Three Times Clockwise
Inspired by events in
Kathmandu and Sagarmatha National Park, Nepal
At many holy sites in Nepal, there are stupas, prayer wheels, and prayer flags.
Prayer wheels are cylindrical and are inscribed with ‘om, mani, padme, hum’ which asks for compassion, wisdom, and accumulates good karma. These same words are on the inside too, imprinted on tissue paper wrapped around a spindle. So when the wheel is turned, the requests are multiplied.
The wheels come in small, medium and large; small being handheld, medium being a row of them around a stupa, and large being bigger than two of me put together (at monasteries or in larger villages). The wheels are supposed to be turned clockwise and when they encircle a stupa, they are turned as the person walks clockwise three times around the structure.
What this means is that you’re brushing your right hand against inscriptions rubbed to a shine by thousands of other right hands that have done exactly the same thing. Both the mantras and the act of turning them are a form of meditation practice, and if you spin the wheel with a concentrated mind the benefit is many-fold. But the good karma this act invites and the bad karma it dispels isn’t isolated to the asker – it is meant for all creatures as well. When our guide shared this with our group, the imposter feeling I had about turning the wheels and coming close to the sacred sites lessened.
The stupas themselves contain five carvings of the Buddha shown in each of the five hand positions: meditation, touching the earth, protection, blessing, and teaching. The first four appear in a prescribed cardinal direction and the fifth, teaching, is hidden in the middle of the stupa. It’s appropriate that the sculpture of fingers encircling each other is at the heart of the temple.
The five positions are also the reason there are five colors of prayer flags: blue (sky, and always on top), white (air and wind), red (fire), green (water), and yellow (earth). So the five things are repeated both in the statuary and in the messages passed along by the flags.
In cities like Kathmandu, there are many stupas that are grand, busy, and architectural. But it was the ones on the trails – the small ones, with worn wheels and cracked stucco and threadbare flags – that I loved the most. Maybe because they were quiet, maybe because of the spectacular Himalayan views. Maybe because I knew that when I walked the circles and turned the wheels, I was doing so in the way Nepalese and Sherpas and trekkers and mountaineers had before me. My circles were sending a bit of the stupa’s atmosphere across the airwaves.
Maybe it was something about the prevalence of circles: the shape of the prayer wheel and the shape my feet made in the dirt. It’s a figure that doesn’t stop, and so it seemed appropriate to be wishing well upon all those who come by. It’s easy to join and then step away when you’re done, knowing that it will continue its turning. Some of the prayer wheels were turned by the water from the stream running through the village, and that brought all kinds of elements together. That the snow falls and melts and becomes the water that turns the wheel that sends out its magic. That it does so as long as water moves downhill.
Turning the prayer wheels and walking around the stupas in Kathmandu, up the valley, and then back down – there was a continuity in those circles and in the way I moved around them that stitched together the journey in a way nothing else could.
So every time we came upon one, we turned the wheels and let those requests for wisdom and compassion ascend into the wind. And let their messages to be magnified by the flags and then circulated to whomever needed it.
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