Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this four-minute aside from a Lam Rim series at Buddha House, Geshe Pema Tsering explains the mandala offering — a ritual presentation of the universe used to accumulate merit or make requests. He outlines three distinct purposes: requesting teachings at the opening of a session, asking a teacher to live long during a long-life puja, or building one’s own merit toward enlightenment. He notes that the wording of the offering actually changes to match the purpose — specific verses and phrases are added or removed accordingly. He closes with a practical note for English speakers: reciting the offering in English rather than Tibetan makes the meaning immediately clear, which may deepen the benefit of the practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 LR 2002 02 12.mp3
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Lam Rim 2002 Bodhisattva Deeds (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-02-12
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~381
Yeah. There are various purposes for which a mandala can be offered, either for one’s own, particular, purpose or, you know, in order to generate merit for one’s enlightenment, achieving enlightenment, or particular, goals that one has or can be offered to one’s teacher in in order to request teaching or offered to one’s teacher in order to request that they live long and so on. So there’s various, purposes that a mandala can be offered for. Offered for. So for instance, a mandala is often in the beginning of its set of teachings in order to request teachings.
So it’s just a So also in the case of a tinshuq or a long life puja, then a mandala is often really is in request to live for a long time and so on. Or otherwise, mandalas are offered in order to accumulate merit for you know, in order for oneself to generate one or add to one’s written merit and so forth. There’s various purposes that that can be. And in fact also the wording of the mandala offering changes according to the specific purpose. There are various verses that can be added subtracted or even phrases within the verses changed and so on in order to reflect the different purposes of them and our offering.
For various purposes, Possibly. There’s no difference whatsoever. And in fact, for English speakers, it may well be better to do it in English because it the words the meaning of the words is a bit clearer in English than it is in So by doing it in English, of course, one has the actual meaning is evident. So by having a meaning evident to one, then potentially there’s a greater benefit in making the offering in that way. So we do