Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute teaching, Ven Margaret McAndrew guides practitioners through the seven limbs—prostrations, offerings, and related practices central to Tibetan Buddhist preliminaries. She focuses on the merit field visualization, making these practices feel real and tangible by visualizing Buddhas in front of you and making offerings to them. She covers prostrations as physical practice with detailed guidance, and offerings in multiple forms: water bowls, mandala, visualized offerings, and informal daily practices like offering beautiful sights throughout your day. She stresses that accumulating merit through these practices, paired with purification, is the essential foundation for all deeper realizations—concentration, tantric practice, enlightenment-aimed training. McAndrew addresses Western skepticism of ritual and clarifies that practice difficulties stem not from inability but insufficient merit. These practices directly build that merit. For practitioners new to or deepening the preliminary path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 P P P 1998 03 28.mp3
UUID: 257d4b6a-1986-4ae2-80b1-1a936ec7762c
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Prayers, Prostrations and Preliminaries (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-03-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~6,224
So in terms of where we are in the outline, the outline of the topic heading starts off with four topics. The first is the greatness of the author, given to show the teaching has an immaculate source. The second is the greatness greatness of the Dharma, given to increase one’s respect for the instruction. The third way is the right way to teach and listen to the Dharma that has these two greatnesses of the authors and of the Dharma. And the fourth one is a sequence in which disciples are to be taught the actual instructions.
And so we’re concerned with that fourth one, the sequence in which disciples are to be taught the actual instructions. And that has two divisions: the root of the path devotion to a spiritual guide and The Proper Graduated Training you should undertake after you have begun to rely on your spiritual guide. The one, the The Root of the Devotion to a Spiritual Guide has two sections: What to do in your meditation sessions and what to do between meditation sessions. We’re concerned with the first part which is what to do in your meditation sessions and that has three subdivisions: the preparatory rights, how to pursue as the main part of the session, and what to do in the last part of the session. And so, obviously, what we’re concerned with is the preparatory rights.
So we’ve already been going through that over the last few weeks, the last couple of weeks. So it started off with cleaning the room and so forth. We went into a lot of detail on all these things. It was cleaning the room, setting up the altar, setting up the offerings, preparing your seat, taking up the seven-point, the eight-limbed posture of Vairochana Buddha and generating the thoughts of refuge and bodhicitta and then that was done in connection with the refuge visualization and then we had to set up the visualization of the merit field, invoke the wisdom beings into the merit field and perform the seven limbs. So last week we dealt with the limb of prostrations and there were there are various of these limbs, seven of them.
So the first one is prostrations. The second one is making offerings. And when we get to this point, it also includes many different kinds of offerings. We went through the water bowls before, so we won’t go through that again. But in actual fact, what we were doing before was setting up the water bowls.
And when you come to this part of the practice, you have the merit field visualized in front of you, and you’re actually making the offerings in the form of water bowls and also many different other forms of offerings, both those which you’ve arranged on your altar and also others which are visualized. So offering is a really important practice, it’s a very essential practice for the accumulation of merit. I’ll go back and say a little bit more about the whole seven limbs actually. In actual fact, before we visualize the merit field and invoke the wisdom beings. So when we do this, we visualize light rays coming from the heart of all the beings in the merit field in front of us.
We went last week through how we visualize this merit field. Also, of course, if you find this too difficult, then you visualize the single form of Śākyamūni Buddha in front of you as the embodiment of all these beings, so you don’t have to get too hung up on the visualization being too complicated. I think it’s probably a good idea to do both. Sometimes if you visualize Śākyamūni Buddha then because it’s simply you can get a better visualization and feel the inspiration of really visualizing Buddha, but really feel the sense of Buddha’s presence. But then I think sometimes for practice it’s good to try to do the merit filled visualization, even if it’s a bit complicated because it’s creating an impingement for the future.
So anyway, that’s really personal choice. So then there’s a prayer for the invocation and at this point we’re invoking the wisdom beings. If you’re doing any tantric practice, you know that this is something that comes into tantric practice also. It’s important because by just visualizing the merit field in front of us, we tend to feel that it’s just a picture, just something that we’ve created and put there. And it’s still difficult to close the gap between the feeling of the real presence of the holy beings being there and just the idea of some sort of mentally created picture which is only a picture.
To overcome this, we then visualize from the hearts of all these beings, light rays go out to the actual Buddha fields, which we can visualize as being in the ten directions, and draw forth duplicates of the merit field from all these Buddha fields and bring them back into this visualization in front of us that they should dissolve into it. And then we should visualize that from these merit fields all the beings in the merit fields absorb to the beings in the visualized merit field in front of us. And in this way, we can feel that the somehow that the merit field visualization has been made live, it’s been made actual. It’s important to try to have this awareness all the time that when we’re doing this practice the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are really there and aware of our offerings and prayers and practices. It’s something that we’re doing in front of them.
Of course, also, we have all the sentient beings around us. Any questions? So then the Seven Limb practice is very essential to accumulate merit in order to progress in our practice. It really contains the basic practices that we need. And in actual fact, the seven limb practice can be as simple as a seven lined verse or it can be extremely elaborate.
There are some practices which you can do for hours on end that really just basically consist of the seven limb practice because there are so many different kinds of praises and homages that you can make. There are so many different ways of making offerings. Even just concentrating on those two branches can become really extremely elaborate and these practices are very beneficial for us. Pabongka Rinpoche and the other lamas always go into quite a lot of detail stressing how important it is for our practice to do these things and to bring about this accumulation of merit and to to bring about the purification of our mind stream of the obscurations which hinder our ongoing practice. So there’s a very strong relationship between these two things: purification and accumulation of merit.
Some practices emphasize more the purification and some emphasize more the accumulation of merit, but it’s really same process. It’s really two different angles of the same process. We can really put a lot of time into these things and it’s really worthwhile and it will definitely bring results if we put a lot of effort into trying to do things like achieving tantric realizations, achieving Samatha and so on, if we haven’t got an accumulation of merit, then we’re not going to get anywhere with it. So it’s worthwhile to put a lot of energy into these preliminaries. And Pabongka actually says that we don’t have to worry too much if we think that we’re not very good at certain aspects of Dharma practice, we think we’re not terribly clever, or if we think we don’t have much understanding, or think we can’t meditate, if we think we just simply can’t develop any concentration, we shouldn’t worry about this.
This is just a sign that we haven’t got this accumulation of merit. And if we just go ahead with the practices for the accumulation of merit, then it will all come in due course and we shouldn’t get hung up about our limitations because our limitations are just something that can be overcome and this is the way to overcome them so this I think is really good news it’s really very encouraging and what we’re not looking at is doing anything wonderful in the short term, but just getting our basic practice together. The nature of the practice and the nature of our own minds is that if we get this practice together, then we’re definitely going to get to where it’s going to take us to. We’re definitely going to achieve the results. And all we have to do really is just have this sort of steady application.
Any questions? Yes, I think it’s extremely encouraging. And I think having been among the Chinese, it’s very interesting to see how much enthusiasm the Chinese people have for these kinds of practices. I think in our society we tend to have not really tuned in yet on the value of these accumulation of merits type practices. I think people in our society have a very it’s probably because of our sort of Judeo Christian cultural background.
We tend to, I think, relate very easily to the idea of negative karma and the need for purification, which is is, of course, very, very important. So this is a good thing. And we also have some sort of natural feeling for the idea of doing good works. This is something that comes to us. And, of course, doing good works is one form of accumulating merit.
It’s a very valuable form of accumulating merit. And, in fact, the lamas generally get people doing all sorts of good works, only because these things are valuable to other people, but in particular because they are valuable to the person who is doing them. In actual fact, if we are working for others, particularly if we do it after having cultivated the mental attitude of bodhicitta, then nobody benefits more than we do ourselves. This is something that’s really valuable. But we tend not to understand the value of these ritual practices in the accumulation of merit, and it’s something that doesn’t always connect with what seems like our logical minds.
But I shouldn’t say that to you people who are here, because I’m preaching to the converted in this instance. You wouldn’t be here unless you accepted this idea, but certainly it’s through doing these practices and experiencing the results that you get more and more confidence in the idea of the fact that they are building up this accumulation of merit and that this accumulation of merit is just giving you strength and stability in your Dharma practice. You don’t expect to see wonderful results all at once. What you do feel is that somehow your Dharma practice just becomes more and more stable, your mind becomes more and more stable, and you’re not being swayed around by different emotions, you’re not being distracted from your Dharma practiced by different distractions, and this is a sign that the accumulation of merit is building up. And then you start to see little things happening.
You just start to understand things a little bit more deeply, not the big flashes that you might have been looking for, but just little developments of just a deeper awareness of the truths, the teachings of how it all really fits together. And this is because of the accumulation of merit coming about. And we actually need a tremendous accumulation of merit. Bodhisattvas really put a lot of energy into the accumulation of merit because even though they’re so far along the path, they understand that they have to, in order to attain enlightenment, achieve a really vast accumulation of merit. And they’re working very hard at that and because of their advanced powers they’re able to accumulate merit very, very effectively but they don’t feel that they have enough.
They feel that they have to keep on accumulating more and more and they have to keep on doing this right up until they achieve enlightenment. Yes. Yes. So, yes, this is the yeah. This is it’s it’s a hard one.
Yes. It has to do with overcoming ego, in particular overcoming jealousy. That’s why they say that but, anyway, I’ll be talking about that more later. So but, yes, that that is an important point. So, anyway, we’re not saying any of these practices are really easy.
We do say that rejoicing is a practice that’s easy in one sense, and that it doesn’t require a lot of physical effort. It’s just a mental practice and you can even do it lying down. But it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to overcome the obstacles in our mind to rejoicing. But the point is that if we can rejoice from the heart, then it’s something that doesn’t require an elaborate setup or particular physical effort to engage in. It’s something that is extremely useful.
And, of course, it’s essential that we have to learn to be able to do it, because as long as we’re just hanging on to our own egotistical pride in our own superiority or whatever, then we won’t be able to progress. The seven limb practice is very skillfully set up to pick out all our weak spots and help us to overcome them, really. It’s very skillful. So anyway, whole point is if we just we’re all going to have weeks, but some of us have more problems than others, you know. Some people might find it very difficult to rejoice, other people might find rejoicing comes more naturally to them, but they find it very hard perhaps to make offerings because they have a miserly streak in them.
And so, whatever your particular I’m not saying that anybody here is like that, you know, I’m just saying that these things can these things can happen. So You’re so diplomatic. So anyway, yeah, this is they’re really good. These practices are really good, and there’s a reason why we’re advised to do them. So term field, does anybody understand where the term merit field comes from?
Okay. Yes, Mark? Uh-huh. But field for accumulation of Mhmm. That’s right.
So, yes, it is a field for accumulation of merit. So it’s like merit is like the harvest. If you plant the seeds, it’s like a field. If you plant seeds in a field and cultivate them, then you can the harvest. You can reap the harvest.
You’re planting planting merit. So we’re planting the seeds of merit and we accumulate merit. These holy beings that we’re visualizing in front of us are a particularly powerful field of merit because of their being holy beings, of their being objects of refuge; the merit of making offerings to them is immense because of the power of the object. You know when you create karmas that there are certain objects that are more powerful than others and your own father and mother are a much more powerful object for you than other sentient beings so if you give your mother a present then that’s accumulating quite a lot of merit. And if you say something unkind to your mother, then that’s accumulating a lot of bad karma.
You have to Yes. It sort of the closer people are to you or just the parents properly being played? It’s particularly the parents. It doesn’t seem to work with others like your brothers and sisters and so on. Of course these are people that we have very strong emotional involvement with and when there’s strong emotional involvement that tends to strengthen our deluded mental states and so we tend to make strong karmas with these people because of that factor but it’s not because of the power of the object but with the parents there is something in the power of the object because they gave us life because they gave us this human life.
There’s a very strong responsibility, very strong sort of sense of duty there to those parents, and they have become a field of merit for us. And of course, our teachers, even our worldly teachers who taught us things like how to read and write, are objects of respect to us. And in particular, they say that we should respect the teacher who taught us reading and writing because if we hadn’t learned reading and writing, wouldn’t be able to study the Dharma texts. That sounds a bit funny in the western context, but then of course bodhisattvas and arhats and so on are also because they can be visualized in the merit field, they’ve achieved path of seeing. They become objects of refuge for us.
They become Sangha and Buddhas of course. And our own spiritual teacher we regard as being the embodiment of all of these objects of refuge. If we’ve made connection with a guru, with teacher in the sense of accepting that teacher as our guru, then this becomes the biggest field of merit for us that we should regard the teacher as personifying Buddha, Dharma and the Ārya Sangha all in the one being and of course, anything we can do in the way of service or offerings to them personally or to those around them. They say that making offerings to the pores of the Guru is the greatest accumulation of merit. And the paws as a guru is a poetical term for the guru’s pores p o r e s the skin pores, actually I think more literally it is the hair follicles, but that doesn’t sound very poetical in English.
So, what that refers to is those close to the Guru. For instance, if the Guru is a married person, their spouse and their children, and or if they’ve got servants and their servants, and if they’ve got a horse, their horse and their cat and their dog and so on. If we sort of do service to any of these beings, then apparently it’s doing service to the Guru, and also if we help the guru’s disciples. So I always feel that if you have a relation to your to a guru who has Dharma centers, for instance, in my case, Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa have all the FPMT centres, so I’m really lucky because even though I might not be able to be around these teachers a lot of the time, I’ve been able to be around their centres a lot. Of course, it works in reverse too, that if you’re unpleasant to these people, you can create a lot of bad karma.
It hasn’t all been just one way, but at least, know, being in the Dharma Centers and working for the students in the Dharma Centers, you’re able to accumulate a lot of this particular kind of merit. So it’s really particularly helpful. So anyway so in this way, we can reap a lot of merit. And, anyway, even if we don’t have the physical opportunity of doing all these things, and we can do it in our own homes even if we’re hundreds of miles away from the nearest student or friend of our gurus or whatever we are still able to make these offerings and make these practices by visualizing the merit field and visualizing our guru in the merit field and also visualizing that all these holy beings were visualizing in front of us are all emanations of our guru or if you haven’t formed a particular relationship with a specific guru yet, you can still think that somewhere or other you do have a guru who will be connecting with you, that the Buddhas are going to emanate in the form of a guru for you. Just thinking that the Buddhas that you’re visualizing in front of you are also your gurus, you can kind of put it the other way around.
This is just my idea, but I think you can put it the other way around. If the Buddhas are emanations of your guru, the guru is also an emanation of the Buddhas, and you can think that these Buddhas are going to emanate in the form of a personal guru for you when you are at that stage of your practice. So you can be thinking and praying that they’ll emanate in this way and thinking of them as already being that guru just in front of you in the form of Buddhas. Does that make sense? That’s a Hindu saying, but I think it’s definitely one that the Buddhists would accept too.
Well, I think already we’re making contact with our gurus in the form of these people who roll up to us in the street, and we just don’t recognize them. But what I’m talking now is making contact in the formal way with a guru on the formal level where you recognize a guru’s qualities, where you make this relationship and receive formal guidance on the path. That was what I was really referring to because we can be sure that we’re already receiving help from them all the time in ways that we don’t recognize Particularly to achieve the meditations on the Graduated Path, it’s not enough to just meditate on the Graduated Path and expect to get realizations because it will be a bit dry and we won’t be able to achieve deeper understanding that we’re aiming for unless we have this accumulation of merit and we need the seven limbs for the purification and accumulation of merit also we have obscurations on our mind stream which will be an obstacle to our achieving realizations of the practice and the purification which is brought about by the seven limb practice will remove those obscurations so we really need to do this seven limb practice.
So in terms of the first limb of homage, we were talking about homage and prostrations last week and we went through the physical way of doing prostrations. There are three types of homage and that is bodily, verbal and mental. So bodily of course we’ve been through already and verbal is reciting praises and mental of course is our mental attitude of respect and homage. So in actual fact, when we’re reciting verbal praises, can also put our hands in this mudra so that this actually counts as bodily prostrations as well. Everybody was here last week, weren’t you?
You were all here last week? Nobody? Oh, is there anybody who sorry. Yes, right. So if you missed out on learning how to do prostrations, maybe some of the other people who were here and learned how to do it last week could show you.
So, also, when we’re doing our body bodily prostrations, we have to use our mental powers to increase the merit of what we’re accumulating while we’re doing these prostrations so it’s said that we accumulate enough merit to be born as a world emperor emperor from each atom of the ground that we cover when we do a prostration. Even if we haven’t got very big bodies, can visualize that our bodies are very, very big. And we can also think that not just the body of this life but all the bodies of all our previous lifetimes are also prostrating. So I think you have to visualize them as being human beings because it might be a bit hard to visualize them otherwise doing prostrations. You know, you can’t imagine slugs and snails doing prostrations.
They might have their own slug or snail way of doing it. So yes. And, also, when sometimes when we’re not doing physical prostrations, we can do this with our whole body, we can do this hand mudra. So prostrations are really important because they purify all negativities of body, speech and mind, and they’re also a direct antidote to pride. There’s something about getting down on your knees, getting down on your sort of flat on the ground on your stomach that counteracts pride.
And I think this is something that is recognized in all cultures. Most cultures, if you look at them traditionally nowadays in Western society, we don’t bow anymore. But in the old days, they used to always bow. It’s still at court, you know, if you go to court or, you know, if you’re introduced to the king or something, queen, wherever you might be, if there’s royalty, you’re still expected to do some sort of a a bow or a curtsy. And these things from traditional cultures where bodily forms of demonstration were more expected than they are in our present society.
We still have ways of showing respect we still stand up if we’re in the presence of somebody if somebody comes in who we respect we’re always expected to stand up still in our society we used to have to stand up for god save the queen And the teachers coming into the classroom, of course, yes. Adults maybe don’t do it very much in our society, but there are still certain circumstances where it’s done. So it also brings benefits: a handsome body, a golden complexion, and well, you can become a world emperor if you want to, but it’s better to dedicate that for enlightenment. It might be beneficial to become a world emperor because just think of the power and influence that a world emperor would have over the sentient beings in their realm if they were a bodhisattva. So bodhisattvas actually often take these kinds of jobs, not because they want them for themselves, but because it’s a benefit they can do for others.
So Also, it plants potential by touching the different points of our body, we’re creating the potential to achieve the Buddha’s Ushnisha, which is the sign of his enlightened state, and also the little curl which is here between the eyebrows, which is another of his signs, and to achieve the enlightened speech, which is the Dharma conch. So we achieve the enlightened body, speech, mind. And the enlightened speech has sixty tones and can be understood by sentient beings according to their level. All the sentient beings in a particular group listening to a Buddha speaking at the one time will understand what he’s saying according to their own particular level. And, it has all these particular special qualities. And it’s important to do these actions carefully, and mindfully and to do them in a perfect way rather than just going for quantity.
It should be a question of quality not quantity. So I was mentioning last week about how some people in order to do a lot of frustrations very, very quickly, have a prostration board and they just slide down. And that way you can do a lot of prostrations very fast. They have paths that slide up and down, but it’s not the proper way of doing it because you really should lift up your hands and put them down again as you go down. There’s a lot of thoughts and we went through that last week so I won’t repeat it but some of the people here have good memories and a perfect remembrance of everything we went through will tell you.
Anyway, it’s here in It’s all explained in here. Also, if you find teachings on the thirty five Buddhas, I think our little booklet on the thirty five Buddhas of Confession, I think there’s probably a teaching included on that, you could check it out anyway. It will give you a very very beneficial practice to do while you’re making lots of prostrations. But just when you’re doing three prostrations here, can visualize colored light coming from the merit field, white light purifying our bodies as we touch here and here, red light — you can imagine it’s coming from the appropriate points of the beings in the merit field too. So first, white light from their heads comes to our heads, then red light from their throats comes to our throat to purify our speech, and blue light comes from their hearts to purify our mind.
So there are then the next practice is offering, and we already went through this the first week of this three weeks course, and that was particularly in association with offering the water bowls. We can offer many different things on our altars. We can offer flowers, incense, perfume, food. You can put whatever you think is beautiful, such as beautiful crystals or feathers or statues or whatever you think is suitable to offer as long as it’s something clean and pure and beautiful. For instance, Geshe-la used to put an airplane on his altar because to him that symbolized the means of how he traveled around the world to connect with his various disciples in various countries.
So he was offering that to the holy beings. And I think also in the old texts they say that when you reach the level of a Chakravartin monarch, you get eight special things and one of those is a chariot that can fly through the air. So nowadays these chariots are available to anybody who can afford an air ticket. So in the old days, other Chakravartin monarchs used to have them. And, actually, Buddhas received these signs because when when a Buddha is born in the lifetime in which he’s going to manifest as as a founding Buddha, he he has the choice of either becoming a Chakravartin monarch or renouncing the world and going off to become a world teacher.
And, of course, they renounce the world as Śākyamūni Buddha did. They have to go through these twelve deeds of the Buddhas, and one of them is renouncing the world and taking up the life of a wandering holy man. So, of course, they don’t become a Chakravartin monarch, but the signs are something that is still associated with the Buddhas. Sorry. Chakravartin monarch is like somebody who becomes a very I think it really means, like a worldwide emperor, you know, ruling the the world.
In those days, of course, I think what they considered to be the known world was mainly just India, maybe, a little bit of China and so on. But they had this idea that you could have a very great emperor who’s a will turning emperor who would be a not only a very powerful monarch, but also a very virtuous one. And this was like a golden age. Yes. Well, I mean, I think the idea of a Chakravartin monarch is a little bit mythological that that, for instance, is supposed to have an elephant that they can ride around the world on in one day and so on.
And I think Ashoka probably would be sort of like a historical version of of this being a very powerful monarch. Of course, he started off as a quite a bad man who was very warlike and aggressive and conquered a lot of but then he changed his mind because of his virtuous seeds that were on his mindstream and became a dharma ruler at the in the later part of his life. So, anyway, they do say we accumulate this merit to be Chakravartin monarchs. It doesn’t have to be in this world. It could be in some other world.
So we can also visualize offering anything that we think is beautiful or good. So even things that we don’t have ourselves, even things that we don’t have the possibility of offering physically, we can offer as a mental offering. So if you’re going around and you see anything beautiful, a nice car for example, or a beautiful sunset or lovely scenery, the light of the sun and the moon, we can offer these things. And that when we turn on the light in our room, we can think that we’re not just making light for ourselves for our own mundane purposes, but we’re also offering the light to the holy beings on our altar. And all these things we can offer.
In fact, we offer the whole world. When we come to making the mandala offerings, we actually offer the whole world. And it’s permissible to do this because we don’t just have to offer the things that belong to us personally because as a being inhabiting this world system our karma went into the making of this world system and so together with all the other beings in this world we actually brought about the formation of this world as it is and all the things in it and so in that sense we have an ownership in them we have some sort of stake in all these things and we can offer them That’s great. Yes. To share?
That’s right. A happy situation. Yes. Yes. We can offer all these things.
And you don’t have to be in front of your oldie to do it, you can do it at any time. It’s very good practice to do all this. The practice of offering as we go about is an extremely powerful way of accumulating the merit of offering because we can be doing it all the time even while we’re engaged in other activities. If you’re going around and, for instance, you’re passing somebody’s garden and there’s a beautiful rose hanging over the fence and you stop to smell it, then instead of thinking that you’re just enjoying it just for yourself, think that you’re offering this beautiful perfume to the merit field. You get so many opportunities this way to offer things.
And that ties up with joyfulness and mindfulness, doesn’t it? Yes. Yes. That’s right. And it stops this grasping because then when you see something beautiful, instead of thinking, Oh, I wish I had that, and wanting to grab it for yourself, you think, Oh, wonderful, I can offer this to the merit field, and that cuts your clinging.
It’s very powerful. So, also, we can make supreme offerings, and these are upholding the Dharma, cultivating bodhicitta, putting our Dharma study into practice, and transforming our root virtue into material offerings, visualized material offerings. The first three are fairly self explanatory, and we should just remember that we can offer things. They say the offering, particularly if you have a personal guru, the best offering to the guru is the offering of your practice, particularly the offering of your achievements, if you achieve realizations of the practice. And so we can offer these things to the merit field.
And in in the Guru Puja, there’s a verse of offering our root virtue transformed into beautiful things like beautiful gardens filled with flowers and so on. You’ll find that first if you look. I think it comes just after the just after the secret offering, just after the offering. First you’ve got the offering of the water bowls and then you’ve got the inner offering and so on. Then at the end of that section, have this offering of your merits transformed into beautiful objects.
So another form of offering that we make that’s very important is offering the mandala. You already know about about the mandala. We visualize the the whole world, Mount Meru and the four continents, and all the mythological explanation of the way the world is formed, condensed into a small area and visualized in the form of the rings and rice or whatever that we have, that we’re holding in front of us in form of a base which is shaped like a plate, and we have various rings. We fill up these rings with either grains or seashells or precious substances, jewels, or whatever we might happen to have that’s suitable for the purpose. On this we visualize the whole world system.
We shouldn’t think, Pabongka Rinpoche says,, we shouldn’t think that the rings we’re holding become huge and we also shouldn’t think that the world system becomes very very small but we should think that our base and rings are the size they are but on them we can visualize the whole world system the size it is and it’s like you can reflect the whole world in a small mirror. You know, you can reflect the whole environment around you in a small mirror in the same way you have to somehow put these two things together, that what you’re actually holding and what you’re visualizing as being their respective sizes. So we’ll be going through the details of that later on when we get to sitting down and doing it with the rings, so I won’t go into a lot of detail here of what we’re visualizing. The material that you use to make the base and rings and also the material that you use to put inside can be according to your wealth. For instance, when Lamrimpa was doing three hundred thousand or something, he did a tremendous amount of numbers of more than three hundred thousand, I think it was three million or something, tremendous amount of mandala offerings until his arm was all scarred, because he was using a rock, just a flat rock in front of his cave where he was meditating.
And