Mandala offerings 2: a profound practice for letting go

When a kid does their best to create a nice card for their mom on Mother’s Day, even though it’s no great work of art she loves it and sticks it on the fridge. It’s the same with us making mandala offerings. The point is not that our visualizations have to be perfect and professional, but that, if we offer a mandala with gratitude and faith, our Spiritual Guide and all the Buddhas can’t help but love it.

One way to make mandala offerings is in conjunction with relying upon our Spiritual Guide, which we tend to do in our preliminary guide retreats. It’s a perfect combination. Remembering the kindness of our Spiritual Guide, we naturally want to offer them something in return. And this offering brings on blessings, merit, and concentration, such that our reliance grows even deeper. It’s a virtuous feedback loop!

I started explaining this practice here: Mandala offerings: a powerful spiritual technology for our times.

Creating a better world

I read this on the KMC NYC website the other day:

Offering the mandala is an ancient and blessed meditation practice used since the time of Buddha to create the causes for a far better world. The essence of this prayer involves imagining a pure world, which we then offer to the Buddhas.

Whilst holding a pure universe in our mind, we can recite the long and/or short mandala offering verses. This is the standard short verse, the so-called ‘seven-point mandala offering’:

The ground sprinkled with perfume and spread with flowers
The great mountain, four lands, sun and moon,
Seen as a Buddhaland and offered thus,
May all beings enjoy such Pure Lands.

IDAM GURU RATNA MANDALAKAM NIRYATAYAMI

And here’s a reminder of how we make this offering according to Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s most recent instructions in The Oral Instructions of the Mahamudra:

How do we offer the mandala? We stop our appearance of impure worlds, their inhabitants and enjoyments through correct imagination, and believe that every appearance of worlds, their inhabitants and enjoyments appears as the worlds, inhabitants and enjoyments of a Buddha Land. In this way we generate a new Pure Land of a Buddha through our correct imagination, and we offer this new Pure Land of Buddha to the assembly of Deities of the Guru-Deity.

A powerful mind-training practice

Making mandala offerings is transformational as it connects us to what a pure, non-deluded experience of ourself, others, and our world would be like. It opens us up to a whole realm of wonderful possibilities, and fills our mind with powerful, positive energy.

There is a fabulous and liberating method for transforming our relationship to the objects of our delusions by offering these up. We can offer up any or all the objects of our attachment, hatred, and confusion – all purified and transformed – which gives us a pure view of them such that the rug is pulled out from under these three poisons. (More about the three poisons here: Detoxing our daily life.) We can use the prayer:

I offer without any sense of loss
The objects that give rise to my attachment, hatred, and confusion,
My friends, enemies, and strangers, our bodies and enjoyments;
Please accept these and bless me to be released directly from the three poisons.

In 1998, Venerable Geshe-la explained:

One reason why this practice is so important is that by offering all worlds, objects of enjoyment, and beings, we are offering all the objects of our attachment, anger, and self-grasping. Since we have offered up all the objects of delusions we will no longer be in contact with them, and thus never develop delusions. We offer all the objects of the delusions to the holy beings with the motivation to free ourself and all living beings from delusions.

When we offer an object of delusion, we’re basically saying, “I’m willing to let go of this.” We understand that there is no object of anger outside of our mind of anger, for example – no inherently awful person. There is no inherently attractive person who is a source of happiness. There are no inherently existent boring strangers. We are training in letting these all go, offering them up.

If we get rid of the objects of these delusions, the delusions cannot survive for even a moment because they depend upon their objects. And once we’ve given them away, we can’t grab them back! They now belong to the Buddhas.

When we understand, “I’m putting these objects of attachment, anger, and ignorance inside this Pure Land mandala, which is the nature of bliss and emptiness,” it’s actually pretty hard to hold on to them anymore because there is nothing left to hold on to. So it feels almost effortless to let them go. Just by putting them in the mandala we have recontextualized them, we have changed their nature. I also find this a very effective way to purify past delusions and pre-empt future ones.

Attachment: With attachment, we are attached to the places, enjoyments, and bodies of samsara, so we can offer all of these, each time creating the cause to live in pure places with pure enjoyments and pure beings. We can make this as specific or general as we like – offering up everything ranging from our current lover, for example, to all our past and future objects of attachment.

What happens if we put an object of attachment in the Pure Land? Normally our object of attachment appears especially special; but now it is an especially special person, for example, amidst all these other especially wonderful people who are all equally the nature of bliss and emptiness.

Confusion: At the moment, everything is for us an object of confusion or ignorance; so with this mandala offering we are really offering everything! But now it is seen as pure and empty.

Anger: Let’s say that there’s someone you cannot abide, who makes you mad whenever you think of them – whether that’s someone close to you or some public figure. We now dissolve them into their emptiness and transform them into a pure being, free from delusions and mistaken appearances, and put them into our mandala offering where they are now having a very good time! They’re experiencing the fulfillment of their wishes and perfect freedom from suffering. Normally with anger we want them to be in an impure land experiencing lots of suffering, “You deserve it!”; but now we are doing the opposite, we’re imagining them in a Pure Land.

So how does that work?! This person is now in the Pure Land, which means they are now a wonderful, good person, full of joy, kindness, love, and compassion. How can we be angry with such a person?! Try it and see! And don’t worry that you’re letting them off the hook – you’re actually letting yourself off the hook.

We can offer any object of anger that we’ve had for a long time, even one we may have been repressing because we haven’t figured out yet how to transform them.

Letting go of difficult people

I’m going to drill down into this a bit because I think it’s a very useful practice during these days of anger and frustration.

An object of anger or frustration only exists relative to a mind of anger or frustration, or to someone who is identifying themselves as angry or overwhelmed. We are identifying ourselves in a limited way, as someone who cannot handle stuff:

I can’t handle that you’ve said something that I didn’t want you to say! I can’t handle that this has happened, that you’ve done this deed which to me is unbearable.

We are cherishing that self, the self that needs serving and protecting. We have left reality and are now caught up in a hallucination in which we are totally identified with a self that doesn’t exist, one that we’ve projected into existence but believe exists from its own side. That self feels alone or hurt or overwhelmed, and we’re identifying with that, instead of our vast, boundless Buddha nature that is indestructible, or with ourself as mere appearance not other than emptiness. Let alone with ourself as the Deity.

Out of the self-cherishing need to protect this hallucinated, painful self, we now get angry, thinking, saying, and doing things that we may later regret and that create future suffering for ourselves. All in the name of self-protection, protecting a self that doesn’t exist. And round and round we spin in samsara’s crazy (not-) merry-go-round.

In other words, anger depends on this self-grasping and self-cherishing context and its object is appearing inherently terrible. Now we take that object and recontextualize it in a Pure Land, in which everyone including them is pure bliss and emptiness, and there’s simply no basis for anger anymore. We fully envision our previous enemies or irritants as full of happiness and good qualities, and now it’s, “Who don’t I like?!” For us to be angry at them, they have to keep appearing as a horrible person; and what would a horrible person be doing it in a Pure Land? The moment you put them in a Pure Land, the horrible bit is gone. How can we stay enraged with this wonderful person who is finally full of happiness, joy, and good qualities?! It doesn’t make any sense. There’s just no basis for that anger anymore.

If we take the time to explore this, it’s a lot of fun and very liberating.

Perhaps we think, “I’m not going to put them in a Pure Land. They don’t deserve it.” Who doesn’t deserve it, really? It’s you, isn’t it? This is actually self-punishment. The thing about anger is that it’s really just self-punishment, keeping ourselves trapped in a state of pain.

With all the objects of delusions, try it and see, have fun with it. We can go in there and be creative. The thing about making mandala offerings is that we can do what we want – it is a fundamentally creative practice. As we get used to it, the sky is the limit in terms of what we are correctly imagining and offering. I am not sure there are wrong ways to do it if we understand the general principles, but I could be wrong.

I will conclude with some encouragement from Venerable Geshe Kelsang in 1998:

To begin with, our determination to engage in mandala offerings may not be very strong, but gradually as we learn more about the practice and gain more experience of it our determination to practice will get stronger. Gradually, through the strength of this determination our attachment, anger, and self-grasping will diminish. Our mind will become more calm and peaceful, our Dharma practice will be more successful, and we will make rapid and easy progress on the spiritual path.

One more article to come, discussing the outer, inner, secret, and thatness mandala offerings. Meantime, please keep the comments and any questions coming 😁