I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable…
T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.
T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
We neglect the gods at our peril. “What gods?” you ask. The gods have always been there, overseeing or interfering in the affairs of us humans—be it famines, floods, or pestilence, good fortune or ill. They are there, in their perches high above the clouds, in mountains, rivers and sacred groves, or in caves and the dark places where few dare to go. An illness beyond the scope of modern medicine, a natural disaster (an Act of God, as the old insurance policies would say), a tragic loss, a despair at our inability to fulfill the deepest yearnings in our hearts, and we are reminded that our seemingly well ordered and predictable world is not so well ordered and not always predictable.
Despite our continuing efforts to the contrary, we do not know what is actually going to happen tomorrow. We have done everything we can to take the mystery out of illness and disease, the weather, and the stars that illumine the night sky, out of the bewildering array of flora, fauna and formations in stone, sand or ice, and, somewhat less successfully, out of the complexities of social, economic and political systems. We attribute superhuman powers to human agency and are bewildered when something unexpected happens. People in earlier times knew better. Life is just too complex to be encompassed by any system of thought. We may have learned how to negotiate much of our lives without reference to gods, and we may have grown comfortable in ignoring them. But they are still there. The gods are capricious. We neglect them at our peril.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend invited me to join him on a hike around Mt. Tamalpais, in honor or some old friends of his—Allan Ginsberg, Phil Whalen and Gary Snyder and their Opening the Mountain hike in 1971. Shortly after we started, we reached a bluff overlooking the coastal hills and the Pacific Ocean. My friend stopped, took out a pouch of tobacco, and threw a few handfuls in the air as he called on the local and regional gods to grant us safe passage on our hike. Fifteen miles later, we arrived back at our starting point, a bit stiff but none the worse for wear, despite a couple of steep rocky descents where a slip or a missed footing could easily have resulted in a sprained ankle or a concussion. I was grateful for the safe passage.
Offerings to the gods. Vajrayana is full of them, both gods and offerings. The gods are many and profuse. The buddhas and bodhisattvas reside in domains of awakening (buddha realms) beyond human conception, well, beyond all conception, human or otherwise. The guardians, protectors and dakinis have their special places, charnel grounds, caves, mountains and rivers. They are active in the world but are not of this world. Other gods have their own particular residences, be they mountains, cliffs, lakes, or groves, and they don’t take trespass lightly. They are in this world and of this world, impatient with the same petty irritations as we humans. Still other spirits, whether demons or ghosts, bring famine, plague, earthquake, flood, or war when they are unhappy or displeased. Others keep the body in balance and cause illness, mental or physical, when they are neglected. And then there are the debt-collectors, those who feel cheated or left out, troublemakers who feel they are owed something and do not care how they collect it.
Why so many? It’s a way of looking at the world. Here there is no notion of one true God, against whom all other gods are false. Mind and body are not split this way. Whether expressions of awareness, awakening or compassion, of anger, jealousy, greed or other emotional eruptions, of the energy and balance of mountains, winds or seas, of earthquakes, floods or forest fires, of plague, pestilence or emotional disturbance, of bad luck, bad judgment or bad choices, all come from the same place, the empty clarity of mind itself. This is not a vacuous proposition. In this world it is a statement of fact. How we experience the world may be outside our ken, but it is not outside our mind because our mind is how we experience the world.
Does this mean we have to believe in gods? If you are asking whether these gods exist, we all accept that they do, already. We are just uncertain as to what category of existence to put them in. Do they exist in their own right, with minds and lives of their own? Are they symbols that put us in touch with various aspects of our psyche? Are they links to sources of energy that we can draw on? Perhaps they do not fall neatly into any category, and in this way, provide us with a way to relate to the mystery of life.
In mystical practice, we are stepping into the mystery of life and we necessarily step right into the world of the gods. Efforts to control or predict it are largely futile, but control is not our aim. Our aim is to know the mystery directly, to be free of the confusions and projections that cloud our awareness. Then we can be at peace in the mystery, even though we cannot understand it with our conceptual mind. As we enter the mystery we encounter the gods, the powers and forces that make the world we experience. We experience them through our senses, through our emotions, through the stories we tell, and through direct knowing. We cannot understand these forces, let alone control them. Yet we still need to know how to connect with them and how to relate with them. One way is through offerings.
In the mystical practices of vajrayana, there are many kinds of offerings. There are actual offerings, imagined offerings, and imaginary offerings. There are in-kind offerings, monetary offerings, mandala offerings, shrine offerings, fire offerings, burnt offerings, and torma offerings. There are peaceful offerings, wrathful offerings, and sacrificial offerings. There are outer offerings, inner offerings and secret offerings. There is even the mystical offering of mind itself.
This last set, outer, inner, secret and mystical, is probably the most important. These four levels correspond with the four empowerments, which
I wrote about in an earlier newsletter
. To review briefly, the four empowerments are shifts in how we experience life. The vase empowerment marks the breaking of the spell of the solidity of sensory experience. The secret empowerment marks the breaking of the spell of the solidity of emotional reactions. The wisdom-awareness empowerment marks the breaking of the spell of the solidity of spiritual ideals. The fourth empowerment marks the breaking of the spell of the solidity of practice.
Outer offerings are offerings of what we experience through our senses. In Vajrayana offering rituals, the outer offerings of what see, hear, smell, taste or touch are made sacred in order to free them from our habitual reactions of attraction and aversion. Inner offerings are the corresponding transformation of emotional experience. Secret offerings are the offerings of peak experiences—bliss, clarity, non-thought—induced by high level energy practices. And the mystical offering is to be empty and make offerings without any notion of gift, giver, or giving.
The three dimensions of awakening, pure in their being,
Form the receptacle, an eternal castle of infinite space.
In it, all the matter of the world, potential and actual,
What is true, what is vivid, and what is there,
Melts and becomes liquid awareness,
Its blazing light filling the sky.
The essences of this pure liquid, drawn from all experience, patterned and free,
I share with all who have ever been my guest
From time without beginning until now.
Here, as is typical of this kind of ritual, sensory experience, that is, all the matter of the world, is transformed into liquid timeless awareness and is offered to the four guests: those invited out of respect (buddhas, bodhisattvas, teachers, yidams, etc.), those invited because of their power (the protectors along with regional and local gods), those invited out of compassion (the six realms of sentient beings) and those invited because they cause trouble (demons and spirits that bring illness, untimely death, bad luck and misfortune, etc.).
The inner, secret and mystical offerings are made in these three lines:
The fire offering of skandhas and elements blazes brilliantly with radiant health.
The fire offering of white and red awakening mind blazes with bliss-emptiness.
The fire offering of emptiness and compassion fills the totality of experience.
These four levels are present, explicitly or implicitly, in all vajrayana rituals, from short daily practices to the long elaborate ceremonies used to activate the energy of various deities for both spiritual and conventional purposes. Terminology is not always precise. Just to confuse the unwary, the secret level of interpretation usually corresponds with the third empowerment, the wisdom-awareness empowerment. The inner level of interpretation usually corresponds to the second empowerment, the secret empowerment. How this usage developed, I don’t know, but it is easy to trip over this terminology and end up more than a little confused. Further, the poets who compose these rituals often take a bit of poetic license in how they express them and that can add another source of confusion.
Having honored the gods with outer offerings—the actual burning of different kinds of foods and fragrant plants and minerals, and the inner, secret and mystical offerings, we express our wishes, and, in some cases, ask the gods to fulfill their responsibilities. Because the burnt offering ritual is directed primarily at the troublemakers, we pray to be free of trouble:
Past karmic debts — may they be cleared away.
Current breaches — I confess now so that they don’t continue.
Future clouding — may I not be caught in that cycle.
And then we express our wishes and prayers to all four kinds of guests:
May these offerings please the buddhas.
May they fulfill the desires of the oath-bound.
May they meet the wants of the six kinds of beings.
May they satisfy the owed and the resentful.
May they complete the generation of goodness and awareness.
May they clear away the two distortions and associated conditioning.
May we all attain the two pure forms.
What do we do with all these different kinds and levels of offerings? In the three-year retreat, my teacher did not encourage us to think about them, at least not while doing the rituals. Instead, he said to do these rituals while resting in the emptiness of mind nature. Initially I wanted to understand what I was chanting, how the offering rituals worked, and what role they played in practice. I put a lot of effort into learning the ins and outs of these rituals. But over time, I came to appreciate the wisdom and depth of his instruction.
When I had learned the meaning of not only the words but also the different sections, and had come to understand the structure of a ritual, I found that it led me through a kind of drama, a sequence of images and actions (visualized and verbalized). When I rested in mind nature during a ritual, not thinking about the words and meanings, the unfolding drama of offerings seemed to have an effect, not in the sense of cause and effect that we think of in the West, but more in the sense of the creation of conditions in which a different way of understanding and relating to the world can arise.
This is how magic works. We use ritual (and other tools) to effect a change in how we experience the world, where the world means both what is out there and what is in here. Consistent exposure to these levels of interpretation, largely free from the engagement of the conceptual mind (as per my teacher’s instructions), gradually changes the way we experience life, moving us toward a mythic understanding of life, one in which signs and symbols speak to us, but not in the naive superstitious sense that we rightly distrust.
In the case of offerings, these rituals opened me to two possibilities: the possibility of experiencing life in ways that were deeper and vaster than anything I could imagine and the possibility of not attaching to any experience, no matter how deep, difficult, or incomprehensible it might be. At the level of form and material objects, I learned to enjoy them and give them away—in actuality or in my imagination. At the level of emotional reactions, I came to see that even the strongest, most seductive and most intoxicating emotions as well as the most powerful, vilest, and darkest emotions have no ground, and can transform to become sources of spiritual nourishment. At the level of spiritual ideals, those deeply yearned dreams of transcending the human condition, I learned to let them go and, through my doing so, the energy they consumed was freed to nourish attention and awareness. And at the level of practice, I learned that there is nothing to do but be what we already are.
In our culture, we are no longer used to honoring the gods. Indeed, Most forms of Western Buddhism have taken great pains to eliminate this dimension of practice. In doing so, they have created imbalanced forms of practice, and those forms can only lead to imbalances in result. As I said at the beginning, the gods are there, and we ignore them at our peril. We also ignore at our peril the rituals that have evolved over centuries to balance the powers and forces we meet in mystical practice. How we honor the gods in our culture and what those rituals might look like, I have no idea, but even though I may use a bridge to cross a river, I can still offer my respect to the strong, brown god, sullen, untamed and intractable, who dwells there.