Spinning the Wheel

The prayer wheel is the most elegant machine I know: a brass cylinder packed with written mantras, and every rotation counts as their recitation. Devotion, outsourced to good engineering. You push with the palm, the wheel takes over, the merit accrues.

I spun it properly, clockwise, with the scarf over my shoulders and my glasses in my pocket, which is as close to reverence as my face gets. The bearing is smooth from a century of palms. Somebody maintains it; someone always maintains the important machines, quietly, without a plaque.

A device that transforms motion into meaning. I have spent three books looking for exactly that mechanism in radios and reactors. Here it sits in a monastery courtyard, brass, humming, solved.