The Center for Central Asian Literatures in Translation

THEY ALSO SAY...

HOW WORDS CAN LIGHT A LAMP

A poor man had no oil for a lamp, so he went before the Buddha and asked Please light the lamp.  His thoughts raised up the flame and afterwards he commited himself to worship.  I don't know in fact how many hundreds of millions of prayers he offered.  We experience how every prayer we offer purifies and illumines the mind and how, like a gushing spring, they cleanse and clear our troubled thoughts.

When this pious man began to pray in the gloom of evening, he suddenly saw before his eyes many lamps brightly burning.  If he stopped praying, he saw no lamps there.  When he began to pray the following night, the lamps were once again burning.  As he prayed like this, he noticed flames upon the pads of the fingers of his hand.  Many hundreds of millions of times he prayed Please light the lamp and he imagined that his mind was truly like a burning lamp and knew that his prayers had been fulfilled.