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Water bowl offerings on the beautiful altar that was set up next to Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s throne during the teachings organized by Gendun Drupa Center, Martigny, Switzerland, November 2018. Photo by Harald Weichhart.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche wrote a group of sixteen retreatants who had completed 100,000 water bowl offerings together and offered their practice to Rinpoche. They asked if they could do preliminary practices in this way, doing the practices as group and counting what they had collectively done. Here’s Rinpoche’s response:
In Tibet this happened: there was a great lama in Amdo, I’ve forgotten his name, who went to the monastery to look for the text on Gyalwa Gyatso. Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche advised of this. So this lama explained that in Tibet he put up a big tent and then many people made the water bowl offerings together. Then they offered them all together, so that means even though all the water bowls weren’t done by each person, the group counted them together. The lama used this technique in this way to finish them. Therefore, when you make an offering, you can offer even what has been offered by others.
I think similarly you can do this for light offerings. For example, even though many people have worked making the butter lamps and so forth, when you offer them you can offer them all and count them all. Like the water offerings, you can count all of them together.
Also, it’s the same with tsog offerings—even if the tsog is made by different people, when you offer it you can offer all the tsog together. So if there are one hundred people and they make a billion tsog offerings, then each person offers the billion tsog offerings.
Water bowl offerings on the altar at the teachings with Lama Zopa Rinpoche in Martigny, Switzerland, November 2018. Photo by Harald Weichhart.
But for other preliminary practices it isn’t the same. For example, if one person eats delicious ice cream, the other one hundred people or a billion people, or tens of thousands of people or one hundred thousand million billion people, don’t get the benefit of that one person eating ice cream.
I don’t think so, otherwise in that case, for example, if a monk eats ice cream does everyone feel like they have also eaten ice cream? When the monk’s stomach is full, is everybody’s stomach also full? When the monk is hungry, is everybody also hungry? When the monk eats potato pancakes, does everybody in France feel like they have eaten potato pancakes? If you can do that, then it’s OK.
When the monk does Vajrasattva practice, has everybody in the world done Vajrasattva? When the monk’s stomach is full after eating potato pancakes or eating momos, are all the people’s stomachs in the whole world full? Have they received the same momos or potato pancakes? If so, then it’s OK.
Anyway, from my heart I want to thank everyone, all the sixteen people, everybody. Billions of thanks for creating the cause of enlightenment. That means the cause of enlightenment for all the numberless sentient beings. That means each water bowl is done for the numberless hell beings’ enlightenment, the numberless hungry ghosts’ enlightenment, the numberless animals’ enlightenment—every mosquito, every single ant, every maggot, every slug, every spider—for all their enlightenment. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow! Every water bowl has been done for the human beings in the numberless universes, and for the numberless suras and numberless asuras. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow ! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!
From “Water Bowl Offerings as a Group Practice,” posted in Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s Online Advice Book in November 2018 on the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive:
https://www.lamayeshe.com/advice/water-bowl-offerings-group-practice
For more about water bowl offering, FPMT Education Services has created “The Preliminary Practice of Altar Set-up & Water Bowl Offerings” available from the FPMT Foundation Store as an ebook and PDF:
https://shop.fpmt.org/The-Preliminary-Practice-of-Altar-Set-up-Water-Bowl-Offerings-eBook_p_2577.html
“The Preliminary Practice of Altar Set-up & Water Bowl Offerings” is also available as a print booklet:
https://shop.fpmt.org/The-Preliminary-Practice-of-Altar-Set-up-Water-Bowl-Offerings-_p_339.html
Lama Zopa Rinpoche is the spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a Tibetan Buddhist organization dedicated to the transmission of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and values worldwide through teaching, meditation and community service.