The 7 Preliminaries with Eva Natanya - 16 Mandala Offering Meditation with Commentary

Eva Natanya, 29 Apr 2020

Eva (Yangchen) introduces today’s session by inviting us to always maintain fresh this particular practice, to vary the visualization and so on. Then she instructs us to arrange our plate, cloth, substances, and talks about the different types of plate and substances. She gives then the steps for setting the offering, and with this introduction we go into meditation.

Meditation starts at 5:30

After the meditation Yangchen gives recommendations on how to address our daily practice regarding mandala offering, how to make it our own. She draws from two analogous stances of the Christian tradition which hold, respectively, a strong parallel with guru Padmasambhava embracing all worlds, and with the offering recitation. Yangchen then gives an account of the Christian prayer, and talks about what it means to ‘give back’ everything we own to the greatness of the ultimate, the ground, the dharmakāya. She reminds us that every preliminary encompasses the other 7, and how this is so regarding the mandala offering.

Eva talks about the four continents surrounding Mount Meru, naming them all from East to North: Purvavideha, Jambudvipa, Aparagodaniya and Uttarakuru. Then, she speaks about the way in which this cosmology appears, where and to whom. This explanation is drawing from the essential nature of space, which is emptiness. Yangchen gives an analogy by Lama Tsongkhapa, of how something that is ‘wet and flowing’ can be regarded as different from three different karmic perceptions, how the same basis can be simultaneously seen as blood and pus, clear water, and ambrosia. It is in this way that the Buddhist world system can be here and now, in our Universe of solar systems and galaxy clusters, she invites us to think how this could be true to us.

Download (MP3 / 14 MB)

Transcript

This lecture does not have a text transcript. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer to assist our transcription team.