Notes on the Mandala Offering by Peter Morrell

Notes on the Mandala Offering
by Peter Morrell

Mandala offering offers the Mahayana Buddhist numerous excellent advantages, which include

1. it generates great merit

2. it creates mental pliancy

3. it reveals great insights

4. it creates mental focus as a good form of meditation in its own right

5. it strengthens visualisation

6. it lets one contemplate and appreciate the actual reality of a 'spiritual realm'

7. it helps one appreciate what giving and abundance mean

8. it is one of the most powerful means of spiritual purification and karmic cleansing

9. it acts as a spiritual protector against misfortune

10. it can be practised exhaustively and expanded indefinitely

For all of the above reasons it stands out as the most exceptional and uplifting mode of preliminary practice at the start, in the middle and at the end of the spiritual path.

Reciting the mandala offering is a good form of meditation in itself, as it demands that we fix our mind only on the words we recite, to the exclusion of everything else. That is not easy and not what usually happens. What happens in reality is that our attention keeps wandering off the words and onto other matters in our daily life. This has be watched carefully and our attention gently and repeatedly placed back on the mantra repetition. Gradually we lose that fuzziness and our attention becomes more focused and powerful. Only then can we really begin to penetrate deeper into the heart of what mandala offering means and begin to reap some of its vast spiritual riches.

Mandala offering is also about abundance, giving and generosity; selfless giving even without thought of reward, without prospect of reward or even acknowledgement for what one has given. It is crucially centred in the idea of abundance and offering up or giving massive amounts of goods, fruits, jewels and precious things. This inevitably permeates our thoughts during practice. This is the thought of fertility, richness, abundance and wealth plus the idea not of keeping or enjoying this wealth for oneself, but of giving it away as an offering to the Buddhas and gurus, as a gift. Thus the twin concepts of giving and abundance permeate the whole practice. It creates a wealth consciousness and a very giving, generous and selfless consciousness. It is saying, "I summon all this wealth but instead of keeping it for me, I give it to the world, the Buddhas and the universe itself." It is thus a profound salutation of generosity, giving and wealthy abundance or fruitfulness. This should be our underlying attitude when practising mandala offering. This is the deeper 'thought essence' that we should try to cultivate as part of the practice.

Mandala offering blends off into selflessness and egolessness because the giving and the abundance are always undertaken unselfishly and with the sole thought of giving to another, to a bigger and higher power as a pure gift, given without any thought of reward, but just given as an end in itself, as a purification exercise, as an offering to the universe. It is thus an exercise in karmic cleansing and merit acquisition, to be sure, but it is also underpinned by the concepts of abundance and giving as spiritual qualities one needs to attune to, immerse onself in and become throughly saturated with. One needs to become clothed in abundance, giving and selflessness as potent ideas to enrich one's ordinary life. These are the concepts running through mandala offering and the qualities one naturally acquires through its frequent practice. They tend to simply rub off onto one's soul during its practice.

Mandala offering also empowers one as the actual creator of a new spiritual world. One becomes like a Buddha through mandala offering, because one can then be seen as the creator or instigator of a pure spiritual realm. The mandala offering is thus many things all at the same time. It also deeply reinforces an appreciation of the power of merit and karma and the personal responsibility for and power one has within one's daily life. Daily mandala offering certainly works to spiritualise one's daily life, deepening and enriching a spiritual feeling about one's existence, such as appreciation of beauty, of merit and karma, of compassion, impermanence and wisdom. It acts as a magnet for all the goodness, happiness and peace in the universe and is a great dispeller of darkness, sorrow, pain and grief. It acts this way, on one level, for oneself but also on another level for all living beings.

Repeated mandala offering also reinforces one's sense that mandala offering is going on all the time in the background, even without our knowing, like an engine of merit, attracting wealth, joy and abundance into one's life. This feeling partly derives from the way the mind wanders off during recitation of the offering but always keeps coming back to it. As if the mind will always wander off anyway of its own accord, but that it is tied like an umbilicus to the recitation to which it keeps getting pulled back repeatedly. The more one does the recitation the more one can undistractedly do other things at the same time. This also leads to the impression that mandala offering is going on continuously in one's consciousness regardless of whether one is awake or asleep. One has the feeling that offering of mandala is a very precious practice that connects one deeply with all the gurus and Buddhas in a timeless way. So powerful is it, that one feels connected to states of bliss and to Nirvana itself simply through this practice alone.

The mandala recitation verses:

Here is a pure spritial realm....

...with sumeru king of mountains in the centre...
...being adorned by the four continents...
...the five sense desire objects...
...and traversed by the sun and moon...
...also there is the wealth of Gods and humans...
...the seven precious articles of royalty...
...the wish-fulfilling cow, the wish-granting tree...
...unploughed harvests...
...gold and silver....
...an inconceivable store of good grains...
...all wealth of the finest articles...
...by offering all this to the gurus and the Buddhas...
...may I attain the stage of a fully enlightened one...
...and all beings be placed in a Pure Realm.

Source

by Peter Morrell
homeoint.org