![\"\"](\"\/prwhbl1.gif\")
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This is a digital Tibetan prayer wheel<\/a> with the prayer\/mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum” written in Tibetan script:<\/p>\n By the way, I tried writing this here in HTML-escaped Unicode:<\/p>\n ?????????????<\/span><\/p>\n (this is ༀམཎིཔདྨེཧཱུྃ༔, if you’re interested), but Safari and other browsers decompose the sub- and superscripts. Internet Explorer for the Mac just renders garbage. This forum software doesn’t currently support UTF-8, which I suppose would work correctly…<\/p>\n Update:<\/strong> UTF-8 doesn’t work either, although it makes the characters show up correctly in Safari’s “View Source” window.<\/p>\n Update 2:<\/strong> Everything works fine now in Safari 5.1. It’s been years since I checked this, of course (August 4th, 2011).<\/p>\n Anyway, the idea is that simply by downloading one of these images to your hard drive, the drive’s spinning will cause the prayer to be repeated and you will gain the appropriate blessings<\/a>. Indeed, simply by viewing this on your browser it will be stored in the browser cache or virtual memory file and therefore spin several thousand times per minute.<\/p>\n Should a census researcher come to our house today, I would declare myself as a Buddhist – both because it’s true in a certain sense and to skew the results a little. I have read several books about Tibetan buddhism and have visited the Karm\u00ea Ch\u00f6ling<\/a> meditation center in Vermont. I found that although their emphasis on tradition and ritual didn’t work well for me, it’s certainly beneficial for many people. I myself am more inclined towards the less formal Zen and Taoistic aspects of Buddhism.<\/p>\n There’s a very appropriate Zen saying that says, more or less, “in the hands of the wrong person, the right means will work in the wrong way”. In other words, the benefits of a digital prayer wheel will accrue only to those who already are aware of, and aligned with, the traditional Tibetan practices.<\/p>\n Should you be interested in Tibetan Buddhism I can highly recommend Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa<\/a>‘s books Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism<\/a> and Transcending Madness<\/a>, among others. (The Karm\u00ea Ch\u00f6ling center is led by Trungpa’s son, Sakyong Mipham<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Thanks to Boing Boing<\/a> and Caio’s 42<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a digital Tibetan prayer wheel with the prayer\/mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum” written in Tibetan script: By the way, I tried writing this here in HTML-escaped Unicode: ????????????? (this is ༀམཎིཔདྨེཧཱུྃ༔, if you’re interested), but Safari and other browsers decompose the sub- and superscripts. Internet Explorer for the Mac just renders garbage. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-yo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"\/OMPH.png\")
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