Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Margaret McAndrew opens with a striking reframe: cleaning your meditation space is not a chore but a profound spiritual practice. In this 45-minute talk, she covers the first two of six preparatory rites, focusing extensively on cleaning and altar arrangement. She anchors the teaching in the story of Chudapanthaka, the slow-learning monk whose patient sweeping purified obscurations and led to enlightenment. Rather than treating cleaning as housekeeping, she frames it as mind-training through the body, offering multiple benefits: clarity, attracting supportive spirits, collecting karma for beauty, and rebirth in pure lands. She covers altar arrangement—honoring all Buddhist images equally regardless of artistic quality, positioning Dharma texts highest—and adapting these practices for Western students. She clarifies the distinction between these session preliminaries and the extended ngondro practices.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 P P P 1998 03 14.mp3
UUID: 0a088e9a-ae56-4d98-b15d-9b915877b156
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Prayers, Prostrations and Preliminaries (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-03-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~6,903
Path. There’s a the the broad outline is that, first of all, we study the qualities of the author. So that involves studying the life story of Atisha and how he developed various good qualities and how he came from India to Tibet and taught the Dharma in Tibet. And it’s from Atisha’s text, Lamp of the Path to Enlightenment that all of the subsequent graduated path presentations were developed. So this is really where the particular presentation of the graduated path in they stem from.
Then the next topic is the greatness of the Dharma given to increase one’s respect for the instruction, and there are various subdivisions of that which are to help you to understand the qualities of the Dharma and why you can attain the realization of the path from studying the Dharma, then the the third outline is the right way to teach and listen to the Dharma that has these qualities. And the fourth one is the sequence in which the disciples are to be taught the actual instructions. Instructions. Mhmm. Yes?
You can’t hear? Mhmm. Now it’s turned off. So so then what we have to study is how to, first of all so when we come to this the first section, is the sequence in which the disciples are to be taught the actual instructions, then that has two sections. And the first section is the root of the path devotion to a spiritual guide, and the second one is the proper graduated training you should undertake after you have begun to rely on your spiritual guide.
So here we’re concerned with the first of those, which is the root of the path devotion to a spiritual guide. And that has two sections, what to do in your meditation session and what to do between meditation sessions. And the first part, what to do in your meditation sessions, has three parts. And the first part is the preparatory rites, and the second part is how to pursue the main part of the session. And the third part is what to do with the last part of the session.
And so what we’re studying today is the first part, which is the preparatory rites, and sometimes there’s some confusion here between the preparatory rites or the preparatory practices which come at the beginning of a meditation session and what is often referred to as the practices or the preparatory practices, which you might have heard about. So some of these practices are the same. For instance, prostrations fall into both the the preparatory rites at the beginning of a session and also into the ngondro practices, mandala offerings also, but they’re not the same thing. So what we’ve talked about here is the preparatory practices for the beginning of a session, and there are six of these. When we’re talking about the preparatory practices for highest for yoga tantra for tantric practices, they’re a different thing at all altogether and well, not altogether, but they are a different thing.
And sometimes you hear about people saying that they’re doing a hundred thousand mandala offerings or a hundred thousand prostrations or a hundred thousand Vajrasattva mantras or making a hundred thousand tsatsas and so on. And when you hear about all these hundreds of thousands, these are all to do with the ngondro practices for tantra. Ngondro. It’s usually transliterated as sngon ‘gro in Tibetan, and that translates as preparatory practices. But there are also these preparatory practices which come at the beginning of a session.
I’m not quite sure how you say that in Tibetan. Maybe it’s the same, but it’s talking about preliminaries to meditation, things that we should do every day. And we we’re not counting them in hundreds of thousands here. So in the med meditation sessions, first of all, we’re concerned with these six. So I’ll hand these around anyway.
I’ve got some sheets here. I haven’t got enough here, but, I can do a few more later for the ones who don’t get them. You can share them for the moment. So actually these came from a book which so that there I’ll mention I’ve got a reading list there for the books which are suitable. And this is a book by Geshe Rabten, which is it doesn’t mention what page that is.
But, anyway, this is on page thirty one of the book. So there are two books mentioned there, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, which is a, as you probably all know, it’s a very valuable basic text if you’re wanting to practice the graduated path as set out in our particular tradition, the Gelugpa tradition. It’s pretty much a how would you say it the text to have for your practice if you’re really committed to this path and seriously practicing on this path. This is another good presentation. It’s more brief and concise than the presentation in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand.
So it’s also very useful particularly for starting off and getting an idea of what it’s all about. Presentation is very detailed and really excellent for understanding all those details. They are in the library and probably in the bookshop as well. Good. Because it’s really it’s definitely a must if you really want to continue with your practice in in this tradition.
And this is also an excellent book. Anyway, we’re going to gradually work through these over the next three Saturdays. And so we’re concerned as you can see, there’s six of these practices. And the first one is cleaning the room well and setting up representations of the body, speech, mind of the Buddha. Well, you’re you’re going to be excused from cleaning the room today.
That’s been done already. But that doesn’t always happen because I was giving a workshop on this at Chenrezig Institute not very long ago. And the Gompa had unfortunately been very busy the day before, and somehow the cleaning rota, the cleaning roster had fallen through. And the Gompa was in an awful mess. So when all these people turned up, I said the first preparatory practice is cleaning the Gompa, cleaning the meditation place.
So I said, know, there’s mops and brooms out in the back room and dusters and away you go. So we did, and I thought that was actually very good because it really reinforced the importance of this practice. So I will be coming back to that anyway. Will read through them first of all. Cleaning the room well and setting up representations of the body, speech and mind of the Buddha.
Seeking offerings without dissembling and setting them out in a beautiful arrangement, seated in a comfortable place in cross legged or half cross legged posture with the body straight, take refuge and generate bodhicitta successively and together. Fourth, visualize clearly the field for the accumulation of merit. Fifth, train the mind with seven limbs that combine the points of accumulating merits and purifying obscurations. That’s a major practice that will take a long time to go through all the points of that. And sixth, offer a mandala and pray many times with strong desire for the inspiration quickly to stop all perverse states of mind, produce all non perverse states of mind, and quell all external and internal hindrances.
So what I’m going to focus on today in terms of practical things is this setting up of the altar and setting up the offerings. And then next week, we can focus particularly on prostrations and the seven limbs. And the week after that, we can focus particularly on the mandala offerings. So to get back to cleaning, this is really a very important practice. You find that Pabongka Rinpoche goes into a lot of detail about this.
He places a lot of emphasis on this. And in the context of this, the lamas always tell the story of small You have probably all heard the story of Chudapanthaka, have you? Well, to be traditional, I’ll probably have to tell the story of Chudapanthaka again. The some of the western students who have had a lot of teachings tend to have heard the story of Chudapanthaka so often that they tend to raise their eyes and groan when they hear it mentioned again. But it’s important because it emphasizes the value of cleaning.
We shouldn’t think that cleaning is just a chore. In actual fact, is a very important spiritual practice. A very important practice for our mind. And we have to realize that when we are doing all these things, we are working with our minds. These are all practical ways of working with our minds.
Most of us are not very developed and we are perhaps quite in touch with our bodies, so we have to work with our mind through our bodies. Is easier to get in touch with our minds through bodily practice. And this relates not only to cleaning but to a lot of other practices. This is why we do the prostrations as we do and why we do things like mandala offerings through our five senses, through our bodily sense, through our eyes and our ears, through chanting, through fragrances and and offering beautiful smells and so on. We can work through all our five senses and in this way develop ourselves.
And we do all these things as an offering to the Buddhas. But what we’re really doing we understand that when we’re offering to the Buddhas and to the merit field, what we’re really doing is also, in the ultimate sense, offering to our own inner Buddha potential, potential, our Buddha nature. This is the ultimate refuge. So we take refuge in these holy beings and have representations of them in front of us on the altar. This is to help us to get in touch with this energy, which at first we relate to as an external energy with which we gradually come to see as we reduce our duality as being both the nature of the holy beings and also the nature of our own inner potential.
And we come to see that there’s no duality between these two, that it’s the one energy, but we’re getting in touch with it more ourselves, whereas these holy beings, the Buddhas, bodhisattvas have got in touch with this energy in a very strong way, we only feel a little bit of it getting through now and then. And what we have to do is become more and more aware of this inner potential, this inner Buddha nature of ourselves. And through the blessings and the inspiration of the holy beings, we can get more and more in touch with our own Buddha potential. And the way to do this is by doing these practices. This is why these rituals are very important.
You probably don’t need to be told this because you wouldn’t have perhaps come along to a course like this unless you already had some idea of the importance of ritual, why ritual works. But it’s a way of getting in touch, of creating a situation that helps us to get in touch with this more true, more real part of our beings, and to help us to express this. And also if we practice cleaning our Gompa and or our meditation space and think that we are doing it for the holy beings, is nothing to the holy beings, then it is a lot easier to carry that practice into all these sort of routine chores that we do in daily life. So most of us have to do a lot of cleaning. Most of us don’t have somebody to do the cleaning for us.
We have to spend a lot of time. In the scriptures, explained in terms of sweeping that we can obviously extend this to vacuuming and any other cleaning chores that we have to do. And even if it is in other parts of our house or cleaning the backyard, we can think of this whole place, this whole environment that we concerned with is mandala of these holy beings. If we think of it in this way, we can make it a practice. If you have tantric initiation, then you can think of yourself being the deity at the center of mandala also.
But in particular, when we are doing this kind of practice, can think that we are doing it for the mandala of the Buddhas and that the Buddhas are at the center of the mandala and that we are preparing this mandala for them and it’s like a pure land rather than just an ordinary sort of dirty environment. And by cleaning, we can be purifying our mind and thinking that we’re preparing because we can think that the environment really is this mandala, and we just can’t see it. But by doing this practice of cleaning and preparing it for the holy beings to come into it, we can be gradually clearing away the obstructions of our mind that prevent us from seeing it as this wholly pure space. So the story of pure of small path is that Chudapanthaka was a very ignorant boy, a very stupid boy. And he he became a monk.
He had an elder brother. His eld elder brother was called Greatpath, and his elder brother was very, very intelligent and became an arhat very, very readily. And then when Smallpath became a monk, he was so stupid that he couldn’t his brother tried to teach him, but he couldn’t even learn more than two words at a time. His brother tried to teach him a verse of four of a couple of lines, but if he learned the first two words, then he’d forget then his brother would go on and teach him the second two words, and he’d forget the first two words while he was learning the second two words. So he he was simply untrainable, and his brother was in despair.
And then Buddha always comes along in these stories to the rescue. So Buddha came along and said, alright. I’ll I’ll train him. And he sent him out to sweep the the area around the the the temple and to sweep the temple. And for some time, all Chudapanthaka was allowed to do was to sweep the temple and clean the monk’s shoes.
And this was very lowly work, he had a a good heart. He had the right attitude, and so he sort of went to work with the will and just swept the temple and cleaned the monk’s shoes. And this had such a a purifying effect on his mind that he was eventually able to learn four words together. And so then Buddha taught him a mantra, was, in Sanskrit, abandon dust, abandon stain. And he he learned this.
And I’m sorry. I got it wrong. First of he had to clean the shoes. And then after he cleaned the shoes for a while, then Buddha taught him to sweep the temple. And this was sort of like a step up for him.
And while he was sweeping it, he had to recite the mantra, abandon dirt, abandon stain. And while he was repeating this, sweeping, and he kept on doing this for quite a long period of time, he he was gradually without being aware of it and through the blessing of Buddha, purifying all the obscurations of his mind. And, eventually, it dawned on him that the, dirt and stain that he was abandoning were not, the dirt in the temple, but the dirt which was obscuring his own mind. And, actually, simply through this practice without doing much other study, he he broke through to a great degree of realization. And he eventually became an Arhat and became highly regarded by by all the other monks and nuns and laypeople in in the same way as his brother was highly regarded.
And so in actual fact, it’s very important to think this way. And if we set our mind in this way during various different kinds of practices concerned with cleaning and think that we’re cleaning our minds, and you can recite the mantra either in English or the Tibetan is dul shig, drima shig. And if you say this, then it can be a mind trick that you say while you’re cleaning, and it can be very, very effective for our minds. And this is actually something that can bring big results. Abandon dirt, abandon stain, or abandon dust, abandon stain.
It’s actually literally dust, dirt. But, anyway Yes. When I was at Copan, there was one monk there who somehow there was something he he had a very, very good attitude. He was obviously somebody who was very devoted to the Dhamma. He was one of the elder monks.
He didn’t speak very much English, but you felt look. By looking at him that he was a very devoted practitioner. He was quite a young fellow. You didn’t always feel that about all the young monks. Some of them were worried they were having a good time, but this one was obviously very devoted to his Dharma practice.
I heard one story him actually, he was first of all put in there as a young boy and then later on as he was into his older teens, his family who lived right up in Solu Khumbu up in the mountains made him come home again to look after the yaks and help on the farm. And he wasn’t happy about this. He wanted to stay with the monastery. And, apparently, he he persuaded his parents, and, eventually, they gave him permission to to come back to the monastery again. And so at this time, the the Kopan monks used to actually go up to Solu Khumbu to the monastery up there every year to Lama Zopa’s place up at Lawudo.
And they were apparently, when they came up near his farm, he came running down the mountain at full speed beaming because he he wanted to tell the lama lama Lundrup that that he was allowed to stay with them and to be a monk again. So that was his story. But anyway, this particular monk, apparently, he was always cleaning the bathrooms after we got some west before when we first got to Kopan, they just had holes in the ground, and you couldn’t do much about cleaning those. But then the western the western students weren’t too happy about that situation. They eventually managed to get some money together.
Well, not exactly western south of but, anyway, Indian style flush toilets, which you flush by carrying a a sort of container of water in and pouring it down. So they are a sort of primitive type of flush toilet, and they’re sort of much better than what we’d had before. They’re reasonably well effective, actually, these toilets. They work quite well, and that they work well for ending conditions because they don’t use so much water. And, anyway, the story is that this particular monk was always cleaning the bathrooms, and he just mentioned to one of the Western students that the bathrooms didn’t really need cleaning all that much, but his mind did.
And that was why he was always cleaning them. So I thought when I heard that he really had understanding, you know, and At times I found myself having to do a lot of bathroom cleaning in various jobs I was doing, so I used to try to have that attitude about it. Wasn’t always easy, but at least to keep it in mind that this is a really good practice. Practice. So cleaning, anyway.
So there there are various different advantages to do with keeping the environment clean, keeping your house clean, particularly your meditation space. One is so that’s the first one is that your own mind becomes clear through this practice. And if you feel that your mind needs more clarity, then it’s a practice that you can’t disregard. A second one is that it pleases the gods. This might sound a bit funny, but if you think about it, there are all kinds of various spirits, nature spirits, and so on, which are actually classified as being in the god realms and which are actually around us in our own environment.
Are you a godfussy cat? Maybe she’s one of these nature spirits manifesting in cat form. And I always think it’s interest interesting with cats that they always know where the vibrations are good, and they always want to get up on the Lama’s throne to fall asleep. So they tune in. They tune in.
Yes. Yes. So, anyway yeah. Yeah. So it’s good for us to have the good gods around and to discourage the bad hungry the the hungry ghosts.
Although we want to help the hungry ghosts, we don’t want them hanging around because they tend to have bad bad vibrations, and some of them have, a tendency to want to interfere with people’s practice. So they like bad smells like decaying food and they say the smell of meat cooking. The Tibetans are a bit horrified when they see the Western habit of having barbecues because they think that the smell of meat cooking out of doors draws their spirits around. And so by having a clean environment and keeping away anything that smells bad and by having nice smells such as perfumes and incense around the place, tends to encourage the right kind of spirits who will help and support us in our practice. And some of these spirits frankly have powers to help us in various material ways, such as helping us with money and that sort of thing, so it’s to be encouraged.
Another one is if we collect the karma to be beautiful. So you might think this is rather a worldly thing that we don’t have to be concerned with, but if we’re going to progress with the dharma, then we’re going to collect disciples in our future lives, and being beautiful helps to well, it helps us to to direct actions, not necessarily just through disciples, but also if we want to help people, they’re more likely to trust us and to accept our help and advice and so on if we’re good looking. It’s an unfortunate thing about being ugly that it’s quite unfair to the person concerned, but people tend to distrust them and dislike them because of their looks and to not not being accessible to being helped by them. So being beautiful, you are naturally attractive to people and it helps to subdue their minds. And there are some kinds of beauty which don’t have a sort of very sexual vibration.
Some people are beautiful in a way that sets off people’s sexual desire, and that can be a problem. But other people have a kind of beauty which tends to arouse people’s admiration without necessarily setting off a lot of sexual desire. So and this is more the sort of beauty that sort of around the kind of respect in people. And and this is the kind of beauty that can be helpful to people too. It can sort of draw their mind to a Dharma sort of attitude.
And another one is that we can be reborn in the celestial realms. Now as you’ve been studying the meditations on the graduated path, you might wonder, why would we want to be born in the celestial realms? So this requires interpretation because you’ve learned that if you get born in the realms of the Devas, that although they have a very good life, they don’t have very much opportunity for practice. But we have to interpret this as meaning the pure lands, the Buddha realms, and through this practice of cleaning and making a beautiful environment for our practice. And oh, I missed one back there too.
It pleases other people’s minds as well. So when they come into our environment and if they come near our meditation space, they get a good feeling, a good vibration. And this can make them feel good about our meditation space and make them have a positive attitude towards the the holy beings on our altar and towards the idea of meditation. So this is something that we can do for other people. And, also, of if these other people live with us and share our environment, then it’s very good for them.
It’s pleasant for them, and it’s helpful for them to live in this good space. This is particularly important for people with families. So that was the second point. The first point is that our minds become clear. The second point is that other people’s minds become clear, and it and it pleases them.
The third one is that it pleases the gods. The fourth one is that we become beautiful in our future lives. And the fifth one is that we’ll be reborn in the celestial realms interpretation pure lands, which is a wonderful result if we can get it. We really want to try to bring this result about because if we don’t become enlightened in this life the best thing that we can do is to be reborn in the pure in one of the pure lands. And in if we’re born in the pure lands, and even if we were not even if we didn’t achieve bodhicitta during our lifetime, we get born as bodhisattvas.
We achieve bodhicitta in the in between state and get born or transport. So sometimes we don’t go to the in between state but get transferred directly to the Pure Lands. And we arise as bodhisattvas. We achieve bodhicitta during that process and arise as bodhisattvas in the pure land. And in the pure land, we find the perfect conditions to continue practice until we achieve Buddhahood, and we we get taught by Buddhas directly in the I think it’s in the Sambhogakāya aspect.
And no. Hang on. Only Sambhogakāya pure lands, I think. But, anyway, we get taught by the Buddhas directly. And yes.
So that’s right. Sambhogakāya aspect in the pure land. And, anyway, we we have all these fortunate conditions, so it’s great thing to aim for if we can achieve it. And and it’s not something that’s that’s beyond our reach. A lot of ordinary people managed to get born in the pure land, so we should definitely aspire to this.
A cleaner. Yes. It’s wonderful. If you’re a cleaner, wonderful, because you have this wonderful opportunity to practice. If you’re a housewife, wonderful, because you have this wonderful opportunity to do to do all this cleaning.
It’s great. It’s but if you’re not doing any of these jobs, don’t despair because whatever you’re doing, there’s some way that you can bring it into your Dharma practice. But it’s it’s an interesting thing that we should realize that cleaning isn’t just a humble, worldly sort of job. And if we happen to be cleaners, we shouldn’t just think, we’re, you know, frankly, we’re failures because we haven’t got some more brilliant job. We’ve actually got a really good job there because it’s a wonderful opportunity for practice.
And if we’re not cleaners, then if we if we’ve got some really like, what the world would think of as being some sort of fantastic job, then we should think maybe it isn’t so wonderful after all. Maybe, you know, maybe we’d be more fortunate if we had been cleaners. And thinking that way is good because it stops you from having pride about your worldly position, whatever it might be. It might be a bit beside the point, but it’s I was doing a a course on a weekend course on Jungian psychology once. And one lady told her dream, and it was quite a complicated dream, but what it boiled down to was that the dream what what she was getting through interpreting this symbol was she’d been brought up in the family.
Her father was quite a proud person, and she’d been brought up with all this pride. She was as she developed spiritually, was coming to a point where she was realizing the value of all human beings and all human work, and that one particular field of work wasn’t more valuable than the other. Somehow in this dream, she dreamt that she was descended from a sailor, and the feeling she got about this was that this sailor was quite a humble person, but but somebody who was very spiritual, very a very good person. And when she was explaining her feelings, she said that she’d been thinking of actually, it did relate to how she’d been thinking lately and how she’d been thinking about how her father’s attitude of pride was mistaken. And she related that to, well, what’s the most lowly job I can think of?
And she thought, the most lowly job I can think of is garbage collection. And she thought what would the world be like if there was no garbage collection being done, if the garbage collector stopped working? And then she thought this is a really important job that the garbage collectors are doing. So it sort of gave her some insight into the importance of how every job had its place in the world and that she it’s sort of a slight big step for her to to come to that conclusion, and that was reflected in her inner realization through this So it’s explained to us that we should sweep our meditation space before each session. Actually, we might feel this perhaps doesn’t quite fit our habits of perhaps cleaning at some later time in the day, but to Tibetan custom that they always sweep and then in India they sweep first thing in the morning and then they do their meditation.
So we should at least keep the area very clean. And because it’s set out in the teachings that that we should sweep before a session, then we should at least do a token sweep or or vacuum or whatever around the meditation area, maybe just a very, very quick one, maybe just more as a token. But to because it is set out very clearly and very emphatically in the teachings, and the lamas seem to feel that we should actually do it as exactly as it set out and that we should follow this custom. But I think if it doesn’t happen to fit your routine, then just make it a token sweep, and you can do the the big clean at some later stage of the day. So and you can recite this mantra.
I am removing dirt. I’m I’m removing dust. I’m removing dirt or stain. And this is very effective for our for our mental state. So the next thing is arranging your altar.
Now the order in which we arrange the altar should be in general similar to that of the merit field. If you want to know what order the merit field is in, I won’t go through that because it’s a very, very detailed teaching, and it would take a long, long time. And it’s all set out in full detail in Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand. So, basically, we have the Buddha at the top of the order. It’s visualizing a big like a a tree with a big lotus on it, and the lotus has many, many tiers, and there are many, many thrones arranged around each tier.
And just in brief, you have, actually in the merit field, have Lama Losang Tubwang Dorje Chang. You might have heard of that. We say it when we say the mandala offering. That actually means that we have Lama Tsongkhapa with Buddha visualized at his heart and, visualized at the heart of Buddha. There’s a lot of significance in that visualization.
And, if you’re putting Buddha at the center the field, then you would put just Buddha there. And then around that, have the other deities on the various different layers of the lotus. You have the deities of Anuttara Yoga and Yoga Tantra and and the deities of the other levels of yoga. And you have various different Buddhas of the past and future and the the thirty five Buddhas and so on. And you have bodhisattvas, arhats, dakas, dakinis, and so forth, anyway.
Around the merit field, not on the lotus, but in the air above the lotus, have the lineage gurus, and there’s different ways. There’s three main lineages, the what’s called the vast lineage and the profound lineage and the lineage of tantra. So what it boils down to is that you on the if you try to arrange the holy objects in accordance with this spiritual visualization, but sometimes you have to make some adaptation according to the lack of space on your altar. But, generally, you would put the your actual gurus on the in the top position and in the center. And and then next door below, you would have the Śākyamūni Buddha.
And and then next, you would have the the other deities like Tārā and Chenrezig and so on. And then if you’ve got any statues of protectors, they would go on the outside or in the lower position. So, anyway, when we’re arranging our altar, we should think that all the images, whether they’re paintings, photographs, statues, think that they’re the real thing. And whether they’re a valuable material or not, we should treat all with equal respect and treat them as being of the, the nature of being actually Buddha or Tārā or actual Chenrezig or whatever. And, also, we shouldn’t just discriminate our statues according to the quality of the artwork.
We shouldn’t think of them as being just you know, this is a beautiful statue. So I’ll put this in pride of place, and this one’s ugly. So I’ll put this somewhere, you know, that’s dark and dirty because this is bad for our minds to think this way. We should try to treat them all with equal respect. And think that they’re all representations of Buddha.
And we should treat these, for instance, when we’re moving Buddhist statues around, we shouldn’t just sort of pick them up by the head. We should hold them by the base and pick them up respectfully. And when we’re dusting them, we should dust them respectfully and think that we’re offering one way that you can think of it is to think that you’re offering a bath to the to the Buddha. There’s an actual practice that’s very nice that can be fitted into this business of your daily rituals if you want to do it, where you actually offer a bath to the Buddha. I think actually Pabongka Rinpoche might mention it.
There’s various you might have done it sometimes. In fact, when we do the Nyungnae, it comes into the Nyungnae practice. And you you visualize this beautiful bathing chamber, and then you invite all the holy beings down, and they they actually come down and put put on bathing robes. And you you offer them a bath, and then you offer them beautiful clothes afterwards and so on. And there’s a mantra that goes with that, and you can recite the mantra if you like while you’re doing the dusting.
So, anyway, yeah, you you can just use your common sense really, but treating these things with respect and keeping them always clean and putting them on a nicely arranged altar. You can perhaps put have a nice altar that’s perhaps beauty according to your possibilities, know, have some sort of beautiful piece of furniture or put nice cloth there for them to stand on and so on, thinks that you’re making all these things as offerings. Also, the Tibetans like to make offerings of clothes to the statues, particularly when they have a larger statue, always cover them up with brocade robes. And the Westerns often think, do they have a beautiful statue like that and then get it beautifully painted by an artist and then cover it up with a a piece of brocade so that you can’t see most of the statue, but it’s an offering actually. And these things, these are all different ways of offering to the Buddhas.
And also, they like to gild the faces or gild the whole statue, and these things are all additional ways of making offerings. But the way we normally make our offerings is by putting offerings in front of the statues every day. So we should arrange in particular, we have on our altar representations of the Buddha’s body, speech, and mind. So the representation of Buddha should be a statue or a picture of Buddha, then to represent the speech, we have some sort of Dharma text. So, generally, if you’re having Dharma texts on your altar, they should go above the Buddha.
But the one that represents the Buddha’s speech, we actually have one to the right of the statue of Buddha. And to the left of the statue of Buddha, we have a representation of the Buddha’s mind in the form of a stupa, which could actually be an actual small stupa or a picture of a stupa. And the if you’re going to keep your books on your altar, they shouldn’t go below the statues of Buddha. They shouldn’t be you shouldn’t put a statue of Buddha above a book because the text the books represent Buddhist speech. And this whether it’s an actual scripture of Buddha or whether it’s some other Dharma texts such as commentaries and so on or Lamrim texts by various pandits, they’re all regard as being the holy speech of Buddha.
So we actually, if we want to have them on our altar, we should have them on the top shelf because the speech of Buddha out of the Buddha’s body, speech, and mind, it’s the speech that gives us the most benefit. If Buddha had appeared on the earth in his body, if his body and mind had been present but not his speech, we wouldn’t have been able to follow the path. And so it’s the speech that the path of teachings, is the actual Dharma that that gives us the real benefit. Any questions? Well, everybody has to work this out for themselves.
What I did myself was bought a a cabinet with a glass front, which I find is very nice because I can keep it’s not all glass fronted. There’s actually a top shelf which is open, and I put some of my books up there, particularly the books I don’t get at so often because I have another bookshelf. And, unfortunately, the whole thing’s rather wobbly. And every time I take books off, I have to be very, careful not to let them fall off. But I like to put the holy offer the statues and things in the glass fronted section, which is a bit lower down.
And but that way, they are kept free from dust. And I have some statues and pictures and things. I have some additional pictures and so on that I have on the wall that have some smaller pictures. Particularly, have a picture of his we always put a picture of his holiness, the Dalai Lama, and of the two tutors in in the pride of place on our altars. That’s sort of a a custom with the Gelugpa tradition.
Even if you have pictures of your own gurus, we always put the picture of his holiness in the center, and your own gurus would be on either side of that, your own particular root guru and other lot gurus of this life. And so, usually, if we have his holiness and his two tutors, Kyabje Ling Rinpoche and Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche, they all go together in the center. And so I’ve got some small pictures of them, and then I have some pictures of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who were my chief gurus in this life. And I have them, and I also have some pictures of some other Lamas that I’ve had a strong connection with. And I have a beautiful little statue of the Buddha, which I have on a sort of a little stand in the center.
And I also have some actual relics of Lama Yeshe which I’ve got in little sort of cases and so on. I’ve tried to find some attractive little cases for them over the year and also some other relics of other Lamas. And I’m not quite sure about the relics, but I reasoned that they’re the actual form of the Lamas, so I’ve put them on the same level as Buddha. And I’ve got some stat little statues and pictures of other deities such as and so on around and various other little sort of things like representations that I felt were appropriate there. I’ve got a little stupa, and I didn’t put a representation of this.