Gananath Obeyesekere

Gananath Obeyesekere's latest contribution is a long, challenging book that demands a reader's full attention as well as something more subtle: the kind of intellectual rigor that is conditioned by spiritual openness. Anthropologists who are best familiar with the author's early work as an ethnographer of personal symbols and religious experience in South Asia may well be surprised by the sheer reach of this book as well as its deep facility with the complex textual and conceptual systems of classical Buddhism, medieval Christianity, early modern occultism and theosophy as well as Jung, Freud and the contemporary Lucid Dreaming movement. What each of these settings has in common is either a strong visionary tradition or an analytic interest in visionary experience. The frame is broad enough to include Tibetan vision journeys, Julian of Norwich's Christian mysticism, Edwin Muir's "dreams of death and transcendence" and even the visionary poetry of William Blake-nor is that all. Obeyesekere divides the work into eight separate "books," each of which might really have been published under separate cover if but for the cross hatching of certain major themes like the priority of visionary experience over discursive formulations and the recurrence of visionary engagement with nothingness, which some Christian traditions describe as "the dark night of the soul."

This paper explores whether Buddhism contains any practices that can be classified as 'prayer.' With a focus on 'Kannalavva' (plaint) texts of Sri Lanka, it explores whether they can be taken as functional prayer texts. Ideas on prayer by Reginald S. Copleston, Anagarika Dharmapala, and D.T. Suzuki are discussed. Meal prayers of Theravada and Zen traditions are taken into account. The paper ends with a brief discussion of prayers of the New Kadampa Tradition of Geshe Kelsang Gyatso.