Mandala offerings 4: breaking out

To drill down a bit on emptiness and mere appearance, both of which are invaluable contemplations during mandala offerings and life in general … some months before he passed away, Venerable Geshe Kelsang said:

All phenomena their own emptiness appears as themselves. Otherwise all phenomena do not exist at all.

In The Oral Instructions of Mahamudra, Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s most recent instructions on how to do a retreat on mandala offerings, he says:

There is no such thing as a Pure Land that exists from the side of the object; the Pure Land is merely an appearance to a pure mind. Equally, there is no such thing as an impure world that exists from its own side; an impure world is merely an appearance to an impure mind.

You don’t need to send a cleaning brigade to the impure world – simply recognize that there is no impure world.

It’s the same with the impure self: there is no impure self other than as appearance to an impure mind:

If our mind is impure, we are an impure being, and if our mind is pure, we are a pure being.

This is so simple yet so profound. Everything depends upon our mind, so if we want to be always happy and free—according to Buddha and I agree—our main job in life is to purify and transform our mind. Geshe-la quotes Buddha Maitreya in Ornament of Clear Realization:

Impure worlds develop because living beings are impure. This proves that we can accomplish a pure world, or Pure Land of a Buddha, by becoming a pure being ourself.

Carrying on from this article: Mandala offerings 3: how to visit a Pure Land.

Backing up a bit …

In any actual wish to experience a Pure Land, there exists a conviction that samsara is a prison from which we must escape, as opposed to a pleasure garden in which we must continue to seek happiness. Samsara is not an external prison, but it is still unbelievably wretched for as long as we are buying into it.

When my renunciation is not strong, I notice myself practicing Dharma to keep a peaceful, happy, loving, and perhaps even wise or spacious mind. However, I lack the burning desire to get out of samsara, which means I am mainly using Buddha’s teachings to improve my samsaric life. One way I can tell when my renunciation needs topping up is when things go wrong – eg, I start to feel unwell or someone acts like an idiot – and it disturbs my inner peace and contentment. For if I am holding out for samsara, naturally this means that samsara needs to work.

In terms of practicing Tantra, being Buddha Vajrayogini or Heruka is then simply a more glamorous way for me to hang out in samsara. I am trying to make samsara into a Pure Land, when you simply cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

I had a couple of niggly health issues recently that were a tad troublesome until I worked on turning them into valuable insights by contemplating the seven sufferings of samsara (more about those here: What’s your problem?!) It all starts with birth, or rebirth, which as a human is not much fun – all that going back to the womb stuff is highly overrated.

I saw this Bodyworlds exhibition back in the day, and have never forgotten this poor squished child. This was only month 8 into the pregnancy—it gets a lot tighter in there before the pain of childbirth and the wailing of the newborn baby. I vowed there and then that I would never take another rebirth in a human meat suit.

And it doesn’t get a lot better once you’re out of the womb – more room for your body perhaps, but still, if you’re made of bones and gristle, everything can and does eventually go wrong, ending in the body’s gradual decay, death, and further decay. No one (hopefully) wants to keep our corpse around once we’ve left it.

Although a precious human rebirth is the best option within samsara, it is still a true suffering.

I asked some people recently what the Pure Land meant to them, and one of them replied “relief”. They meant permanent relief or liberation from all the sufferings of birth, sickness, ageing, and death, not just a temporary relief from a particular suffering. Without renunciation, we’re not sufficiently scared of remaining in samsara’s prison to do anything about it. Even as a practitioner who has met the path to liberation and enlightenment, without renunciation we are still prepared to just coast along. Years can go by without our getting down to serious practice, almost as if we are simply sitting this one out, perhaps in the vain expectation that we’ll do the bare minimum to get the job done in the next rebirth or the one after that. Perhaps we even think: “When I die, people will do transference of consciousness (powa) and I’ll go the Pure Land. That’s when I will really practice Dharma.” But I don’t think this is how Buddhism works. It is a far more reasonable expectation that we will end up back in another gristly jumpsuit in the prison of samsara.

In this prison, there are some far better experiences than others – we can feel comfortable, well fed, entertained, etc on the upper floors of a higher rebirth. But there is no certainty because we’ll be dispatched back down to the dungeons sooner or later. Moreover, compared to the infinite space and sheer joy of the Pure Land of bliss and emptiness beyond the prison, the pool table and porridge are pathetically paltry, as are any samsaric enjoyments. Which is why Milarepa called out to that thief rummaging around in his cave in the middle of the night:

How do you expect to find anything valuable here at night, when I cannot find anything valuable here during the day?

In the light of their omniscient wisdom, the Buddhas can find nothing to recommend samsara. So why do we, in the darkness of our self-grasping hallucinations, think that we’ll somehow be able to?

Helping others

In the Pure Land we will experience endless enjoyment, but this is not separate to our benefitting countless beings at the same time. Sometimes in samsara it feels like it’s an either/or – either we are helping others or we are indulging ourself in pleasure (sometimes as a reward for helping others, lol). That might be why at the end of The Good Place, a pretty humorous comedy about the afterlife that I watched with my Dad, those who finally earned the pointless luxuries of heaven (spoiler alert) got really bored and listless after a few thousand years and opted for total nothingness instead. Even in the god realms of samsara, that bliss is basically meaningless. In the Pure Land, on the other hand, our Enjoyment Body is sending endless clouds of emanations to liberate all living beings. Our pleasure or bliss is in itself deeply meaningful, loving, compassionate, and productive.

I’ve been thinking about this lately: although realizing emptiness is profoundly blissful and utterly essential, it is given lasting meaning by our compassion. Do you agree?

Breaking out

A couple of months ago, an anonymous insect scored a victory in their (generally losing) battle against the giants of the human realm. One pinprick of a bite, which I didn’t even notice at the time, became first an abscess and then a staph infection and, not just one but 3 courses of grudgingly-taken antibiotics later, my skin is only now patching itself up. Gross, right? But as this involved only approx 8 inches of my skin, what does that say about all the other horrors lurking in the rest of my body?!

Buddha said the human body is composed of 32 impure substances, including pus and blood. Why would we want to identify with this meat suit, thinking “Me”?! We’re mad. If you’re in any doubt as to the purity and cleanliness of this body, just read chapter 8 of Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life and Shantideva will quickly put you straight. ‘Cos you may not have a skin infection at the moment to remind you, but you are still made of the same gross stuff. Remember that survey about how Brits only feel fully comfortable in their bodies an average of 61 days a year?! Given what this body is made of, is that so surprising? So, what’s it to be, break out in a skin infection or break out of the prison of samsara?!

Sorry to lure you under false pretenses into an article about blissful mandala offerings only to hit you with the truth of suffering! However, if we have renunciation and compassion, mandala offerings make perfect sense and we might actually get around to doing them.

Comments are so welcome!