our own experience it is ours to give. Our personal experience doesn’t belong to anybody else. Thus, we are able to give away whatever we perceive as our world.
One purpose of the mandala offering is to eliminate ego-clinging. Another is to perfect the accumulation of merit. Any act of giving is an offering, not just of the object being given but of the effort that went into creating that object. For example, when giving a single butter lamp you offer not only the act of lighting the wick, but also the work you put into obtaining the butter or the oil, creating the vessel, providing the metal that formed the vessel, and so forth. This principle applies to other types of offering as well. Basically, all that energy is what creates the merit.
Some people understand the concept of merit quite readily, while for others it’s difficult to comprehend. Merit most definitely does exist. Like everything else in the world, it’s formed through causes and conditions. All phenomena come about through causes and circumstance; there is no independent entity anywhere. Everything depends on causes and conditions. For instance, anything material is dependent on the four elements. Especially in the West, with its emphasis on materiality, matters are very dependent. Like everything else, merit is dependent on causes and conditions. Through the accumulation of merit, positive situations can be created. For example, meeting with the Dharma and receiving instructions on practice requires a certain amount of favorable circumstances to arise simultaneously. The occurrence of this requires merit.
Mandala offering is a very profound practice, which is why it is one of the preliminaries in the Tibetan tradition. I personally feel that all the preliminary practices are extremely important, but among them, the most profound are probably guru yoga and mandala offering. That doesn’t mean the others are not profound, but rather that these are perhaps the most profound. People often come to me and say, “I understand the reason for doing the prostrations, taking refuge. I also understand the purification aspect of Vajrasattva practice. But I just don’t get the point of making mandala offerings, and I don’t understand guru yoga.” This kind of statement shows how profound these practices actually are. Ego is not so willing to accept them. Ego is very clever and would like to create doubt for us about anything that undermines it, anything that might prove hazardous to its favorite practice, which is ego-clinging. This is really true—check it out for yourself. Whenever something is harmful to ego, ego will try to raise doubts about it. We need to recognize this trick from the beginning.
Prostrations are easy for people to understand. Some look at them as if they’re good physical exercise. They think that they’re good for the heart: “Oh, I understand. Prostrations strengthen my legs and back. If I sit for a long time in meditation and I get back pain, then I’ll just do prostrations to correct this. I might feel drowsy or lazy, but prostrations will chop up the laziness. I think refuge is very important: whatever we do, we need a certain type of guidance. So we have the Buddha as our guide, Dharma as the path or technique, and friends as the Sangha. I completely understand taking refuge. And Vajrasattva is the natural form or the manifestation of compassionate emptiness. I get it. By chanting the mantra and visualizing this thing moving down through me, well, I don’t exactly know what bad karma and obscurations are, but I feel less guilty. All this feeling bad about myself goes away, so that’s great. Karma, all these things, well, I don’t really know—but never mind, I certainly have some baggage, a few emotional patterns. I must clean these out; it makes sense.
But mandala offering I don’t understand. Offering the whole world—it doesn’t even belong to me. Mount Meru does not even exist, and what’s this about the four continents, when there are actually seven? And why offer the moon and sun? It’s ridiculous, crazy talk. Also that thing about blessings, I don’t get it. And why do we have to supplicate the guru, who after all is somebody made of flesh and blood, just like us? What’s the point of that?”
These doubts come up because we don’t really understand what the “guru” in guru yoga really means. The guru is not just the particular person you met. The guru principle refers to a lot of things. There is the guru as nirmanakaya, sambhogakaya, and dharmakaya, and the essence body, the svabhavikakaya. There is the guru as living lineage master, as well as the guru who manifests as our life situations and the guru who is the scriptures we read. Then there is the guru who is our intrinsic nature. We should understand all of these aspects as being the guru. If you learn something from a tree, then that is the guru as symbolic experience. You could say, “All right, I’ll take support from the tree; I learned something there.” If your wife is giving you a hard time and you learn something from that, your wife is your guru in that situation.
The purpose of guru yoga is to receive the blessings of realization of the root and lineage masters. Recognition and stability in the self-knowing wakefulness of one’s own nature doesn’t take place without direct transmission by a living teacher. Therefore, connecting with a living master and practicing guru yoga is essential.
There is a very good reason the preliminary practices come before the main part of practice. Every single aspect of the preliminary practices is meant to be like a pestle to grind and smash your laziness. Imagine that you are making hot sauce, achaar, with a stone mortar and pestle. When making this Tibetan salsa, you successively add garlic, ginger, chili peppers, and spices, grinding them all together into a smooth sauce. It’s the same with the preliminaries: you smash your laziness first with prostrations, then with Vajrasattva practice, then with mandala offerings and guru yoga, till all the laziness is gone. If you really go through these practices in an effective, thorough way, there is no room for being lazy, for hanging on to personal comfort—none at all.
After we do all the preliminary practices, we find we can sit for one hour, five hours, six hours in meditation, and it really feels like taking time off: “What I went through before was so hard, but this is nothing—I can easily sit and meditate for hours and hours.” This is because the laziness has been totally vanquished.
You might think it would be enough to do only 10,000 repetitions, but our tradition is to do 100,000 of each. With this quantity, there’s no way to be lazy. You’ll never finish unless you really persevere, really push yourself and use a lot of effort. In this way, because you do 100,000 of each practice, the laziness does not dare return. It’ll mutter to itself, “I’m just getting a beating if I stay around here. If I dare to come back, I’ll probably get 100,000 beatings again, so I’m not gonna hang around this guy any longer.” I’m not joking here; it’s really true.
For a practitioner who has already recognized self-knowing wakefulness, doing the preliminaries can totally obliterate all laziness so that none remains. At the same time, these practices also perfect the two accumulations and remove all hindrances. The essence of mind is further and further revealed by the steady process of removing that which obscures it. All this takes place through the practice of the preliminaries.
When we are about to begin Vajrasattva practice it is good to have received empowerment to Vajrayana. This empowers us to realize the three vajras—the fact that body, speech, and mind are by nature the innate three doors. There are four levels of empowerment in Vajrayana: the vase empowerment, the secret empowerment, the wisdom knowledge empowerment, and the precious word empowerment. Once we have received empowerment, utilizing skillful means is like squeezing our body, speech, and mind in such a way that they have no choice but to be realized as the three innate vajras, as the vajra body, speech, and mind. There is no alternative to this; it is inevitable.
There is much to learn in Vajrayana, and many skillful methods. For instance, the five negative emotions are by nature the five wisdoms. These five wisdoms are the buddhas of the five families—that is, if the vital essence of the emotions is recognized. Then it can be truly said that one doesn’t have to suppress or reject the emotions. Rather, they can be realized as being the five types of original wakefulness, the five wisdoms. I will go into more detail about this later.
Vajrayana is something precious and rare. The methods of Secret Mantra are not often given. Of the thousand buddhas
