Серия ежедневной практики, курс 10 — Мантра Чже Цонгкапы (Ганден Лхагьяма) (1998), занятие 3

[Speaker 2]
Session three.

[Speaker 1]
Making offerings during retreat is really important. I mean, more important than other times. So normally, when you're doing a long retreat, it would be good to, every morning, like half an hour, 45 minutes, and make the altar, you know, spend a lot of time in the altar, and make it really beautiful.

And it's a custom, especially in retreat, to take the time to do that. So if you're doing four sessions in retreat, the first session might be 45 minutes of offerings and 20 minutes of meditation or something, okay? It's important during retreat, especially.

So today we'll be making tormas. I'm not going to teach you any kind of secret torma or anything like that. You have to get that instruction from your tantric lama.

But we'll be making a simple torma offering cake. In tantra it's called a khandro chittor, and it's like a general all-purpose torma, all right? So we'll just get the general shape right, and how to make it.

And then we'll be making tonight what's called a gekdor. Gekdor is... And tor means you make an offering to local spirits and things like that to prevent obstacles during your retreat.

So we'll start with a chittor, like a general all-purpose torma today. And then we'll do tonight a gekdor. And when you do the torma, the general torma, then it should be made of what are called white substances like honey, sometimes sugar, white milk, white flour, and butter is considered a holy substance.

And a lot of this comes from... I don't know if you know this story, but Lord Buddha was trying to meditate according to sort of like an ascetic way of life, like just trying to see how long he could go hurting his body basically, and not really meditating on anything with content. And he did that for years in the forest after he ran away from his palace with his friends, five friends, four friends, and...

five, and called them denga. And it didn't work, but he like held out to the end, and he refused to eat any solid foods, and he was living off of little things. And then finally, he was sitting in meditation, and...

I don't remember whether he got enlightened first or afterwards, anyway, some lady, I think it was after he got enlightened. He gives up that way of life mentally, he gets enlightened, and then the first thing that happens is this woman comes and appears and offers him a bowl of... I think it was yogurt.

Huh? Rice? Food?

Okay, anyway. White, white substances. And then, this is like auspicious for making torma.

So torma should have these white, they're called the karpos, white substances, okay? So, the normal ingredients are some kind of flour. In Tibet they might use sampa.

Rinpoche likes to use Wonder Bread. Okay, I mean, he says the cheaper and whiter it is, the better. You know, like the kind that turns into paper in your mouth, and that's really good for making tormas.

And then there'll be milk, then there'll be clarified butter, ghee. When you clarify butter, try to use... I think it's the sweet kind that's not good, because it burns easily.

The salted kind is better. Like, they sell two kinds in the store. The sweet kind tends to burn, and after it burns you can't light it after that.

Okay, so if you... And then, normally you should boil it for maybe 45 minutes or something, and it'll start to separate. The whey will go down to the...

the nigma will go down to the bottom, and then the rest will be clarified butter, and there'll be a little foam on the top. So the idea is to get the foam off, pour the rest through a strainer, a pretty fine strainer into a jar or something, and then throw out the rest. When you get down to the...

It looks like tofu at the bottom or something, a little bit more gooey than that, and you throw that out. Then what you have left over will burn nicely in butter lamps, and that's what you need to make tormas. The butter has two functions in a torma.

One is to... part of the ingredients, and then one is... you normally paint the torma afterwards with the clarified butter.

If you're doing other kinds of retreats, you put coloring in the paint, a certain coloring, but we're not going to do that. Then you put also honey inside, and also some kind of sacred substance. So we'll be giving you a little drop of something that you have to throw in just before you start finalizing it, okay?

And then there's a thing called kargyen. Kargyen means ornamentation that you put on the outside, and that has different meanings. So I'll teach you how to do it, but we're not going to go into much into the meaning, okay?

Then it's a custom to leave a little ball of the torma offering to the side, some of the dough, and then you make these little tormalets, okay, like that tall, and I'll show you how to make them. And then during retreat, you have an option of either making a new torma every day. I mean, a real torma takes about seven hours to make.

The real tormas for Vajrayogini Leru, they take about seven hours. So the lamas have made this custom where you take a little piece of the original torma and you save it in the freezer, and then every day you take a piece and you put it on the torma plate, and that represents a new torma, okay? If you're really lazy, you can use cookies or stuff like that.

But I think we'd make a nice torma, and we'll make the tormalets, okay? And then you plan for how many days you're going to be in retreat. So if it's a ten-day retreat, you make ten of these little, they look like pyramids, and you keep them off to the side, like in a refrigerator is good.

And then every day in the morning, you take one and you add it to the plate, okay? It's also a nice way of keeping count of how many days you're in retreat. And it feels kind of neat as you see them pile up at the bottom of the torma.

If you're in a two-month retreat or something, then you know that you're deep into the retreat, if not from your state of mind, then from how many little tormas are there. But it gives you a feeling that you're making progress or something. So we'll do that.

And then the torma tonight will be for Gektor. And then when we close the boundaries, which will be tomorrow evening, you use the Gektor. And each person will make their own Gektor, and each person will offer their own Gektor to prevent local spirits.

Basically, you're creating a lot of energy in someone else's airspace. And it's like, please don't mind. And that's what a Gektor is for.

And that's how we'll do it. When you actually make the torma, you can go put it on your own altar. So each room will have, you know, three, four, five tormas on the altar.

And then you have to feed it every day with the little torma. So the day after tomorrow, you have to bring one of those little tormas. I hope we have refrigerator space, a couple hundred.

They're about this big. Oh, we can keep them outside. Frozen is fine.

Maybe somewhere where the animals won't get to them. And in the instruction books on tormas, they say keep them in a place, sometimes called a torkang, which means like a little... on your altar, a little glass box, so that mice won't get to it.

Like if you're doing your retreat in Arizona or the Bendigo or something, and wallabies might attack or something, then you keep it locked up. Because it's very distracting when you're meditating to have mice. You'll find that they love altars, and they start crashing things and breaking things and leaving poop on your altar.

So the idea is to keep them out of range, out of reach, like those critters, okay? Up high somewhere. Okay, so get ready.

I don't know, how many people have worked with dough? I don't know. Most people.

Like, the trick with dough is don't add too much milk, okay? I mean, don't add too much liquid. If you add too much liquid, you can't go back.

You see what I mean? Unless your friend has got extra bread or something. But the trick is to be very, very conservative on the liquid, okay?

So the first job is to take about... start with half the bread, okay? And...

I'll show you. I suggest you don't use the... don't use the end piece, okay?

Then you take this and break it into little pieces like about that big and throw it... Huh? You can use a...

don't use the end piece, okay? It won't work. So you just take off little pieces about that big.

You know, in the monastery we use a chop knife, but if you don't know how to use one, you probably cut your fingers off. Just break off little pieces. You're going to have to do the whole loaf, so do half the loaf now.

Okay? That's fine. You don't need...

I don't think you need a spoon and all that. We're going to mix it up with your hands. By the way, your hands are supposed to be totally, absolutely clean, okay?

I forgot to tell you that. No, you're supposed to really go in and wash. That's why I took a shower and shaved.

By the way, if you drop something, don't put it back in, okay? No, the idea is it's totally pure, okay? It's also good to have an apron on when you do this.

Apron. Like a full-length apron is really useful. It's going to be an offering to Je Tsongkapa, so, you know, think about it while you're doing it.

At the end of the retreat, it's good to put the Dharma someplace holy. They say like a body of water is very good. Throw it into a body of water, like a lake.

We have a pond. Put it up in the trees, okay? And then in the morning, everybody should spend time on the altar, okay?

Don't like... You know, take time and do the offerings. Very important in the morning.

Take like half an hour. Make it really nice. Clean it off.

Polish the bowls, even if they're already clean. You know what I mean? We'll be passing some honey around.

Take out about two good teaspoons and spread it on the bread, okay? Too much is not good, because then the tormas tend to... They get fungus on them towards the end of your retreat.

Too much honey is not good. I mean, I'm just speaking practically. They start to turn green halfway through the retreat.

Unless you're doing green tar, it seems kind of inauspicious. You can use the... The ends are okay.

I mean, you don't have to cut the crust off. It's okay. If you didn't use it, it's okay.

Your torma will just be wimpy. Two big gollops, okay? So you can get some on your neighbor.

Okay, then one teaspoon of this, okay? This is generally called duci or amrta, okay? Nectar, deathlessness, okay?

Special stuff. You can use special pill. It depends on what your torma is.

There's different kinds of special pills, okay? Just one teaspoon of the amrta, okay? If you have a pill, you put the pill itself in.

Okay, then you start to add milk. I suggest you have your friend pour the milk, and you mush, okay? Because you can't do both, because your hands get all mushy, okay?

And then pour the milk in really slow. If you put in too much milk, you can't take it out, okay? And then the torma won't stand up, okay?

But what you want to do is you want to make a very stiff dough, like a silly putty. No, you don't have to pour things in order. You're going to need half the milk for this evening, okay?

And you won't need more than half this container of milk, okay?

[Speaker 2]
If you don't know...

[Speaker 1]
If you don't know how to knead dough, put your body into it, put your body weight down on it, and it goes a lot faster. If you want to see, the consistency should be like that, okay? And you have to mush in all the pieces, okay?

Keep going until you mush in all the pieces. You got to put your weight into it, okay? You do a lot better if you get your weight into it, like actually.

You keep going like this and flopping it over. You got to get all the lumps out, because after a few days, they'll dry out and they'll fall off. When you finish the first half, then take a little bit of the wax paper, because it'll dry out, and wrap it up in that.

And then do the second half, okay? All right? Don't forget on the second half, if you need honey, you need another dollop of honey on the second half.

[Speaker 2]
Don't forget the honey.

[Speaker 1]
Then it'll start to, it'll get squat. It'll start to squat, and then it'll go. By the way, when it's too dry, you got to add milk immediately, okay?

Or else you can't, you won't, you got to add milk immediately and start kneading like crazy. This is perfect. You feel how it does that, something you said?

Yeah, yeah. When you finish the first half, do the second half. Okay, so make two equal balls.

Over towards Ian. Okay, watch. You guys ready?

Take one ball. Okay, and Elizabeth's going to help the people in the back because she's done it, she's done it a lot of times, okay? So we're going to make a cone, we're going to make a cone out of one whole ball.

Okay, that's for Jetsun Kappa, the main one, okay? So you go like that, and you work it into a cone. You make it into a cone.

And you can let the weight of it just, the weight of it will carry it down, see? This is how you, when you find out if you put too much or not enough. If it's too dry, it'll start to crack now.

We should have put a spoonful of ghee in it, but we forgot. Normally you throw in a spoonful of ghee, but we're going to put it on the outside.

[Speaker 2]
We're going to put it on the outside.

[Speaker 1]
If you made it too wet, make it a little bit longer because it's going to collapse. It's going to shorten its... When you get close to that shape, Okay, when you get close to the end like that, then you're going to snip off pieces from the four sides, okay?

So, like these three fingers, okay? So you go like that, okay? And set it down.

You're going to take a chunk out of each of the four sides, and then you've got to fix the bottom. Okay, and the bottom can come in a little bit. It tapers in a little bit.

How big are the chunks I should be? It should be about... about this big, okay?

All four, four chunks out of the bottom. Okay, you pinch them off with your three fingers, your thumb and your first two fingers. And then you fix the bottom back.

So the bottom can taper in a little bit. It's okay. Pretty good, pretty good.

A little fat, but pretty good. A little bit longer. By the way, there's like 20 different kinds of tormas, so you know.

Work out the cracks now, because they'll expand during the week, okay? It shouldn't have any cracks in it. If you see any white spots, try to...

We're going to paint them, but it doesn't help. We paint them with ghee afterwards, but if there's a big crack, it's not going to help. Yeah, Demi-Vise is pretty good in the back.

That's good. Folds in the door are like dangerous. They're not like fatal, okay?

A little more angle. Hold it... If you don't get the shape, hold it up like this, upside down.

If it has a little taper at the bottom like that, it's good. See? See there's a little...

That's where you pinch the stuff off. And it's a little bit of a... Yours is good.

Is it going to stay up? Okay. Okay, ready for step two?

Okay, take that little piece that you pinched. No, you don't... You keep them separate.

Those four pieces are separate, okay? This is going to be a flower petal, and it gets attached to the side about here. Okay?

And I'll show you how to make it. They'll just... Make them a little chubbier.

It's like petals. It'll be petals on the four directions. Okay?

And it... It's like that. It's triangular at the bottom.

See? This is the outside, and this is the side that's going to stick to the torma. Okay?

And this is the outside. And if you look here, it's... When you look down from the top, it's going to look like a petal sticking out, like a lotus petal.

Okay, like that. And the bottom is... It's like tapered, like a V.

So it goes from a V up to that, and then this is going to be stuck on the edge of the torma. So when you look down from the top, you'll see a... Like a circular thing like that.

Okay? Okay. It should look like a...

I don't know, like a turbine coming off a jet, the back of a jet.

[Speaker 2]
Right?

[Speaker 1]
I think start... Start triangular and then work it out. Okay, like that at the top.

Yeah. And then... Then it's going to be attached right...

[Speaker 2]
Right about here.

[Speaker 1]
Okay? And... You've got to make sure it's...

It's like... Like the line between the piece and the torma, is that you get it really in there, because they'll start to fall off halfway through your retreat. Yeah, it's really good to use a piece...

A little bit of milk, and run your thumb along it, like that, and it'll join. When you get to the second one, you might want to put it on your... You put it on the plate, okay?

Okay, like that. Then you put on the other three. If you have a small plate like this, put it in the back.

Don't put it right in the center. Put it towards the back a bit, because you're going to have to fit two smaller ones side by side. Okay?

Got it? If you pinched it right, you've got the shape that's halfway finished already. Like about halfway up, yeah.

And then you start adding the other ones. This is... This is for Jetsun Kappa.

He's very... If it won't stick, use lots of milk. Midnight at the AC...

[Speaker 2]
How do you do it?

[Speaker 1]
When you finish that, split the rest into two equal balls, and make two more cone tormas. But we're not going to make the four petals on them, okay? So this becomes one cone, and this becomes one cone.

The other half. Okay? Two more cones.

Gatote and Kirite. Then with the other half, you make two small ones like that. Okay?

And leave some space in front, because that's where the ten are going to go. Okay? We're going to do the ten tormlets tonight.

Okay? All right? So leave a little platform here in front.

And put the directions of the petals like the, you know, one facing towards you. All right? This one will be for Gatote.

This one will be for Jetsun Kappa. This will be for Kirite. Okay?

Oh... Do you get any merit points off for a crooked torma? I think you go to crooked torma hell and they make you make tormas all day.

They make you make tormas all day. And they fall apart just as you make them. Okay, if you're done, which, don't worry, don't worry, okay?

Don't rush, okay? Don't worry. But if we start the next step, then people can help you.

You just take one of these paintbrushes, okay? And dip it in the ghee. And paint the tormas, okay?

And be generous, okay? A lot. It's like an offering and it keeps them from drying out also.

And it's important to do it before they start to dry out. Yeah, it's great. You're so great.

And then put lots of butter on them. If it drips down and makes a little pool here, that's okay. Okay?

Don't be cheap, okay? Put lots of it on it. And it'll start to dry and then add some more and make it thick, okay?

And if it starts to, if it starts to collect on the dish, don't worry, it's okay. We have more brushes? We got eight brushes going around, so just be patient and the brush will reach you.

[Speaker 2]
If you don't have a brush, help people do it.

[Speaker 1]
If the butter collects in those little lotus petals, that's fine, don't worry about it. It's good, okay? We're almost done.

Don't be shy with the butter, okay? Dump a lot of butter on there. Don't be shy with the butter.

My diamond cutting teacher used to say, that looks good. Okay, I think we're ready for the next step. Card dance.

Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Last step. Last step.

[Speaker 1]
Take the other plate, all right? Put one piece of cheese. Now, in Tibet, they use animal fat and ice.

You mold it in a bowl of ice with your fingers for like an hour. And Rinpoche likes this method, okay? Or they might use wax and butter, okay?

But this is, this is, Rinpoche likes to use this in the States, okay? Then you take, you start with this. You need to find a bottle cap, okay, that's about this big.

And the point is that halfway up the torma, there'll be this, this round, like, moon-looking thing stuck on the torma here, and then there'll be one stuck up here, okay? And the one up here will be smaller, and then you use a, like a Worcester top, okay? And, and if you're making it really extensive, you, you have three or four.

And then you have all these decorations at the bottom. We're not going to, that takes like six, seven, eight hours. So, so you take that, and then you, it's like a cookie cutter, okay?

And you go like that. And then the thing, sometimes it won't come out. So you try like that.

Then if you get desperate, you take that toothpick, and without destroying the shape, you know, you work it out. Okay? So then you make a, all right?

Then, let me see. Then you break off a toothpick, like about a third of it, okay? You should use round toothpicks.

They work better, okay? You want to hold it up while I do it? How's that?

Careful. Whoa. Okay, and then you, you, this is called a kargen, by the way, okay?

Then you, kar, kar means white, gen means ornament, okay? Then you, you might want to have somebody hold the back. You pull it up about there, and then you just spear it onto it, in the middle.

And then leave, leave a little bit of the toothpick sticking out, like just a little knob of the toothpick sticking out, okay? And don't forget, you've got to leave room for another one up here, okay? All right?

So try that. Here's the, here's the big cap, and we'll pass around a little cap. I should have made more of it.

Then you take the other half of the toothpick, break off some of it. Okay, like that. Let me see.

Yeah, and then make three of the little ones. So we'll put one each of the little ones on this. Do you have that black one?

If you want to send a mission to the kitchen and find some more bottle tops and stuff, that's okay. If somebody wants to go in. Someone's almost done.

Yeah, one big one, three small ones. Don't, don't press the, don't press the toothpick all the way and leave a little knob hanging out, okay?

[Speaker 2]
Half is too much.

[Speaker 1]
Half is too much, like a third. Sorry?

[Speaker 2]
I like that.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, the point goes in, the broken part goes out. Okay, one more. Now you got that ugly toothpick hanging out, so we make a little tab to cover it.

And we got macaroni sticks here for you.

[Speaker 2]
Okay?

[Speaker 1]
I usually use a plastic straw, but we didn't have any, so. So you stick this, stick it down in the cheese, try to blow the thing out.

[Speaker 2]
It doesn't go.

[Speaker 1]
Then you can push it out with a toothpick, okay? It works if you have a straw. Yeah, see it's a little knob like that?

And then you put it over the, over the end of the toothpick hanging out. And it should cover it, okay?

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
That's what the little knob looks like, okay?

[Speaker 2]
On the top?

[Speaker 1]
See? There?

[Speaker 2]
And if it doesn't, if it doesn't come out quite round, you can mold it with your hands before you put it.

[Speaker 1]
Then you're finished, okay? Then tonight we got another, we're about halfway done, okay? No, don't change, you gotta paint it before you put the toothpick.

If you ever do it the opposite way, it's a little challenging, because you're using colors.

[Speaker 2]
You have to use butter.

[Speaker 1]
What you can do is suck it this way.

[Speaker 2]
No, what do we do?

[Speaker 1]
You can push it with a toothpick. By the way, the cheese dries out, so you might want to wrap it before we finish, okay?

[Speaker 2]
Wrap it.

[Speaker 1]
Then we'll be, Are we gonna use cheese again? Yeah, we're gonna use the cheese again tonight. When you finish, carefully, slowly, holding lightly, take it to your room.

And I suggest you put some aluminum foil under it or something that won't, because there'll be butter underneath. And set it on your altar.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, I still lost a little, I'm gonna wash my hands, and I'll...

[Speaker 1]
And then we'll see you back here. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. This is the end of Session Three.