“The Ngor lamas from the Vajrayana Institute really went to bat for me. I prepared for two weeks. Except for the long Hevajra sadhana it was all done in Tibetan—4 hours long. My Vajra Master was also named Sonam Gyatso and he attempted to teach me the text before hand. It took four monks to perform everything. One to keep me reading in the right part of the text. One to pour butter. One to throw seeds and grasses into fire. Definitely one of the harder things I’ve ever had to perform.” I texted the above to a Vajra sister who knew I was in pursuit of accomplishing a fire puja while in India.
Two-and-a-half weeks after leaving Dehradun and then traveling to Manduwala to request a fire puja from the generous lamas mentioned above, I undertook, with their indispensable aid, the pacification fire puja for Hevajra—having completed, less than two months earlier, the requisite nine month retreat and challenging recitation numbers. Five days before undertaking this fire puja, having waited over forty-years, I had a life altering experience I now call an ‘Avadhuti-pa lay-down’ (This is akin to an accomplished Shivasana—or, ‘a profound pacification.’) It occurred while preparing for the long awaited Homa ritual in my modest guest room at Ngor Monastery. Afterwards, I understood ‘pacification’ very differently—for me, it’s the same as the Third Noble Truth of Cessation. This truth, a law never heard as such (though some believe it may be based on an ancient Indian medicinal formula of diagnosis, cause, prognosis, and treatment) until Buddhas taught The Four Noble Truths, turning his unique Dharma Wheel in Deer Park at Sarnath (see my entry on Sarnath). In general, Gothama taught about the unsatisfactory nature of human existence, that the causes of karma and the defilements of body, voice and mind, both behavioral and conceptually ingrained can be eliminated because karma and the defilements take place within us. The basic situation of all beings is the three existential marks of suffering: Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (dissatisfaction) Anatta (no soul). This last one, meaning no inherent being, also means people can and do change in life, as well as life to life. For that reason, we don't need to depend on anyone else to remove the cause of suffering. One’s own thoughts, after all, is the architect of this seeming reality, as Buddha instructed in the Dhammapada. To expedite, however, the matter of our and others’ salvation, we can find the Buddha alive and well in the form of an incarnated Buddha, greatly kind, who will teach us. First, having been well-tested and found to be a genuinely ‘wise person’ (as referred to in Cambodian smote chant-sang by the monks there) we can and should avail ourselves of the lightening quick Vajrayana methods and thereby, with great faith and diligence, become that “one in one-hundred-thousand” practitioner who attains Enlightenment.
On the morning of the fire puja—March 26, 2023 (5 - 2- 2150 of the Tibetan lunar calendar: “Avoid feast with relatives. A good day for fire puja.”)—I awoke early with the visual form and physical presence of HH Sakya Trichen standing near. This happened several times during my nine-month Hevajra retreat, especially in the beginning when I would start to sleep through a session, or just if I needed to wake up early for whatever reason. Roundly motivated, I turned to my altar and did Birwapa’s yoga. Then, as my hot water heater stopped working after my first night’s stay, I took the usual cold shower. I put on white pants and shirt, went outside next to the Mahakala shrine room, and had tea and samosas with the younger monks. The key monks helping me with the ritual—all graduates of the Ngor Vajrayana Institute—had already set up two seats and tables close together, equipped with bells, dorjes, skull cups, shells filled with sprinkling water and kusha grass. Set at my place were two large brass tongs with spoons at their ends, one round and one oblong. These were for mixing ‘melted butter.’ They were imposing, medieval looking utensils, and took up a lot of space on my desk. They hung over the edge above an oversized pot containing vegetable oil—a substitution for the melted butter. Next to the Vajra Master’s desk was an assortment of grains, beans, grasses, and some sturdy little sticks. First thing up was to perform the long Hevajra Sadhana. Sonam Gyatso, the Vajra Master, did his in Tibetan and I did mine in English. The allotted time was a third of what I normally take. My performance of the sadhana was Sakya and not Ngor and at a certain point I detected some disapproval of the busyness of what I was doing. He was mostly reciting, whereas I had lots of mudras and gestures I was taught to do. Of course, over the years, one may begin to elaborate on or omit necessary ritual details. Going as fast as I could, I barely managed to finish when he did. Then it was time to start the actual fire puja, which has three main parts. This is when my real troubles began, as I had to keep my eyes on the text and read Tibetan at a good clip, while also copying the Vajra Master’s mudras. This was medium hard as I was familiar with the text and with Vajrayana practice in general enough to anticipate what to do. But then there was also offerings to make by placing grains or grasses, again with the right timing, in a bowl, leaving the right amount for the next offerings, and also finishing up at the right time to match the Vajra Master’s necessary repetitions of mantras. At first I couldn’t coordinate everything I had to do. My Lama friend Dorje Drakpa sat next to me and pointed to each word and made sure I read it. He pronounced some things loudly in my ear when I was using bell and dorje to keep me on track. It also took me awhile to use the giant tongs properly, receiving the flowing oil into the round spoon and then pouring that into the square one. On page thirty-three of the text a hundred of these must be done. When my shoulders started to give out, wracked with pain, it reminded me of holding a video camera above my head while video-graphing concerts. This instilled some confidence that I could actually get through it. Also, there were several time I said prayers to my gurus just to get me through certain points in the puja and that was definitely one of them. Those large number of offering come in the second part, I believe, and is followed up by recitations of Hevajra’s root, essence, near essence, the Ali-kali, the Mother’s mantra, and then those of the eight goddesses. Offerings are also made at each one of these recordings. Then 5,000 of the near essence mantra must be said in 10 rounds of 500’s with recitations of daranis and prayers in an interpolated order, repeated three times, with bell and dorje being rung at the end. The Vajra Master did one or two of these rounds with me and then left one of the monks to help me do the rest. It took around forty minutes. At one point, during recitations of the near essence mantra, I experienced more of that ‘profound pacification’ of which I spoke. It was an out-of-the-body experience mixed with identitylessness and extreme elation. The last part of the puja was to finish up offering the remainders of seeds, grains, sticks and grasses; then doing lineage prayers, torma offerings, and the completion of the rest of the sadhana, which I was able to do in English again. Once we were done, I started laughing with relief and happiness. The monks laughed some too as I’m sure it’d been a bit of a struggle to assist a minimally trained aspirant to accomplish one of their treasured, more complicated, Ngor pujas. Interesting to me, they wanted to know if I was satisfied. Way more than satisfied, I answered in superlatives. I said it was amazing and difficult and I was so happy to accomplish it. I let on too that I’d worried I might not, in this lifetime, be able to accomplish it because of the difficulties in arranging it, meeting all the necessary qualifications, and that I had also waited too long in my lifetime to do my Hevajra retreat. (This last reason is the inspiration for a work in progress entitled, ‘Sonam’s Better Late than Never Hevajra Retreat.’)
The very next day, as a kind of reward, I traveled up to Tso Pema, the lake Guru Padmasambhava created out of a punitive funeral pyre. The collective consciousness in this very Tibetan, other-world lollapalooza is a meditative concentration likened to a cloth made of spaciousness, repeatedly dipped into a pool of Purity’s most blissful Clear Light. The Mother Prajnaparamita, praised above, is also in constant attendance here, receiving thousands of Tibetan Buddhist and Indian Shaivist pilgrims each year. Hopefully, a more expanded—and expansive—writing on Tso Pema will also one day appear in these pages.
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