Traditions

Each page is cited background on how prayer actually works in that tradition: its forms, its rhythm, what it asks at life’s hard moments, and what outsiders most often get wrong. Written for people outside the tradition, for interfaith families, and for anyone whose job puts them at a bedside.

These pages carry no prayer texts and no ritual instructions. 7 of the 11 also have prayers taken from named editions and checked against them, and where a tradition has none, the row says why. How that works.

Traditions

How prayer works in each, written for outsiders, interfaith families and people who care for both.

- BuddhismBuddhist practice, where recitation and meditation often serve the role prayer does elsewhere.The metta and blessing texts are clean from Fausboll 1881 and Rhys Davids 1899. The sickbed material has no public-domain English at all.3 prayers7 terms · 10 sources
- HinduismHindu practice across a wide range of regional and sectarian traditions.The Vedic core is servable from Muller and Griffith, both long out of copyright. Contemporary devotional material and usable transliteration are not.Sourcing not started7 terms · 10 sources
- JudaismJewish prayer and ritual, including liturgy fixed by the siddur.From the 1904 edition of Singer's prayer book and the JPS 1917 scriptures, with Hebrew beside the biblical texts. Transliterations are almost entirely modern and in copyright, so none appears here.23 prayers7 terms · 10 sources
- IslamIslamic practice, distinguishing scheduled salah from personal du'a.The blocker was the English, not the Arabic. The securely public-domain English Quran renderings are nineteenth-century orientalist work that no Muslim community uses devotionally, so none is published here. The Arabic is: short suras and the Quranic supplications people actually say, for illness, grief, marriage, a child and a hard day, from the Tanzil Uthmani edition, each checked against a second edition character by character. For a reciter the Arabic is the prayer, and a reader who cannot read it is better served by an honest gap than by an orientalist gloss.17 prayers7 terms · 10 sources
- SikhismSikh practice centred on the Guru Granth Sahib.Cannot be served responsibly from public-domain material. Nearly every pre-1929 English rendering is colonial, and the Ardas, said at almost every hard moment, has no free edition.Cannot be sourced honestly7 terms · 10 sources

Where traditions meet, and where there is none

Two situations that are not traditions, and that most references leave out.

- Interfaith settingsMaterial suitable where more than one tradition is present, such as a mixed-faith family.Not a tradition with texts of its own. These pages are about what happens when traditions meet, and what a chaplain does when the family is mixed.No texts by nature7 terms · 10 sources
- Non-religious lifeWords for people who do not identify with a religious tradition but still want something said. A first-class option, not a fallback.No scripture to source. What exists here is how people without religion mark the same moments, and the composer, whose words are our own.No texts by nature7 terms · 10 sources