Mandala offerings: a powerful spiritual technology for our times

I recently dreamed of a dark dystopian world where some people were being kidnapped and others were having bombs dropped on their heads. I wasn’t scared as I knew it was a dream, but I was concerned about everyone else not knowing this, so I called out to them all: “Don’t worry, this is not really happening. You’re dreaming!” Unsurprisingly, they ignored me.

I then tried to change the dream into something pleasant, but for some reason I could not. “Why not?!”, I asked myself. And the answer came, “Karma. These are mistaken appearances of mind arising from collective karma. You can only change the world for everyone by helping them to change their karma. As for you, you can wake up anytime you want.” Which I did.

Je Tsongkhapa said that living beings are:

Tightly bound by the chains of karma so hard to release.

Just as each blade of grass grows on its own but also rhizomatically as part of a whole lawn, and just as a school of individual fish swims as one, so are we bound by both individual and collective karma. And it can be very hard for people to extricate themselves from the common appearances of collective karma, such as the collective karma we are experiencing now in our nation and our world.

Seemingly another lifetime ago, during the Covid pandemic, I had a few months of lung-related problems, now all resolved – it wasn’t Covid, but I remember thinking that it was a manifestation of the same collective karma. Just recently I was accused of something I hadn’t done, and again this felt to be an appearance related to our collective karma, in which people don’t trust each other very much. And I also had a brief money-gone-missing scare, also resolved, which feels typical for our times.

What this dream means to me is that I have to live according to the laws of karma – “learn to do good and cease to do evil” as Buddha said, and try and help others do the same. If I want to stop these mistaken karmic appearances once and for all, I also have to put great effort into waking up as quickly as I can by realizing emptiness.

A powerful spiritual technology for our times

To speed things up, I like to make mandala offerings. This is because it’s a powerful spiritual technology for stopping mistaken appearances and creating numberless causes for pure appearances; and I find it the perfect practice for our times. I thought I’d share how I do mandala offerings based on Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s instructions in various books and other teachings.

How to do it

I first stop all ordinary appearances by meditating on the mere absence of all the things I normally see, including myself, our world, and other people. These verses are really helpful:

All appearances in dreams teach me
That all appearances when awake do not exist;
Thus for me all my dream appearances
Are the supreme instructions of my Guru.

The phenomena that I normally see or perceive
Are deceptive – created by mistaken minds.
If I search for the reality of what I see,
There is nothing there that exists – I perceive only empty like space. ~ Lord of All Lineages

Within endless emptiness inseparable from the bliss of Guru Buddha’s mind, I correctly believe or impute that I’m in the company of countless enlightened beings in the Field of Merit, as mentioned here: Life through Buddha’s eyes. Then I imagine and offer up Pure Lands full of pure enjoyments – all mere name or mere imputation – with the strong wish, “May all beings enjoy such Pure Lands.” I feel that the enlightened beings and Bodhisattvas receive these with huge delight.

We can imagine that we’re holding these in our hands without our hands getting any bigger or these blissful worlds getting any smaller, like a landscape in a small mirror or a sky-rise in a puddle. This can be so because they are mere name or mere appearance not other than the emptiness of all phenomena, meaning that they don’t take up any actual space. Where is space in a dream? And whether the objects in the mandala are big or small depends on our perspective – for example, I am huge to an ant but tiny to a dinosaur. If I was inside the mandala, as opposed to looking down at it in my two small hands, everything would appear normal size.

(People sometimes ask me “how big” to visualize Deities at their heart, or Heruka in the body mandala. I give them the same answer – what size they are depends from where we’re looking. And if we are one with the mandala, non-dualistic, what size is everything?)

There is a traditional hand mudra we can do, and we can also use a traditional mandala kit if we like. I really like both as I find they help me concentrate; but they can take a while to get used to, so we can also simply imagine.

As for the meaning of this final line of the offering:

IDAM GURU RATNA MANDALAKA NIRYATAYAMI

Roughly, GURU refers to our Guru, RATNA means jewel or precious, MANDALA means mandala or Pure Land, and NIRYATAYAMI means I offer. So the whole line means: “I offer this precious mandala to you, my Spiritual Guide.”

Why make mandala offerings?

 Venerable Geshe Kelsang said in 1998 when he was explaining the four preliminary guides:

This is a very powerful practice which has deep meaning and significance. We should do this practice with the intention to benefit and protect ourself and all living beings. This great universe belongs to all living beings including ourself. When we do this practice we act as the representative of all mother living beings and we offer our environments and enjoyments to all the holy beings.

I reckon that one session of mandala offerings is worth at least a week striving to fix things “out there”. We end up saving a lot of time and effort, which may be one reason why the Kadampa teachers of old suggested we make mandala offerings in lieu of business ventures when we are short of funds, lol:

Making mandala offerings is the best method to free us from future poverty and to enable us to obtain future rebirth in a Pure Land. Buddha Vajradhara made a guarantee that practitioners who sincerely make mandala offerings would never suffer from future poverty. Kadampa Geshes also said that if we want to be wealthy in the future, then we should stop ordinary business and make mandala offerings. We need to remind ourself of this many times because at first we may have doubts about this practice and lack confidence and determination. Through familiarity our faith and conviction will grow, and our determination to practice this will increase. Eventually we will feel that we are actually making a huge and generous offering to all the holy beings. From such a profound and special practice of giving we will of course receive wealth. Making mandala offerings is also a very powerful method to increase our merit, and to develop pure concentration. ~ Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, 1998

If we understand how our karma creates our appearances and experiences, and therefore the importance of creating good karma, we’ll be really happy to learn about mandala offerings.

Because we are offering the entire universe in a pure form, it is easy to make this offering without miserliness, and without the stains of the eight worldly concerns. Therefore, mandala offerings are very powerful and produce great results. With each offering we accumulate a vast amount of merit and create the cause to be reborn in a Pure Land. Even if we are not reborn in a Pure Land, we will be reborn in a beautiful, peaceful environment. ~ Great Treasury of Merit

And we are offering thousands or even millions of these worlds without attachment or miserliness! Giving is the other side of the coin from ownerlessness, so this practice helps our wisdom realizing selflessness, too.

We need all this merit to gain Tantric Mahamudra realizations, which is why making mandala offerings is one of the so-called four “preliminary guides” for Mahamudra meditation, and why Kadampa Teacher Training Program students all over the world have a commitment to do two weeks of retreat on it each year.

Making mandala offerings is a highly efficient, meaningful, and enjoyable use of our time, a swift way to wipe away samsaric confusion, despair, and dystopia, or even any misplaced jubilation at others’ suffering, which I think we can fall prey to these divided days. The point is, what we see and read about can feel so real, but is no more real than the hallucinatory appearances of our dreams. With correct imagination that is coupled with our understanding of emptiness, we create pure worlds for everyone to enjoy.

 As Venerable Geshe Kelsang says in the Oral Instructions of the Mahamudra there is no real difference between a real and imagined Pure Land.

In short, offering the mandala is offering a Pure Land generated through the power of correct imagination. There is no difference between offering a Pure Land generated through the power of correct imagination and offering an actual Pure Land – both are mere appearance to the mind. If we have a pure mind both exist, and if we do not have a pure mind neither exists.

What to visualize

 In 1998, Venerable Geshe Kelsang said:

When making mandala offerings to our Spiritual Guide and holy beings, in reality we are offering them the entire universe. We imagine the entire ‘ground’ of the universe and the whole of space is filled with a countless number of 37 special objects, as listed in the long mandala offering prayer. Then, regarding the universe as a Pure Land filled with pure objects, we offer it all to our Spiritual Guide and other holy beings.

As for how we visualize the Pure Land with these 37 features, you can follow the Buddhist cosmology for a Pure Land described in Great Treasury of Merit, with Mount Meru, the four continents, the king’s precious possessions, the sun and the moon, and so on. This can help us include a lot of extraordinarily blissful offerings, including gods and goddesses dancing throughout the universe, for example. If you like dancing Tik Tok videos, you’ll love this. You can build this up over time and be as vague as you need – as I like to say, don’t let your visualization exceed your feeling.

Here is a helpful video if you want to have a go at constructing the long 37-point mandala with a mandala kit:

Also included in the long mandala “are all the treasures of Gods and men”, so you can offer whatever pleases you, remembered or imagined. For example, I currently love mountains, Spring trees, and flat whites, so I can offer these, all the nature of bliss and emptiness – Keajra mountains and coffee! (And no hayfever.) This improves our karma, creating the cause to keep having them in thefuture, including in the Pure Land. I had a friend in the north of England (cold, rainy) who offered loads of beaches in his mandala offerings, until he ended up in Florida. Just sayin’. You can offer kittens. (That last line was just an excuse to add this picture of one of my current fosters in case you want him?!)

We make our offering come alive in terms of what we would consider to be a Pure Land, with everyone in it experiencing happiness and freedom. And we present this offering to the Buddhas, who take huge delight in it.

Don’t worry if you’re not great at visualizing or cannot even visualize at all – you can remember that the actual Pure Land is the experience of bliss and emptiness, which is in fact the main offering.

For teachings on how to make mandala offerings, check out Oral Instructions of Mahamudra or Great Treasury of Merit. And listen to this short explanation by Gen-la Jampa! (Plenty more of these short teachings if you haven’t discovered them yet): A special offering of the mandala.

Please leave your comments or questions so I can address them in the future articles currently up my sleeve 🙂