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Why such discomfort with the word "prayer" and activities that would fall under it's domain?
This question comes from a re-post on the Dangerous Harvests blog, and for context it is referring to contemporary (convert) Buddhists in post-enlightenment, post-modern societies whose cultural history doesn't have ancient connections to Buddhism. That would include the societies of nation-states such as the from the Americans, Europe, and so on. More directly it implies the more economically powerful or "developed" nations such as the United States of America.
I read the post last night and composed a comment in response. It had to be divided into two longer comments given the character limit imposed by Blogger. I think the reply was very concise but also very dense, so I decided to sleep on it. I still like the tight and compact form I originally composed, but upon reflection it seemed that there was still a little more that could be said to help clarify what I was getting at, so rather than submitting a three-comment-long response I decided my reaction would work just as well as a full length post here.
What follows is an expansion of and elaboration on the original comment(s), and it's still pretty tightly packed even with some additional exposition and examples added in. My response is based on roughly ten years of observing convert Buddhists online and in print as well as privately studying various forms of Buddhism, and I don't claim any special titles or expertise in the matter. Nonetheless I hope it may help answer the question that was posed. It also provides another angle to my recent exposition on prayer and provides a kind of follow up to some thoughts on contemporary convert Buddhists and God.
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Well, your own post suggests a large part of the problem, both in something you identify and in the way you try to parse things. This get's a little long so I had to break it into two comments. [Or transfer it to this post instead.]
Buddhism has historically accepted that what modern post-enlightenment folks think of as the material or physical world is only one facet or angle of a larger reality. Focusing on it exclusively as the only reality was considered to be an error refuted by the Buddha.
Thus, when people from such modern societies speak of spiritual beings or places like the Buddha-fields, including Amitabha's Pure Land, there is often an automatic dichotomy set up between symbolizing something and referring to something "real" (i.e. a being or place technically defined as spiritual or supernatural, but that in a way that still treats it as a physical entity that occupies some other dimension with different laws of existence).
