Why we pray for the dearly departed

Part of the SGI prayers include some for those who have left us. These are to be said twice daily. As a scientist, I can think through what this is all about. Since it’s interesting, I’m presenting my thoughts here.

When we pray for someone alive, we may have hopes for them. Perhaps some change in their life condition, some improvement, some progress on something important to them. Alternatively, the prayer could be for them to have a better relationship with us, or with someone close to us. In Buddhism, we feel that the way to a better future is to help everyone be happy. That’s the enlightened self-interest thing discussed elsewhere.

But what about dead people? Happiness is a matter of brain chemistry being proper. Dead people’s brain chemistry is completely out of whack within a few seconds of being dead, and even if they did have the right chemistry, it wouldn’t do them any good.

Long ago, and nowadays still in places where expedient beliefs are prominent, there might be some hope that the dead person’s identity is going to be improved somehow. As discussed previously, this “bar-coding” doesn’t have a self-consistent explanation, i.e., it can’t exist. So, praying for dead people has to mean something else.

It does. It is all about the “essence of life”, which is a top concept in modern Buddhist thought. “Essence of life” means that life is a complex continuum, tied together through society and ecology. How do dead people relate to the “essence of life”? They are the ones who built your brain programming. What you think comes from your parents, teachers, friends, mentors, examples, and others that influenced you. These influences do not go away when the people die. They remain just as strong. They are written in your neurons forever.

When you are young, your mind is a huge empty storehouse, just waiting to be filled up by those who influence us. Even writers and composers who have died long ago can fill up our minds. The brain works by building little bundles of neural connections that translate our perceptions into memory.

But the brain is huge, and the storehouse is not organized coherently. When we pray for the deceased, we remember them and we pull together the good things they taught us. Maybe occasionally we remember the bad examples they sometimes gave, but this is good education as well. Our prayers for the dead is just like other chanting – it strengthens our minds. It focuses our goals. It makes clear how to accomplish what it is that we have chosen to do. It explains experiences that might otherwise be cloudy. All this happens by pulling together the almost innumerable experiences and insights we have picked up.

Thus, the SGI prayer for the deceased is a perfect complement to our other beliefs. It is consistent in that it is strongly connected with how our minds work. It is absolutely not reminiscent of the “ancestor worship” that previous religions have had, and it absolutely does not have anything to do with the dead people anymore. It has to do with those influences the dead people left inside us.