement, chanting, and regulated breathing bring about changes in perception and emotional tone, allowing the usual narrative voice to soften and awareness to widen. In such states, what many traditions speak of as God is not encountered as an object or authority, but as a sense of coherence, of participation in something ongoing, something not owned or controlled. Buddhism speaks of this without personifying it, pointing instead to direct experience and the letting go of fixed views. Taoist texts describe learning to follow seasonal movement rather than attempting to command it. Indigenous traditions express prayer through dance, gesture, and relationship with land, where listening takes precedence over asking. Across these expressions, prayer is less about being heard and more about hearing, less about changing the world directly and more about changing how one stands within it. Whatever one chooses to call it, the significance lies not in supernatural intervention, but in the human capacity to sense belonging within a larger unfolding, and to live from that sensing with greater care.

“भला हुआ मेरी गगरी टूटी, मैं पनिहा भरन से छूटी”.

-Kabir

On the surface, these lines feel ordinary. A water pot breaks, the daily task ends, she speaks of the relief from daily chores. Bhakti readers have often understood this as release from ritual obligation, a moment where the seeker no longer carries the weight of repeated effort. Advaita commentators move the image inward, reading the pot as the assumed container of individuality, the sense of a separate self tasked with carrying meaning, merit, or attainment. When that container gives way, there is no longer a carrier and no longer a burden. What was once gathered through effort is recognised as already present. Later interpreters have pointed to Kabir’s sharper insight, that the problem is not practice itself, but practice driven by fear, bargaining, or imagined insufficiency. Action does not disappear when the pot breaks. What falls away is the strain that once organised it. From a psychological view, the image points to a release from effort driven by fear, proving, or inner pressure. Activity may still continue, yet it arises from a different place. What remains is a simpler way of moving, without the weight that once had to be carried.

भला हुआ मोरी माला टूटी, मैं राम भजन से छूटी

This matters, because Kabir himself was often critical of mechanical japa and externalised repetition

Ritual, seen this way, holds a subtle role. It is often dismissed as empty repetition, though such dismissal usually comes from distance rather than familiarity. Ritual does not operate by producing outcomes. Lighting a lamp does not rearrange the world. Repeating words does not persuade life to comply. Its effect is quieter and closer. Ritual marks a threshold. It signals to the body that a different mode of attention is being entered. Familiar sequences, gestures, and phrases guide breath, posture, and focus toward coherence. Long before contemporary language described nervous system regulation, traditions understood this through use. When ritual is inhabited, attention gathers. Emotional intensity settles. Experience becomes easier to hold. A receptive state forms, not through force, but through participation. In such moments, meaning reorganises itself without instruction.

While staying in an AirBnB in Bangalore, the owner of the flat spoke to me before I checked in. She said there was one practice she asked everyone in the house to follow. Footwear stopped at a specific point and never moved beyond it. She called it a ritual and said it had been part of her family life for as long as she could remember. The first time she became aware of it was through her grandfather. She also shared that as a young girl, she resisted it for years, questioned it, argued against it, and followed it reluctantly. Over time, without effort or reflection, it became part of how she lived. Her grandfather had explained that the world outside carries demands, comparisons, conflicts, and mental noise, and that removing footwear marked a deliberate pause before entering the home. Hygiene mattered, yet it was secondary. What remained after decades was a simple inner check. As she removed her shoes, she left behind what no longer belonged inside. The practice did change her life in terms of conscious cutting of chords form the world she didnt want to belong, and yet she had the choice, It shaped how she entered her home. Because small, repeated acts can organise inner life at the level where explanation no longer reaches, allowing people to shift state, attention, and presence without belief, instruction, or effort.

Buddhist practice offers a related understanding. Chanting is not directed toward an external listener. It gathers attention and stabilises awareness. Bowing does not signal submission. It adjusts posture, breath, and orientation. Taking refuge is not withdrawal from life. It clarifies where one places trust when certainty is unavailable. The Buddha cautioned against confusing form with insight, yet he did not recommend abandoning form altogether. Repetition teaches the body how to settle. Wisdom lies in recognising when repetition is serving regulation rather than becoming something to defend. Action remains useful until grasping replaces attention. From this view, prayer can be understood as a psychological method refined through long use. It has been distorted, controlled, and imposed, and it has also helped people remain organised in the presence of fear, loss, and uncertainty. To dismiss it entirely ignores how human systems regulate themselves. To treat it as absolute forgets why it emerged. Over time, the structure will fade away and words might fall away too, Until they do, they remain provisional supports, functioning only as long as they are used with awareness rather than tension.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a person speaks or acts with a troubled mind, suffering follows, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart.

If a person speaks or acts with a settled mind, ease follows, like a shadow that never leaves.

By oneself is one purified, by oneself is one defiled. Purity and impurity belong to oneself; no one can purify another.”

— The Dhammapada, verses 1–2, 165

Namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammāsambuddhassa

Buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Dhammaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Saṅghaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Dutiyampi buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Dutiyampi dhammaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Dutiyampi saṅghaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Tatiyampi buddhaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Tatiyampi dhammaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Tatiyampi saṅghaṃ saraṇaṃ gacchāmi

Pāṇātipātā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi

Adinnādānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi

Kāmesu micchācārā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi

Musāvādā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi

Surā-meraya-majjapamādaṭṭhānā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi

At the end of the day, the function of any prayer, including this one, lies less in the words themselves and more in what they quietly reorient within us. Prayer acts as a reminder of an inner location that remains accessible, even when attention has scattered. It offers a way of stabilising thought, allowing something clearer and less burdened to come forward. In that sense, prayer gathers attention around a single, uncluttered intention, one that assumes support rather than threat, coherence rather than chaos. Life rarely pauses long enough for this to happen on its own. The momentum of events, losses, and demands pulls the system toward contraction and rumination. Prayer interrupts that pull. It creates a brief interval where gratitude can be felt rather than analysed, where blessings are acknowledged even if circumstances have not yet changed. This shift does not deny difficulty. It changes the internal position from which difficulty is met. Psychologically, it marks a movement away from collapse and reactivity toward orientation and agency. The state alters first. From there, choice becomes possible again.