Tibetan Buddhist Prayer Flags (Lung Ta ~ lit. ‘wind horse’).

 

"Tibetan Buddhists offer up prayers into the unseen spiritual world with woodblock-printed, flimsy, loosely woven flags called ‘lung ta’. Each flag carries prayers and invocations to deities with illustrations of auspicious animals: the wind horse, garuda bird, dragon, snow lion and tiger, and colours embodying the five basic elements: air, water, fire, earth and ether, or mind. They are imbued as well with the prayerful mental offerings of the people who make and use them. With each flutter in the wind, visible and invisible prayers are thus multiplied and sent off into the void for the benefit of those who made them, and other beings, as well. Lung Ta are strung up high on hills, from housetop or tree to adjacent tree, and on vertical tree-branch poles marking the four cardinal directions at each corner of the roof of a house. They remain fluttering in the gales and bleaching in the rain and intense sunlight until they decompose away, in the process intimately melding their requests with the universal energy source beyond."

 

Extracted (with kind permission from the publishers) from the highly recommended book ‘Tibetan Reflections’, by Peter Gold (published by Wisdom Publications, London).