By Janet I. Tu
WHIDBEY ISLAND — The two prayer wheels Chuck Pettis has installed on his 72-acre retreat on Whidbey Island stand as symbols of what happens when Tibetan Buddhism meets high-tech Northwest.
From their exterior, the copper-and-brass structures — each about a foot in diameter and 16 inches high — aren’t that exceptional. It’s what Pettis has installed inside them — 128 DVDs filled with a trillion repetitions of mantras and prayers — that makes them unique.
Pettis, a 56-year-old marketing consultant and practicing Tibetan Buddhist, purchased the woodsy property four years ago with money he made in the dot-com boom.
He has since turned part of it into a wildlife reserve and meditation park named Earth Sanctuary that is complete with a labyrinth, a stone circle and, since their installation earlier this week, the two prayer wheels.
Mantras — sacred phrases written in Sanskrit — are typically recited by Tibetan Buddhists to accumulate merit, or good karma, necessary to achieve the goal of enlightenment.
Traditional prayer wheels are filled with scrolls of paper on which a single mantra or short prayer is printed many times — 100 times, say, in a small wheel, or 100,000 in a larger one.
For Tibetan Buddhists, each revolution of the wheel is essentially a recitation of that mantra multiplied by however many times it is printed on the scroll. Each spin would thus accumulate more merit than is possible by simply reciting the mantra alone.
A Buddhist also could dedicate his prayers and mantras to the world, thus sending many prayers into the world with each spin.
Pettis came up with the idea to replace the paper scrolls with DVDs.
Pettis, who also is president of the board of Seattle’s Sakya Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist temple, said he has the blessing of its lama, Jigdal Dagchen Sakya, who regards the high-tech prayer wheels as an acceptable Buddhist adaptation to Western ways.
Donald Lopez, a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says Tibetans themselves have come up with various mechanical innovations to their prayer wheels over the years, including the use of water wheels to spin them.
Ten years ago, some Tibetan Buddhists put mantras on their computers’ hard drives, which spin constantly when the computers are on.
Putting DVDs in prayer wheels, Lopez said, “is just an upgrade in the technology. As long as one understands what the mantra means and what its purpose is, the way the wheel is spun is not as important.”
Pettis sees the high-tech prayer wheels in practical as well as spiritual terms. It’s hard for Americans to carve out the time and concentration needed for spiritual practice, he said. “We’re in a culture that is fast and tech-oriented. This helps the materialistic culture become more spiritual.”
