Tricycle | Awake in the World

After nearly thirty years of using and making the prayer beads of various religious traditions, I have come to a simple conclusion: All beads are worry beads—from the Pope's rosary all the way down to those little wrist malas, sometimes popularly referred to as "Power Bracelets," worn by Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. People of every religious tradition will claim that their beads are for praying—for appealing to a higher power, for collecting the spirit or concentrating mind—and while this is indisputably true, that is not their primary purpose. Beads are for worry. They answer a human need so basic it actually precedes a religious consciousness—and that is to fret over things. The Buddhist mala acknowledges this. It is a way of engaging our worries, a way of combining the universal need for talismanic objects with the kind of repetitive movements that calm the body and mind. The difference between the Buddhist mala and the various Western-style rosaries is simply that it makes this explicit in the symbolism of its beads.

A Buddhist mala typically consists of 108 beads, one for each of the delusions (call them worries) that afflict human life. I am often asked how that number was arrived at, and the answer, although somewhat convoluted mathematically, makes sense from a Buddhist point of view. There are six varieties of delusion that can occur when we experience an object of awareness: delusion via the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body, or the mind. Each of these objects can in turn be perceived in the past, the present, or the future, making for eighteen possibilities in all. Multiply these by the two conditions of heart (pure and impure) and again by the three possible sentiments with regard to any of those sense objects (like, dislike, and indifference), and the number of possibilities for delusion is found to be 6 x 3 x 2 x 3 . . . or 108. There are other ways of calculating that number, but in most cases the gist is the same. For a Buddhist, delusion is the only legitimate source of worry. Worrying about money or health is, by comparison, relatively pointless. There will never be enough money in the world (that seems to be the point of money), and our health is guaranteed to fail in the end, no matter what we do. The wordless message of the Buddhist mala is "Don't worry about things; worry about the fact that you are so worried all the time, and address the root of that." The mala is a teaching in itself.

No matter which particular recitation it is being used for, the mala contains a full course of spiritual lessons. To begin with, every Buddhist tradition stresses that the beads must be cared for as if they were a precious sutra or a Buddhist robe. This makes a literal kind of sense if we consider the fact that we use them to recite mantras, often considered the essence of the sutras in which they appear. Then there is the fact that, unlike the Catholic rosary, the mala is meant to be worn when not in use. Thus, to use a mala is both to take up a spiritual text and to clothe oneself in the truth of the Buddha Way. And then there is the curious matter of the "guru" bead. The larger, three-holed bead at the end of a mala is the Buddhist equivalent of the crucifix on a Catholic rosary. It is the teache—and the teaching—we keep coming back to with every cycle we pray.

At some point in their religious observances, most Mahayana Buddhists recite some variation on the bodhisattva vows, the second of which is "No matter how inexhaustible delusions are, I vow to vanquish them all"—a paradox at best, at worst an impossible task. But the mala offers a valuable clarification on this point, for it is basically a circle. In the course of reciting a round of mantras, one begins and ends with the guru bead. As a rule we never cross that bead in our counting. Rather, if we want to continue beyond a single cycle, we stop at the guru bead and count the beads back in the opposite direction, repeating this same cycle for as long as we wish to practice. In this way, we find that delusions truly are inexhaustible. Delusion is the realm we live in; delusion is fundamentally what we are. To overcome this, once and for all, is to pass beyond this life. When we have done that, finally, we enter the timeless realm of the Buddha.

What is most peculiar about mala practice is that the beads never take us there. Always we stop short of the Buddha realm and turn back the other way. This may seem fatalistic on its surface, but there is a deep wisdom in this simple ritual, for even though he eventually passed into the extinguished, blown-out-candle state of nirvana, the Buddha realized his enlightenment as a human being and lived in peace with all other beings in this world. He is the Tathagata, or the "Thus Come One," not the Thus Gone.