It was always this is why this is better and more about teaching you how to think. SHANKAR: It was never about, you know, this is what you have to do. And karma is a very important part of it, of course. It’s more about, you know, the morals and the way one should be the best one can be. And it’s more about a way of life, really. And so I grew up with all the big epics and the stories and through them all there’s always a moral in the story, whether it’s about animals or kings or gods and goddesses or whatever. A lot of what they teach kids in Hindu mythology and history is to do with stories, which makes it a lot more fun, I think. And that stopped as I got older because she figured it was more up to me whether I wanted to pray or not.
SHANKAR: My mom would chant Sanskrit prayers with me every night in order to have me learn them, and I think there were about nine or 10 of them that we used to say together every night before I went to bed. It includes several prayers that Anoushka Shankar recited in her childhood. It’s a collection of traditional Hindu Sanskrit prayers, which her father set to music and which Beatles’ guitarist George Harrison produced. Their first project together, when she was 15 in 1997, was a CD called Chants of India. I interviewed her in 2003, while she was on a tour with her father. Her life might be said to epitomize the modern flow of spiritual ideas from East to West and back again. Anoushka herself was raised mostly in London and California. In the 1960s, her father, the legendary sitar player Ravi Shankar, became a spiritual and musical guru to Western seekers, most famously the Beatles. TIPPETT: We begin with a young musician, Anoushka Shankar.
It’s also not a peaceful activity when we discover or come face to face with the reality of the world. We can’t expect that we are going to be healed of the deep wounds of our heart without seeing what those wounds are. He went through the whole list of one virtue after another and then he concluded by saying, “But prayer is the hardest of the virtues because prayer is warfare to the last breath.” In prayer, we are likely, and it’s certainly what we want, to see ourselves as we really are. BONDI: One of the Abbas was asked one time which was the most difficult virtue to acquire. And theologian Roberta Bondi will describe how she learned to pray in a messy modern life with the desert fathers and mothers, the Abbas and Ammas, Christianity’s first mystics and psychotherapists rolled into one. Later in this hour, Stephen Mitchell, who’s translated texts from the Psalms to the Tao Te Ching, will describe his understanding of nonreligious prayer. In recent years, many Americans have discovered ancient contemplative traditions like centering prayer, the Jewish Kabbalah, the Sufi mystics of Islam, and Buddhists and Hindu chant and meditation. Prayer can be constructed of silence or words or, some would say, of actions. It can be a plea, an expression of thanks, a moment of introspection. The English word “prayer” comes from a Latin root meaning “to entreat,” but the meaning and structure of prayer is infinitely various. Today, we open up the subject of prayer, asking how it sounds and what it means in three traditions and lives. From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. But in astonishing numbers across that spectrum, most of us say that we pray. Americans are religious and nonreligious, devout and irreverent.
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR: If you look at the whole language of Sanskrit, I think it’s the only language in the world maybe apart from Latin where like the vibration of the way the words sound is equally as important as what you’re saying. STEPHEN MITCHELL: A mathematician working at a problem or a little kid trying to pick out scales on the piano is a person of prayer. It isn’t the great spiritual mystery that is too high and lofty for the likes of us. ROBERTA BONDI: Any reason to begin a pattern of prayer is a good reason because prayer is about everyday life. This hour, we’ll explore creative and generous approaches to prayer, religious and nonreligious, in three very different lives with the musician Anoushka Shankar, translator Stephen Mitchell, and theologian Roberta Bondi. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: I’m Krista Tippett.
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