The Practice of Sending Peace

The Practice of Sending Peace

"Polyphanes"

In this light, peace is both the means to blessing and a blessing unto itself, but it’s not like other blessings like prosperity or health.  Sure, prosperity resolves poverty, health resolves illness, and the like, and all those things lead to peace, but only when all problems are resolved can total, complete, and full peace be obtained.  Thus, to wish for such peace upon someone is to inherently wish for the resolution of all their problems in every way.  At the same time, the presence of a smaller, incomplete peace in one way helps bring about other smaller peaces in other ways: if you’re sick and poor, having health can help you resolve being poor faster, just as being prosperous can help you regain health faster.  Every little bit of peace we get helps bring about more peace, and the blessing of peace itself is all encompassing of everything else we do.  In praying for a small peace for ourselves, we bring about bigger peace for ourselves; in praying for peace for ourselves, we bring about peace for others; in praying for peace for the world, we bring about peace for ourselves.  Peace is, in many ways, the origin as well as the result of all other blessings.  In this, it precedes and fulfills everything else we do and work for and pray for, every other kind of well-being, every other kind of problem resolution, every other kind of abating of torment, whether for ourselves or for others.

Thinking more on this since then, I’ve come to the realization that I consider peace—true, divine peace as the highest blessing from God—to be much akin to the Hellenic philosophical notion of eudaimonia.  Although that word literally means “happiness” or “welfare”, more literally “good-spiritedness” and more metaphorically “blessedness”, it was largely considered by many of the ancient Greek philosophers to be one of the outcomes of living life properly and well.  Socrates agreed with pretty much everyone else in his time that all human beings strove for eudaimonia, but unlike (most of?) the rest, he argued that virtue (aretē) was both necessary and sufficient for attaining it.  The Stoics claimed that it was living “a good flow of life” in agreement with Nature; the Epicureans advocated a maximizing of pleasure through virtue such that the eudaimonious life was the most pleasurable one because virtue brings pleasure; the Aristotelians argued that virtue was necessary but alone insufficient for eudaimonia, achievable along with virtue through both rational activity as well as good such as friends, wealth, power, and the like.  In all cases, however, eudaimonia is something that all humans strive for; although the philosophers disagreed on the proper way of achieving it, they all agreed that it was something that could be achieved, and those who managed to do so were held as sages in their own right.  To me, then, this classical notion of eudaimonia rings so strongly of my notion of peace that I’d venture to say that I’m converging onto the same thing, just from a different (and not necessarily virtue-based) perspective.

In my post from last year, I mentioned that there’s a particular prayer I end my daily prayer routine with.  It’s not so much an “offering”, but more of a litany of sorts, a series of requests for the blessing of peace upon…well, anyone and everyone, really.  It’s that prayer, the “Sending of Peace”, that I’d like to share with you all today.  This prayer is loosely based on the Ṣalawāt salutation phrases used for the prophets, angels, and saints conventional to Islam (e.g. “peace be upon him”) as well as those used in the daily Islamic prayers.  It’s not meant to replace them, of course, and it’s not even that general of a prayer to begin with; it’s a prayer specifically to pray for the peace (and eudaimonia) of all the people, spirits, and divine entities in your life and in your world, including yourself.  And it really is to pray for the peace of all entities in the cosmos; although I don’t have a lot of practices along these lines, this is one of the closest I’ve come up with to the general “dedication of merit to all sentient beings” or similar blessing (like my favorite, the Cullamangalacakkavāla Paritta) common to some Buddhist practices, and it’s one I like using for a similar purpose.  Although I give my general rubric below, it can be easily extended or modified to suit one’s own practice as best as one might need it.