Ritual

Rituals at Tibetan Buddhist Dharma Centers can delight, intrigue, and/or confuse newcomers. Here we offer some brief guidelines for the curious onlooker.

Hilary Herdman shows how ritual practice tames our minds as we perform particular physical and verbal actions.

Preferences dominate our thinking most of the time whether we consciously note them or not.  We carry them into our meditation practice. But is that smart? We like or we dislike–often intensely. And if we are practicing meditation, we may be surprised to notice that we spend a lot of time pursuing or discussing our own preferences. Moreover, we may invest preferences with a lot of power. Often, we decide that we don’t like a particular practice. And then we decide we shouldn’t continue it. Some people react strongly against ritual practices, for example–and think that they are happier just sitting in meditation quietly. But is that really so easy?

In the Vajrayana context, practitioners utilize the bell and dorje as important symbolic ritual items. At the outer level, these two implements represent the indivisibility of means (vajra) and the wisdom recognizing emptiness (bell).

For today’s message, Phakchok Rinpoche offers insight into Kyepar Pakpey, the seventh manifestation of Guru Rinpoche. At the heart of this practice is making peace with all sentient beings and showing respect for the environment and those beings and aspects of our world that we tend to forget.

Life-release, or the saving of animals destined for slaughter, is practiced throughout the Buddhist world. All schools of Buddhism encourage followers to not only refrain from harming beings, but also to actively save lives.

Without skillful means, we are unable to easily gain wisdom. In the past, all the great masters have practiced this way. Because this is the case, Rinpoche requests new students who want to join the Vajrayāna path to engage in the preliminary practices and development stage practices.

The word for ‘feast offering’ in Sanskrit is ganachakra, which if translated into Tibetan is tsok kyi khorlo, wheel of accumulation. Gathering the two accumulations of merit and wisdom is the supreme and indispensable method for clearing away the cloud of obscurations that prevent us from realizing our buddha-nature.