8. Dedication, Puja and Concluding Remarks

Tonight we are going to dedicate all the merit we have created during this meditation course, especially all the positive energy expended by Harvey, Dennis and everybody else involved in developing this center and organizing the teachings we have just given for the benefit of all mother sentient beings. So, while Lama Zopa Rinpoche recites the dedication prayers, we should all meditate on dedicating not only the merit we have created here but also all the three-­time merit created by all the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the ten directions and all sentient beings: “May this merit benefit all mother sentient beings in the highest way, bring them all success in their positive intentions and, especially, may the light of Dharma wisdom embrace the minds of all universal living beings.” By meditating in this way, dedicating all your merit to the highest goal, everlasting peaceful enlightenment, you are enhancing your bodhicitta, your enlightenment attitude, so dedication is very useful.

We can liken dedication to a strong horse. If you can control the horse it will take you in any direction you choose, but if you can’t and it just runs wild, who knows where you’ll finish up? Therefore, you should direct the strong energy of the merit you have created toward its intended goal of enlightenment, just as you motivated at the beginning. When you motivate with bodhicitta, engage in the appropriate activities and dedicate the merit at the conclusion, it becomes a complete and exceedingly powerful action. Thus we consider dedication to be extremely important, especially if it’s free of ego, like thinking proudly, “I just did a meditation course.” 

When you dedicate your merit to the highest goal it’s like putting a drop of water into the ocean. Your drop becomes part of that extensive whole and as long as the ocean remains, so does your little drop. When you direct your merit toward the highest goal of enlightenment, its energy becomes inexhaustible. It remains until the ocean of samsara has completely dried up. 

You should also be free of expectation, such as, “I took the meditation course, now I should be happy all the time, constantly satisfied.” You crave an immediate result. “I took this course—I want to be happy right now.” Don’t be like that. We dedicate to the ultimate goal, enlightenment, because we’re not practicing Dharma to get some kind of instant effect like we do when we eat chocolate. Just as we guide a strong horse to where we want to go by pulling on the reins, we direct our positive energy into the right channel through dedication. If you don’t control that powerful horse you can even finish up dead. Similarly, you should not dedicate your merit from this course to the limited goal of this life’s happiness and satisfaction. 

Moreover, when we dedicate, all the universal supreme enlightened beings and bodhisattvas—who, as I explained before, have immense telepathic power and can see what we’re doing—also dedicate our merit in the highest way and pray for the success of our pure motivation. 

[Lama Zopa Rinpoche recites dedication prayers and students chant the Manjushri sadhana, during which Lama makes a few remarks about the mandala offering.]

Mandala offering

We offer a mandala in order to both release attachment and train our mind to perceive a magnificent, divine view rather than the depressed one we usually project. In the mandala offering practice we visualize the entire universe transformed into magnificent, beautiful objects and offer those. Doing this has a profound psychological effect.

When we’re depressed, we visualize everything as bad, ugly, foggy and so forth. We can’t visualize things as positive. Making mandala offerings is one way of really training our mind to perceive a positive view of the world. 

Normally our psychology is such that what appears from the side of the object is what we want to see. This is simple to understand. We have a fixed idea of what we want to see and our mind paints that onto the object and then we perceive that view, as if that’s the way the object really exists. That’s the way our mind works, all the time. 

With respect to attachment, we often possess objects that we really don’t like to share with anybody, but if we put those objects of attachment into our mandala and offer them, the experience can be profound. Sometimes our mind is so obsessed with an object that we can’t stop thinking about it, but visualizing it in our mandala and offering it sincerely, can have an incredibly positive psychological effect. This is not just words. It works. I do this myself. It’s so effective.

The thing about the practice of giving is that we have to offer from the mind. The handing of a physical object from one person to another without the mental component is not real offering, not true giving. Even without material objects, we can train our mind in giving by making purely mental offerings. That’s very useful and not at all hypocritical, as some might think. Westerners tend to think that if there’s no exchange of goods there’s no giving. That’s not so. Training our mind in this way is very useful and makes it easier to lose attachment. 

When at the end of the mandala recitation we say IDAM GURU RATNA MANDALAKAM NIRYATAYAMI, the real guru here is wisdom. Perfect wisdom is completely enlightened wisdom. That is the real guru, or lama. When the enlightened consciousness of, say, Guru Shakyamuni, manifested in physical form and appeared on this earth, that gave us the opportunity to make contact with absolute wisdom and make offerings directly to it. This is very different from making physical offerings to some deluded object. 

What we’re really suffering from is a lack of knowledge-­wisdom. Making mandala offerings is a very useful way of awakening our mind and gaining the knowledge-­wisdom we lack. There are many other benefits of making mandala offerings as well.³²

[Everybody recites the Guru Shakyamuni Buddha mantra for nearly five minutes.]

Notes

32. See The Power of Mandala. [Return to text]