You are so welcome!

Parinirvana is "final Nirvana" that occurs after the death of the physical body. This can be a big topic. A great suggestion for a future video! Thanks!

Hi Cindy, are you asking about chanting in English or more like prayers as you are saying here?

@@AlanPeto English chanting? Like how I imagine. Type something if you may. Please + Thankyou

@@AlanPeto I liked your channel a lot

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I can answer this a bit. I practice in the Nyingma school of the Tibetan path of Buddhism, and we pray. However, the problem with the word "prayer" is that it is not a one-to-one translation of "monlam", which my lama translates as "wish path". We don't pray to a being to have our desires fulfilled. We speak our will to reality itself, saying essentially "may this be so". Monlam is believed to work due to dependent origination, and it contributes to the karmic causes leading to the karmic result we are aiming for. It's like learning to control a lucid dream. In a dream, you can state your will or recite mantras over and over again to influence how it turns out. This is something you can test for yourself. Try reciting aspirational prayers and see if it contributes to your overall motivation to practice, and keep reflecting and looking back over time, questioning to yourself if your prayers were part of a web of karmic causes that led to where you are now. Also try learning to lucid dream and try reciting mantras, seeing how they effect the dream. Everything in Buddbism can be tested at some point, but some things do require faith to get started. Prayer is one of those things where you may not have much confidence that it works at first, but this confidence will grow over time. I hope that answer helped. Just think of it as food for thought, because I'm definitely not a scholar or a highly realized practioner! 😅

I will also add that you can also pray to Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. That's more similar to the Western concept of prayer. Enlightened beings can offer help, but they cannot walk your path to enlightenment for you. When you pray to these beings, you are not tapping into an inherently existing soul, but their mindstream. To explain the difference would be difficult for me. A scholar/monk could do a better job and offer a more satisfying explanation.

We are praying to the Buddha-Nature and it's manifestations in awakened beings i.e. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.

Buddhists do quite a few things with their practice. When we bow before a Buddha or Bodhisattva, that is out of reverence and respect - and it is bowing to the "Buddha inside us" (Buddhanature). By showing reverence to that inside us, as if it were the Buddha in front of us, we are also developing ourselves. Buddhists also repent (such as for violating a precept) which is, yes, to ourselves so we make that transgression known. But we also make it to the Buddha. That leads us to your overall question about prayer and who it is being said to. There are three bodies of a Buddha. For Shakayamuni (Gautama) Buddha, only one 'body' of the Buddha remains, but it's not something physical we will see (or even hear from!) but it's there. Think of it more like a embedded cosmic essence rather than a conditioned body. I'm not doing justice to this concept here, but yes, we are indeed 'praying' to something. This also goes into other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Typically, such as with a Bodhisattva, we are asking/invoking assistance. Do we get to see such a Buddha or Bodhisattva appear before us? Doubtful. But will we feel the effects? That's what is needed. A Bodhisattva can help in many ways, but primarily to help us with the Dharma. Our overall goal in Buddhism is to progress towards Nirvana, and Buddhas/Bodhisattvas (as beings of the "Dharma" for the Dharma) help sentient beings with that. So, if you have "xyz" problem, they are not going to change things or anything like a god, but they can indeed help - even if we are unaware that they did something. It's a challenging concept for Westerners to understand, especially when you can't "prove" it, but it is part of Buddhism.