You can also walk with meditation on impermanence and death. With every step you take, think how your life is running out, getting shorter and shorter. The faster you walk, the more aware of how quickly your life is finishing you become. Each step is bringing you closer to death and, if you fail to purify your negative karma, to the immeasurable suffering of the lower realms. (Similarly, when you’re driving your car, feel like a condemned person being led to the gallows, each moment bringing you closer to your execution.)
This is how to practice the mindfulness of life finishing quickly, bringing you ever closer to death and the lower realms. This meditation helps you deal with whatever problems you are facing right now—relationship problems, emotional problems, all your problems. Reflecting on impermanence and death puts an immediate end to desire, jealousy and anger. It quickly brings incredible peace to your mind and makes you more determined than ever to practice Dharma and not to waste your life. It encourages and inspires you to make everything you do a Dharma action. It is a very powerful meditation. Eating with bodhicitta
Why should you offer your food and drink before you consume it? It’s not because the buddhas are hungry. If you have taken refuge, of course, you have a commitment to offer all your food and drink, however, every time you offer your food and drink to the Guru Triple Gem, you create many causes of enlightenment.
You are creating merit not only because you are making offerings to the Buddha. You are also making offerings to the Dharma and the Sangha, so your offering is that much more powerful.
Furthermore, since you are making offerings to the Guru, you are creating the most extensive merit of all.
This practice comes from Guru Shakyamuni Buddha’s compassion. By making it a refuge precept to offer all your food to the Triple Gem, Lord Buddha is making you create countless causes for inconceivable happiness every day, ensuring that you attain the peerless happiness of enlightenment—the complete eradication of all mistakes of mind and the achievement of all realizations—as soon as possible.
There is also another very important reason for offering all your food and drink to the Guru Triple Gem. The comfort and enjoyment you get from eating and drinking—your very life and health, your perfect human rebirth, your long life—all the benefits you experience every day, hour, minute and second, come from the kindness of other sentient beings, from even their mere existence; from their having endured unbearable suffering through being killed, tortured and harmed in other ways; from other people creating so much negative karma in growing food for you. This is what the food and drink you enjoy costs other sentient beings.
For example, there are visible and invisible sentient beings in the water you use for cooking and drinking. When the water is boiled, they all suffer. Think about the wheat you use for cakes, noodles or bread or the rice on which you base so many meals. In the West, the fields are plowed by machine, killing many small creatures such as insects, worms and mice. In the East, oxen are used to pull the plows, so not only do the tiny creatures suffer as before, but also these beasts of burden suffer greatly by having to work hard for long hours under the blazing sun. If land has to be cleared, the fires and bulldozing kill and injure many more sentient beings. Not only do farmers give sentient beings much harm and create much negative karma on our behalf, but they themselves also have to work long, hard hours preparing the fields, looking after the crops, harvesting the grain and getting it ready for sale.
Think how much suffering goes into each grain of rice you eat. Then think about the previous grain from which it came and the beginningless continuity of all those grains of rice. By thinking back carefully on the beginningless continuity of every grain of rice you eat, you can get a deep feeling for just how many sentient beings have suffered, created negative karma and been killed in order that you can eat. As a result, you’ll no longer be able to bear eating food simply for your own benefit, happiness or enjoyment.
It’s the same with the vegetables and salad that you eat. Countless sentient beings have suffered by being harmed or killed in the ground or by having to harm or kill others by tilling the soil, poisoning worms and insects and so forth.
If you understand all this, there’s no way you’ll be able to eat simply for your own selfish enjoyment. You won’t be able to stand doing that. You’ll feel that you must make the food and drink you consume beneficial for others, especially those who have suffered so much in bringing it to you.
Therefore, first offer your food and drink to the Guru Triple Gem, and then dedicate the merits of this offering to those sentient beings who suffered so much on your behalf, as mentioned in the prayer below. By transforming each instance of eating and drinking into Dharma in this way, you create inconceivable merit, which becomes not only the cause of your own enlightenment, but by the way also brings you liberation from samsara, good rebirths and happiness in future lives, and, in the absence of clinging, happiness in this life too. And when you dedicate the merits of your offering to others, you bring all these different levels of happiness to all other sentient beings as well. Food offering meditation
Generate bodhicitta motivation by thinking, ‘‘The purpose of my life is to free all sentient beings from suffering and lead them to happiness, especially the peerless happiness of full enlightenment. This universal responsibility is mine alone. In order to succeed in this, I must first attain full enlightenment myself. Therefore, I am going to practice the yoga of offering food and drink to the Guru Triple Gem.’’
Then reflect on the emptiness of yourself, the food, the action of offering, the merit field and the action of eating. Visualize first that the food you are offering becomes a vast ocean of nectar and the bowl it’s in becomes a huge jeweled container. Now, multiply this and visualize numberless huge, jeweled containers filling all of space. Then recite the blessing mantra, which causes each buddha to receive numberless offerings:
OM NAMO BHAGAVATE VAJRA SARA PRAMARDINE TATHAGATAYA ARHATE SAMYAK SAMBUDDHAYA TAYATHA OM VAJRE VAJRE MAHAVAJREMAHATEJA VAJREMAHA VIDYA VAJREMAHA BODHICITTA VAJRE MAHA BODHI MANDO PASAM KRAMANA VAJRE SARVA KARMA AVARANAVISHODHANA VAJRESOHA.(3x)
Then make the following offering prayers: The guru is Buddha, the guru is Dharma, The guru is Sangha also.
The guru is the source of all happiness — I offer this food to all gurus.
In all future lives, may I and those around me Never be separated from the Triple Gem, Continuously make offerings to the Triple Gem, And always receive the blessings of the Triple Gem.
The Guru Pujaand other tantric practices explain that by making an offering to even one ‘‘pore’’ of the guru, which means, for example, one of the guru’s pets, you accumulate more merit than you would by making that offering to all the buddhas of the past, present and future and the buddhas of the ten directions.
Therefore, when it comes to creating extensive merit, there is no more powerful merit field than your virtuous friend. That’s why Nagarjuna said, ‘‘Abandon all other offerings. Make offerings to only your guru. By pleasing him you will attain sublime wisdom, the state of omniscience.’’
If you can, elaborate on the method above by making offerings to the Triple Gem and all holy objects—statues, stupas, scriptures and so forth—in the ten directions, seeing them all as manifestations of your guru’s holy mind, your offering generating infinite bliss in his holy mind.
Make charity of oceans of nectar to all sentient beings, fully satisfying each and every one. Dedicate the merit of this charity to their liberation and enlightenment.