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4

Envision Supreme Field

This is going to be easy for me. Those of you who attended the Lama Chöpa teachings have that elaborate field of merit. Those of you who had the Ganden Lha Gyema teaching have Tsongkhapa and his two disciples as supreme field of merit.

Those of you who are here for the first time can use what we talked about earlier for the refuge: 17 Lama Buddha Sakyamuni. He is, in absolute reality, all the masters with whom you have studied, in the form of Buddha Sakyamuni.

It is not only in our imagination, but actually a living one is there. It is not the image nor the drawing, but the real-life Buddha Sakyamuni.

Buddha Shakyamuni can be the supreme field because, as I said before, that is all three jewels together18 . The body of the Buddha is sangha, the spiritual development of the Buddha is dharma, and the mind is buddha.

So in one physical fom you have Buddha, dharma, sangha all together. Not only that, it's also guru, it's also yidam, it's everything. As the Lama Chöpa says, "You are our Guru, you are Yidam. . . 19. You are finding here a connection and also a field where

17 See page 41.

18 See page 39.

19 The single-pointed request from the Lama Chopa, " You are our Gurus, You are our Yidams, You are our Dakinis and Dharma protectors. From this moment until our Enlightenment we need seek no refuge other than you. In this life, the bardo and all future lives, Hold us with your hook of compassion. Free us from samsara and nirvana’s fears, grant all attainments. Be our unfailing friend and guard us from interferences.'

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you can get profit. When you want to grow food, a good field is important so that you can have a good yield. Likewise, gaining merit is building your profit. It is always nice to have the best field you can get, so you can have a better yield. That's why it is called supreme field.

We use the word envision. The reason why we say envision is that this is not a thangka, not an image or statue, it is a mental creation. Again, you have to remember, in one way, it is the training of your mind, and in another way, this is where you can work, where you can purify, where you can have accumulation of merit. This is really a very active sort of Wall Street, a spiritual Wall Street, where you can do a lot of business, and gain a high return. So you will know what you are supposed to do thereafter.

Traditionally supreme fields of merit are so complicated; there are different trees with this or that one in the center. It is okay, if you can pick it up, fine. If you cannot, forget it, just simply have one Buddha in Shakyamuni form. This is guru, yidam, dharma, sangha; it is dakas, dakinis, bodhisattvas, dharma protectors; it is everything in one single Buddha Sakyamuni form. That's why I think it is easy. In absolute reality it is your own spiritual masters or your guru, the big-G word. And the reason why you do that is because it is the connection.

That is the envisioning of your supreme field. What you really have to do is draw some picture in your mind, a mental picture of a true object of refuge or supreme field of merit. Envisioning is the most important, not the thangka, not the drawing, not the picture, not the postcard. It is really a mental image. If you have to draw an image of the Buddha, you probably think. " Well, when I think of the head, I lose the body. When I think of the body, there is no head or feet. When I think of the feet, there is no body." All these are usual problems. Nobody is going to have the image perfectly the moment you think of it. I always say

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that even a yellow lump will do to start. At the beginning level, if you try to draw a Buddha picture in your mind, you may just have some kind of yellow thing standing there. That's good enough. You've found the base on which you can mentally draw and when the time comes, you can make it clear gradually. If you are meditating White Tara, just a little white stuff over there will do, wherever it might be. As time passes, it can come up and it becomes more and more clear to you. That takes time.

In the traditional style of doing a ritual, there is invocation and offering here. All these rituals are built up or knitted in that way. To do offerings here is fine; you have another offering below. Traditionally, in Tibetan rituals, whenever you invoke or generate a Buddha, at every point of invocation there is an offering. Even in a little practice like this you may have offerings repeated fifteen or twenty times. It has its value, it has its purpose, it has had its own time. I don't think we can do that in the year 2000. Nobody will have time to do that, so we try to make it little shorter. That is the generation of or envisioning the supreme field.

5

Offer salutations

When you have that supreme field that you have visualized, you may think, " My visualization is simply my imagination. I know there is no Buddha in there. There is no yidam in there, there is nothing. It is just my imagination". The point is, the moment you imagine something, Buddha and enlightened beings are there. This is the extraordinary quality of enlightened beings. Whenever, wherever, whoever provides a little opportunity for them to be connected and become active, enlightened beings are there. Why should they be there? Because when they were developing, when they were like us, just as we generated our mind to help all beings, and make that our priority, so did they. For every single thing we do, we generate that pure motivation, and so did they. Every single gain that they have has been gained as the consequences of that motivation. It has become their commitment. So wher-

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ever, whenever you give them a little opportunity, they are there to help each and every one of us. Nobody is discriminated against; they are there.

Another quality of enlightened beings is that they don 't depend like us on travelling from one place to another. We always have to drag out bodies with us in metal boxes, whether it is a plane or a car. They don't need that because they function differently than we do. We function with the body level as one thing, the mind level as another thing, functioning separately. We can sit right in here and think of Manhattan, downtown New York; our mind is busy there, but our body doesn't get there. In order to get the body there, you have to carry it over, to land and get in. That is the difference.

For the enlightened beings, the body and the mind function together. If the mind is there, the body is there; if the body is there, the mind is there. They have no separation, but union. The name we call enlightened beings is awakened state, all-knowing. Buddhas are supposed to know everything. If not you are not a buddha, you are not enlightened, so you have limitations. Enlightened beings are free of all these limitations.

These little ghosts around can also do the same thing, they don't have to carry their bodies. Even the people in the bardo, the after-death stage, don 't have to carry their bodies; wherever their minds go, their bodies are there. So, in one way I am trying to tell you it is enlightened being's special quality, and, on another hand, you may think, "I don't know whether that is really possible." Sure, it is possible. You can just look at ghosts; they function on the mind level; they are there to move your table around. Even if you look from the ordinary point of view, you have that.

From the extraordinary point of view, in normal American language you say, " God is everywhere." Don't people say that? If there is one god, how can it get everywhere? The point is that they are supposed to be enlightened. If you are enlightened, you know everything. If you know it by your mind, your body is there because you function on same frequency, together, your body and your mind in union. That is the enlightened beings' quality and that's where they're different from us.

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I remember a joke but I'm not going to say it. Just be aware of it when you go to the bathroom (laughter)! I had this big long debate when I was about twelve years old, whether the enlightened beings know everything or they are everywhere,

and then when you put 'deposit', are they on the 'deposit'? That sort of debate came up in childhood.

They can be everywhere and it is their commitment. The moment you give a little opportunity for them to function, they are there. It doesn't depend on the invocation. It doesn't depend on offerings. We do that just to satisfy our rational mind.

The first thing you do, when a person comes, is say welcome. The way you say welcome is not like, when somebody rings the doorbell, you just open and say, "Why have you come here?" We don't say that, right? We say something nice like

" Oh you look nice, come in, glad to see you, are you too tired, had a good journey?"

The traditional system here is to praise the people. You have a very profitable business to perform here. You sort of please the agent. You invite him in and say, "Please sit down" and then " How are you" or " You look great" —

all the usual routines followed by the actual business. Just like that, you praise the enlightened beings and say, " How wonderful you are!"

In the Ganden Lha Gyema, it says, " Your bodies are radiantly handsome with glory renowned..." You praise the body, you praise the mind, you praise the actions and activities. I want to remind you again that by praising,

it is not that you try to make them happy. By praising them, we are getting the benefit. Actually, I am praising myself, the buddha within me, to be able to become that level. The imaginary being here is the actual being who

represents enlightened beings. I am here taking the opportunity to be able to praise those qualities because a) I admire those qualities b) I want to attain the qualities.

Remember, we never could find a good English translation for the word 'prostration' [which is often used here]; it does not justify [or correspond to] the meaning of the Tibetan word chag tsel. I was very much tempted to use chag tsel in this bookmark, but then all our friends kept on saying, " This is totally English, why do you have one

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single Tibetan word in there?" All sorts of very true, well-meaning; arguments came and I had no answer. So salutation. We can come up with some good word later.

Let me tell you what the word means in Tibetan. The word chag means to really admire your qualities. Why do I respect you? Because you have the qualities which I don't have. You have good qualities, so that's why I admire you, I respect you, I honor you, and I express that to you. The second word, tsel, means I am respecting you not only because I admire your qualities but because I want your qualities for myself, I want to be like you. The word chag tsel conveys these two points. That is the reason why we go round with folded hands in the temples. That's the reason why we respect, why we bow down before all these images. All these are giving a message to them: a) I admire your qualities, and b) I want your qualities, I would like to have ) our qualities, to be like you. That's actually what the word means. We have gone quite far away from 'salutation '.

6

Present symbolic and boundless imagined offerings

Anything that we lay out, any offering that we try to do should have plenty of everything. The offering should be not limited but very elaborate. My most uncomfortable experience was in the mid 1970s; there was a group making tsog offerings who would put just a single layer of biscuits on a plate, then another single layer on another plate, and just leave it like that. I was very uncomfortable, so what I did was try to mix all of them together and make a huge lump on one plate.

Offering is one of our practices of generosity, don't forget. Be generous to the supreme field of merit. What better opportunity is there than this? You always have to do a little more than what you were sort of expected to do. But even then, no matter how much you put out, still it is limited. So mentally you multiply all of the offerings billions of times. That way it becomes boundless imagined offerings.

Am I making up a story? No. Somebody asked the Buddha during the Buddha's lifetime, "What is the best way to accumulate

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merit?" The Buddha said, "Follow the Bodhisattva Samantabadra system." Then they asked Bodhisattva Samantabadra, "How do you work?" Samantabadra said, " Well I transform myself from one to two, two to four, four to eight and so forth.

When I praise, each one of my bodies produces ten heads, each one of the heads produces ten mouths, each one of the mouths produces ten tongues and that's how I praise." And he said, "I also multiply the offerings from one to two, two to four

and I totally fill up all of space." That is how to do it.

That's why I am saying here: boundless imagined offerings. If you are making offerings, don't just think it is a little bowl of water which will not even satisfy a little sparrow bird. It is not that. That is symbolic.

What you really have is pure water with the eight qualities of water20, which fills up all of space. Don't think of a handful of flowers, that is nothing; but think that the whole universe filled up with the most beautiful utpala flowers or utumbara flowers, the Hindu Buddhist mythological flower that is supposed to only appear once a Buddha appears officially. Think of millions of them filling up all of space.

If you are fond of making music, offer it to the supreme field of merit. People may think, " Well, I'm fond of music, I have attachment to my music, or I have attachment to my dance, I have attachment to my drawings. So I should not offer it."

In a way it is true, but on the other hand, we are lay people, and art is a wonderful thing to have. There is nothing better than music, it can really bring a good atmosphere in your life. So there is not anything wrong with it, though it can help to bring attachment. Here you can take advantage of it, you can offer it to please the enlightened beings. And think they have accepted your offer, think they have developed great joy, they enjoy it. That is how we build our merit.

20 The eight qualities of pure water: 1) cool, 2) delicious, 3) light, 4) soft, 5)clear, 6) odorless, 7) easy on the throat, 8) kind to the stomach. For the meaning of those see Pabongka Rinpoche, Liberation in the palm of your hand, pg. 146, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Joyful path of great fortune, pg. 50.

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That's what we offer, good in quality, plenty in quantity. Not only that, you can offer the mountains and valleys and rivers and sun and moon, and all these, space ships, Captain Kirk, and don't forget that beaming business, too! You can offer all of them (laughter), why not? It may be imaginative right this moment, but it may become actual, it has every possibility. That's what boundless imagined offerings are.

7

Purify all that is negative

This is one of the most important points. Though all these points are important, this one in particular is very important. The question arises at least in my mind, can negativities really be purified? How do know they are purified? Truly speaking I don't know, but I have extremely strong reasons why every negativity can be purified if want to. If I had time, I would go in detail, but I don't have time. will say this: the bottom line is that all the negativities are impermanent.

Impermanence or permanence — this is the issue for us. Everything deal with is impermanent, including ourselves. Our actions are impermanent, our physical bodies are impermanent, our minds are impermanent. Even structures and buildings that we call 'permanent' impermanent. We see them changing year by year. We see them lapsing. We see big monuments getting rotten. Even the Lady Liberty comes down and has to be fixed up again. So everything is impermanent.

What does impermanent mean? Changeable, changing in nature. Therefore, our negativities are also changeable. That's why we purify. I really think it is true that you can positively, absolutely purify all negativity just simply because it is impermanent. It has a changing nature, so change has to take place. I am not quoting that Buddha said so. I am not saying tradition said so. If you observe your mind, if you observe your whole experience, you know it changes. Every action changes. So the negativities are changeable and the positivities are also

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changeable. What the Buddhas have done is introduce an opportunity to us.

Since things are purifiable, why don't you purify? Why are you waiting for the consequences to take place? It is the same as for any illness that we have. If we detect or diagnose any illness that we have early enough, we can treat it and get better. Why do we have to wait until it becomes too late? The same thing here. The negativities are going to give us terrible results, so why don't we purify them long before they come in? That's how they are giving us a window of opportunity here to do a purification.

When I use the word purification, some people may think, " Oh am I dirty? Or am I terrible?" No. You are not dirty, you are not terrible. Neither am I dirty or terrible, but I purify all the time. Why? The negativities come constantly, with or without our realizing, because of our minds, because of our thoughts, and especially because of our habitual patterns and addictions to neurosis. These bring negativities all the time, with or without realizing. So there is plenty to be purified.

Do you spend your major time on purification? No, you should not. You do a purification and move on because you want to reach point 64, 'enjoy the freedom of the ultimate union'. You don't want to sit here; you want to go there. But, do purify very often or everyday. It helps you to move. It is like a fuel for your vehicle. It is like removing the big rock sitting right in the middle of your highway. That is why you should purify. But, don't spend all the time on purification because you have other things to do. Enlightenment is very sophisticated, it is not one simple thing. That's why you have to do multiple activities. Even the causes that we create have all these different things coming from different directions. What you are aiming for is very sophisticated; so much quality is in there. Each and every quality that enlightened beings have didn't come from nowhere, it came from somewhere. Who produces that? Ourselves. Individually, not collectively, even. Individually we produce it. So you can't spend all your time doing purification only. That's not right. But, it is important to purify, because all negativities can be purified and we have the opportunity to do so. That's why we do purification.

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Application of the four powers of purification.

How do I do it? Just simply say, "I purify"? Will that do? What does purify mean? Literally, it means to make it pure, to remove impurities. How can you make yourself pure? By freeing yourself of things that you don't want. What does a water purifier do? It takes away all these chemicals, poisons, toxins, whatever. If you just say, "I purify" it is almost like saying "I would like to buy a water purifier," but you don't use it. It needs a little more effort, beyond saying these words only. The Buddha's sharing of his experience is that he said, " Hey, I applied the four powers on that. By the combination of the four powers that I applied together, I purified all my negativities" . So simply just saying "I purify" won't work.

Let me talk the other way round today. Why do we purify? Because we don't like it; my hands got dirty, sticky, I have got to wash them. Right? So if you don't like something, you wash it away, you purify it. Likewise you see "I don't like the negativities that I have, so I am going to wash them away."

Power of commitment or non-repetition. If you don't like it, you don't want to do it again. Right? But I am in habit of doing it. So that's where the change needs to take place. Dharma practice is supposed to change that. The reason why you don't like it is a good enough reason for you to think carefully, "I don't want do it again." So committing yourself that you are not going to repeat becomes one power. It is a commitment power that you are saying, "I don't like this, I don't want do it again, I am not going to do it again." You know what I mean? That is one of the powers.

Power of compensation or power of the base. Number two, what are you going to do? Well, I will do something to make it up. To whom? Oh, whomever I have hurt. You know what negativity truly is? Hurting other beings. Almost all negativities are violence. Buddha always said, " If you are following me, don't hurt other people. Hurting and causing hurt to other people is not dharma practice." The true negativity is causing pain for others, hurting beings, including yourself, too.

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That is the real true negativity. So whomever you hurt, you must compensate. What you do is generate love-compassion. You also go to take refuge, because you cannot generate compassion towards buddhas. You can't say " Poor Buddha, can I help you to free your sufferings?" It doesn't work. Instead, you take refuge.

Often we may not even know the being that we hurt. A lot of them we know, a lot of them we don't know. If you accept reincarnation, we don 't know most of them, because we don 't know whether we were pig or dog or cat or man or horse before, so how do we know whom we hurt? Even in our life, we may think, "I did nothing wrong to anybody" but when you go through, you have lots of those. How many times we say, " Oh I never thought about it, I never realized that that person got hurt." It is true, but people get hurt because our own perception and the perception of the other person are different. That's why sometimes you don't even know you hurt people. They are perceiving what they know, is it real for them, they get pain, they experience it. We don't, because we are the ones giving it out, so we have no idea what we do. We have those all the time. These are our bad deeds.

For our bad deeds or our good deeds, who is responsible? Nobody else, me. I am responsible for my own deeds, good or bad. Each one of us is responsible for his or her own deeds. Nobody is going to pay your debts for you. Maybe we can borrow from future generations and leave them with the national debt! (laughter). Truly speaking this is the most important teaching that Buddha gave — what you normally call karma. They say cause and effect, but the bottom line is this: karma really tells you "I am responsible for my own deeds and you are responsible for yours." Each and every one of us, we are responsible to ourselves, whether we do something good or bad. That is reality. We are responsible for our deeds and if we do something wrong, can we correct it? Most of the time, it is possible to correct.

Then you may think, if I kill somebody, can I correct that? Can I bring that person back to life? No, you can't. But there are two things, l)you hurt somebody, 2) because you hurt somebody, you have some responsibility inside you. Those can be corrected. We cannot bring that person back, but that responsibility you can make lighter and lighter and finally you can get rid of it. That is the bottom line of puri-

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fication. You can compensate something. You cannot bring the past back into the future, yet you can compensate. [That is usually called the power of the base].

Power of regret. You do have to have regret. If you don't have regret, why should you want to be clean? You feel dislike, regret, all of them combined together. I dislike my hand being totally sticky so I wash it. (I try to make the regret a little lighter than it is.) You regret or dislike what you did and you realize it is not good, so you don't want do it again. Then you compensate, you generate love-compassion, or you take refuge.

Power of antidote action. What are you going to do to purify it? "I am going to lead everybody on an odyssey to freedom. That's what I am going to do. That's my compensation. I am going to meditate this, I am going to practice this, I am going to do this, I am going to do that."

Officially, as antidote actions the tradition recommends Vajrasattva recitation, meditating on emptiness, generating bodhimind and so forth. Understanding of emptiness is extremely important. Generating bodhimind is extremely important. Remember the Bodhisattvacharyavatara,

Except for perfect bodhicitta,

There is nothing able to withstand

The great and overwhelming strength of evil. 21

It says, " Such a powerful negativity cannot be destroyed except by the powerful bodhimind." So bodhimind is great. Understanding of emptiness is wonderful. Meditating on the Lamrim stages is one of the best, actually. When you can't do all these, when you have to depend on mantras alone, then you are recommended to say Vajrasattva recitations or things like that. That is really for the kind of people who cannot use their minds, people who cannot do things, who have to depend on only saying mantras. For them, you have this method, say mantras, say Vajrasattva recitation, a hundred times, a thousand times,

21 Shantideva, The way of the bodhisattva, ch. l, vs. 6.

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a hundred thousand times, a million times, a billion times, say it every day, all the time, until you die (laughter).

purification is an activity of mind. We create negativity, we are responsible, we purify, within our mind. As I said, Buddha says,

" All negativities can be purified". We have found this very true, because it is impermanent. It is true when Buddha tells you:

applying these four powers, that's how to purify. But do I know I get purified? No. Really no. You may have some dreams sometimes.

It is said that if you are washing and swimming in your dreams it is a sign of purification. But then, if you have been swimming the whole day,

it could be an imprint of what you did during the daytime. So it is not a certainty.

Sometimes you get stuck on this journey or adventure. You can't do anything, can't even think straight. You read books, you don't-understand.

You talk to somebody, but no one can give you a straight answer. When you get stuck, then when you do a purification, afterwards you can think again, you begin to understand "Oh yeah, the meaning is this, this is what it means." You get through.

That is one of the signs of purification we have. (So maybe I partly have to withdraw my words about not knowing you get purified). How much it is purified, we don't know. But it makes you move, it makes you be pushed forward. That means, whatever was

blocking you there was somehow moved or rather pushed away. If we are really seriously thinking and practicing, we get stuck lots of times.

The effects of purification and the effects of guru devotional practice combined together remove those blocks, get us unstuck. And that way we will know.

How do you practice this? You pick up this point, you say "I purify all that is negative" and you think.

There is one power you don't have to think about because you have already taken refuge, you have already generated love compassion by means of the four immeasurables.

So you simply regret what you did and commit yourself not to do it again. Then anything you do thereafter, like meditation, or being generous, doing something good, giving some help, all these types of things, will help as an antidote action. Practicing the Odyssey to Freedom is really wonderful. There is no other like it. As I told you, whatever practice

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you do, that practice is the main key to help wherever you need it. You don't have to go and search for something else, saying, " When I die, what should I do?" Or " Oh, my friend's dying, what can I do?" You do your practice. Practice is really training yourself how to proceed with difficult times and reaching over there without even going through the difficult times. That is the practice. If that practice doesn't help, if you have to go somewhere else to find how to say 0m Mani Padme Hum or something, it is very pathetic. So the antidote action is your meditation on Lamrim: your antidote action for the negativities is taking refuge, your antidote action for the negativities is generating bodhimind, your antidote action for the negative actions is gaining of wisdom, all of them are the antidote action. Thus, I hope the four powers are completed.

8

Rejoice in all that is positive

This is a practitioner's trick to multiply your good karmas. What is the best investment? One that is risk-free with high returns. Rejoicing is a risk-free Investment. If you rejoice when people do good things, you lose nothing, so it is risk—free. And according to Buddha, you gain double the benefit. So risk-free, hundred percent increase in earnings, what else you want? This is the spiritual business.

Really, rejoicing is very important. Our usual neuroses will not let us rejoice. Instead, they bring jealousy. When someone does something great, we say, "Oh yeah, wonderful, nice, but.. We put in all these 'buts' automatically. Rather than the positive, we bring in the negative side all the time. If it is constructive criticism, it is perfect and wonderful, but we are not constructive, we usually produce jealousy. It is because of our neurosis. So it is not constructive, but destructive criticism.

Ultimately, it looks like disliking that person. It is not so much disliking the person but rather having a narrow selfish mind. If you let that mind go, it would like to say, " Every good thing done anywhere

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should be mine, I should be the one who did it. And any bad thing anywhere, in any part of the world, should be done by someone else." That is the problem. That's why this destructive criticism comes in. That's why the jealousy comes in.

Dharma practice is changing those habits. So the Buddha tells you, rejoice. If you fry to rejoice, what do you have to block? You have to block the jealousy. As I told you, jealousy comes from the self-cherishing, self-grasping ego. Because "I should be the most important" . I once saw a movie called The Dark Crystal, where a sort of bird kept saying "I am still King" even when it was dying. That is the ego. We have that within us and all of those neuroses, if you look at them, come from there. I normally refer to it as the big boss inside, hiding behind a screen. So, rejoice.

9

Seek guidance

You say, "Oh I need help, I need a direction. Can you help me, can you guide me? Would you be timely, meaning would you be available for a while whenever I need it? I am seeking a timely rain, a timely shower when I need it." That is seeking guidance. You need different guidance at different levels because of multidimensional activities. You need guidance from time to time, from point to point. That's what you are telling your supreme field of merit here. In absolute reality, it is your Guru, it is Buddha, it is all of them, and you say " Would you be available whenever I need it?" In other words, you are really telling them "Don't let me down!" The good way is "Would you be available?" The bad way " Don't let me down!" That is seeking guidance. Seeking guidance is necessary. The number one rule in the Buddhist tradition is, you don 't volunteer to talk unless somebody requested you to do so. That's not only for teaching dharma, anything you have to do for somebody, you don't do it unless there is an invitation from the Other side, no matter what it may be. Let's say somebody is dying or has died, even then. You can pray by yourself, in your own home, but still you don't go there and do something unless you are invited. Even

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if you are invited, you have to look at the condition, see how much you can do. The point is, you only act when you've been asked, you do not volunteer, no matter how important it might be. That is why we ask guidance all the time.

10

Request to remain

This is more a part of ritual than anything else. It is the first verse of the seven limbed prayer in the Ganden Lha Gyema.

O venerable Gurus with white smiles of delight, Seated on lion-thrones, lotus and moon in the space before me,

I request you to remain for hundreds of eons in order to spread the teachings

And be the Supreme Field of Merit for my mind of faith.

Making a request to remain is a good omen for yourself to have a long and a healthy life.

11

Dedicate effort

Finally you dedicate all the efforts that you put in. If you don't dedicate, it can be lost. We're told that the application of the four powers I can destroy the negativities. Through the conditions you provide by the four different steps, you can destroy them. Likewise, hatred can destroy your positive karma. Positive karma is not immune to destruction. So, to protect that, you dedicate. When you dedicate something, the karmic rule is such that it goes for whatever it is meant for, [or was dedicated for.]. That's the reason why we dedicate 22

22 Also see pg. 49.

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12

Ask for Inspiration and Blessing

Ask for Inspiration and Blessing means that you go to the Buddha and say, "I am bowing down to you, I am making this request to you, don't forget, Om Muni Muni Maha Muni...." Actually, as if you are saying, "Hey Buddha, hey Buddha, I am telling you, hey Buddha, I am telling you. Om Muni Muni Maha Muniye Soha." Almost shaking or grabbing his feet, though of course you don't need to, but we go that far. That is asking for inspiration and blessing through saying the mantra and making the point. In the Lamrim, you have this at the end of the six preliminaries.