What Prayer Really Asks For

Prayer in the Mahabharat is rarely a request for an outcome. Draupadi's appeal in the assembly is the most famous instance, and what it changes is not the intentions of the men in the room — those are unaltered — but what becomes possible in the middle of them.

The Gita's own treatment is stricter than most devotional literature: it is more interested in the disposition a person brings than in the thing they are asking to receive, and it says repeatedly that acting well matters more than the result acting is aimed at.