Benefits of Offering Food

Benefits of Offering Food

Date of Advice:
September 2014
Date Posted:
November 2016

Rinpoche had sponsored lunch on the Buddha Day for people who had taken precepts at a Dharma center. Rinpoche wrote to thank the center director and students for their service.

My most dear, most kind, most precious, wish-fulfilling director and all the people there,
I am very happy everyone enjoyed the food offered on the Buddha Day, when any merit created on that day is multiplied 100 million times. I heard that the center has the best cook from all over the world, so I am very happy. I shall come to taste your food soon.

This is what I tell cooks: food is very important for the centers and courses. It makes the people so happy, even if the Dharma talk is not very inspiring. If the food is good, then the people stay and at the end they can see the great purpose of the teachings. At the end they can see. Also making good food, delicious food, makes believers and non-believers very happy—both are happy.

Generally we receive all the past, present and future happiness up to enlightenment from sentient beings. We receive all the happiness from each sentient being, so they are most kind to us. To repay their kindness and also to serve them best, this is the best Dharma, the best practice—to free them from samsara's sufferings and bring them not just ordinary happiness but ultimate happiness, liberation from samsara, from the oceans of suffering of pain and the oceans of suffering of change, which is all the samsaric pleasures, then from where those two sufferings arise—the pervasive compounding suffering. These aggregates are under the control of karma and delusion. That is why they are pervaded by suffering and that is why they are in the nature of suffering.

It is important to know how to make the food tasty. When I get a chance to make the food myself, especially when I invite one of my gurus, then I am able to serve good food which pleases their holy mind. That is very good. Pleasing the gurus is most powerful purification. All the negative karma collected from beginningless rebirths [is purified] and it is the way to collect extensive merits, which makes it quick to achieve all the realizations of the graduated path to omniscient mind—the cessation of all obscurations and completion of all the realizations. That makes it quicker to achieve enlightenment and that means it is quicker to free the numberless sentient beings from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and quicker to bring them to full enlightenment.

Again from the bottom of my heart I thank you very much for your service and everybody’s service at the center. That is serving the teachings of the Buddha, serving sentient beings in order for them to be free from the oceans of samsaric sufferings and to bring them to omniscient mind. For that they need Dharma.

Thank you very much. The ultimate is benefiting sentient beings who are numberless. Thank you very much.

With much love and prayers...