Some answers on tsog practice

The best presentation on the practice of tsog found in Vajrayana literature in English and Portuguese is in Chagdud Khadro’s book Red Tara Commentary: Instructions for the Concise Practice known as “Red Tara: An Open Door to Bliss and Ultimate Awareness”. Although quite concise, it is a very profound explanation.

The practice of tsog (tsogkhor in Tibetan, or ganachakra in Sanskrit, sometimes also called ganapuja) is unique to Vajrayana Buddhism in classical India, China, Tibet, and Japan—though it is more common today in Buddhism connected to the peoples of the Himalayas, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim, as well as other regions in northern India where Vajrayana is practiced, along with centers in other countries linked to this Himalayan Buddhism.

Tsogkhor or ganachakra literally means “gathering in a circle” and represents the union of the deity with the practitioners, the sangha with the lineage, and the offering substances with non-discriminative wisdom, which does not operate through attachment or aversion.

It includes the five flavors, as well as mamsa and madana (alcohol and meat, called “samaya substances” or commitment substances), which other forms of Buddhism and some non-Buddhist religions often judge as degraded substances. The use of substances and antinomian practices (which break expectations of what is considered acceptable) is characteristic of tantra¹Tantrayana is another name for Vajrayana, just as Sutrayana (the vehicle of sutras) is another name for Mahayana and Hinayana combined. It is worth remembering that Vajrayana is not a separate school from Mahayana, but is itself a form of Mahayana, as well as containing the teachings of the Buddha sometimes called Hinayana. The notion of yana is not similar to tradition or lineage but is a cumulative concept for classifying the Buddha’s teachings., whether Buddhist or Hindu. Beyond the substances themselves, the integration of sensory pleasure as a meditation practice is unique to Vajrayana.

The practice of Tsog must involve substances considered impure by the dualistic mind. This is exemplified by the use of alcohol and meat—though some teachers have expressed that in cultures where meat consumption is common, that is, in places where people find it normal to eat meat, the use of this substance may not be appropriate or ideal. On the other hand, as dharma centers often attract vegetarians, with their usual combination of virtuous aspirations and hints of judgment and spiritual hygienistic attitudes, it may well be that meat remains suitable as a commitment substance.

A recurring situation in the hagiographies of great Vajrayana teachers is that at some point, they are offered (by their guru or a dakini) “unacceptable” substances. They eventually accept them, thereby overcoming self-centered attachment, often tied to hygienic, moralistic, or spiritual superiority²Here, a connection can be identified with the idea of the spiritual ideals of fascism. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche says that Buddhism is the deepest form of anarchism, and thus, Vajrayana is precisely “antifa Buddhism.”. They abandon attachment to their social position and ideological identification with purist ideals, embracing non-duality. For example, a person who was of the Brahmin caste may have a caste-less guru, and thus an effective factor in destroying their social pride may be accepting pig foot soup and cachaça, the most disgusting things for a Brahmin—by sharing these substances, as well as going to the market to buy and prepare them for the guru, they abandon self-centeredness and the strong sense of identity tied to caste or social position. These are exactly the things that, if another Brahmin saw them eating or buying, would fill them with horror and judgment, considering them degraded and unclean, just as they view the substances themselves. The person who partakes in these no longer belongs to what once gave them “superior” identity. This kind of overcoming of preferences and identity ties, which we sometimes sustain by simply avoiding or accepting the consumption of certain substances, is a crucial part of tsog.

These practices are sometimes kept secret because unprepared people, upon seeing or receiving such substances, may generate conceptualizations, which in turn may cause them many obstacles. For example, a vegan may want to avoid Vajrayana because it seems to contain practices that create exceptions to what they consider irrevocable principles. In such cases, insisting that the person eat meat, or even abruptly revealing that such practices exist in Vajrayana, is inadvisable.

However, food offerings are common to absolutely all forms of Buddhism—as an essential form of dana, donation, generosity—the first perfection to be practiced. This is done at the altar and also directly to monks, since the time of the Buddha.

In the time of the Buddha, among monks, there was also a mentality of not judging what was offered, as it was what the person had and could offer—and the main purpose of this offering issue is to open a field where people with little or no merit can generate merit. Moreover, as a monk in the Buddha’s time, one could not even choose whom to ask; during the alms round, a street was determined, and one went from house to house along it, regardless of whether it was a place of poor or rich, clean or dirty, sick or healthy, degraded or holy people—or whether they ate meat, chayote, snails, or only alfalfa sprouts. The only exception would be an animal specially slaughtered for the monk, which in this case the monk should refuse. Of course, in Mahayana Buddhism in general, when a person produces or buys their own food, vegetarianism is preferred or required.

Sometimes some Vajrayana practitioners who are unaware of the rules of tsog try to bypass vegetarian vows they have taken by offering a large amount of meat, which lasts basically until the next tsog. Since the consecrated substance should be seen as wisdom and not as meat, they think they are being clever consuming meat supposedly without breaking vows. However, the abuse of the tsog substance (eating too much, using tsog as sustenance or casual food) is itself a breach.

The traditional offerings in all forms of Buddhism are: water for drinking, water for washing (or bathing, or washing feet), flowers, incense, lamps, pleasant scents, food, and entertainment (essentially music). These are things you offer to a layperson or monk, anyone you wish to extend respect to, whether respectable or not, known or a stranger—if you received them at home in the classical period of Buddhism in India, and perhaps before. And so, symbolically, these are the things you offer at the altar as well. In some places, more incense or flowers are offered, and fruits, some water, etc.—they focus on some things, not giving much importance to others—but the eight offerings are common to all forms of Buddhism, in part or in full.

It is common for all Buddhist practitioners to offer cookies, rice, or fruits at the altar as an offering to the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas represented there. Vajrayana practitioners, and sometimes Mahayana and even Theravada practitioners, also make offerings of food and other substances to a class of Bodhisattvas called dharmapalas, on a separate, slightly lower altar. All these offerings are made in small quantities and should be discarded in nature with some regularity.

In all forms of Buddhism, practice itself (whether it appears as a simple meditation, a complex ceremony, or is composed of everyday actions) is an offering. Among the offerings we can make to the lineage, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, as praise and gratitude, and to sentient beings, out of compassion, the offering of practice is considered the best, superior to the offering of effort and time, as well as the offering of material goods—which, of course, are also offerings that should be made, being the practice of generosity in its most literal form.

Among Buddhist practices in all traditions, with a name probably even older than Buddhism, is the puja, which is a practice usually performed in a group, where at least Buddhist texts are recited aloud, but depending on the tradition, various other meditation activities are included. These meditations sometimes take on a format that people who do not understand the Dharma may call a “ritual.” Puja means offering, devotion, or celebration in honor, in Buddhism, for example, of the Three Jewels (Buddha, the Dharma he taught, and the Sangha, the community that practices it).

Within Vajrayana, there are various forms of puja. The puja in Vajrayana, like all formal and informal practices, has three stages, sometimes called the three excellences: preliminaries, main practice, and dedication. The preliminary practices and dedication consist of maintaining certain mental attitudes and making certain reflections while reciting prayers audibly (not necessarily aloud, but not entirely in silence). The main practice is divided into two stages or yogas, the development stage (sometimes called the creation or generation stage), and the completion stage (sometimes called the perfection stage).

In the development stage, the Vajrayana practitioner strengthens the habit of abandoning self-attachment through a meditation in which they self-identify with the deity (who is naturally free from this attachment). They do this through the visualization of the mandala, the recitation of mantras, and the performance of mudras. They thus identify in body, speech, and mind with the wisdom, enlightened attitude, and beneficial activity of the deity, becoming capable of expressing these qualities in the world seen as the mandala. To an outside observer, they are also reciting a text, playing instruments, and making gestures—but there are various aspects and meditation scripts applied during the recitation. It is also necessary to maintain an upright posture with the spine straight and the eyes open or half-open—throughout the entire practice. There are various internal and external aspects to this dynamic meditation unique to Vajrayana.

After meditating for some time in the development stage, they engage in the meditation of the completion stage³The degree or emphasis on this separation in "stages" depends on the specific practice and the skill of the practitioner. Highly accomplished practitioners never separate from the completion stage, even while outwardly engaging in the development stage., one type of which is precisely the practice of tsog, where an offering of food and drink is made to the deities. Tsog is a practice of inner tantra, that is, where one must avoid seeing a separation or duality between the practitioner and the deity; thus, an offering is made precisely to the inner deities, who reside in the practitioner’s body from time without beginning and are revealed through the initiation ceremony. Tsog should not be seen as a party, meal or snack but as a way to purify dualistic vision, which separates you from Buddha-nature and makes us see ourselves as inadequate before the Dharma, or at least essentially different from the Three Jewels and the Three Roots (the Vajrayana form in which the Three Jewels, through pure vision, become the guru, deity, and dakini).

The outer tantras, less sophisticated, emphasize the separation between the practitioner and the deity—and at this level of practice, eating something offered to the deity or placed on the altar is considered a breach. Thus, the practice of inner tantra is also antinomian to the less sophisticated understanding of outer tantra, or dual tantra. In inner tantra, the greatest breach is seeing a separation between the practitioner and the deity, seeing one or the other as superior or inferior—in outer tantra, the breach is disrespecting what is seen as superior and unequal. This is mentioned because there is also Vajrayana practice where tsog is not consumed, and consuming tsog is seen as a breach, although the practice of outer tantras is extremely uncommon nowadays.

Finally, with the completion of the practice, after a period of consistent meditation, everything that arises is recognized as naturally free from dualistic fixations, all movements are recognized as compassion, and everything that can arise in the mind never separates from wisdom.

Thus, the practitioner consumes the tsog as an offering, during the offering or puja, which is the offering of practice. The extreme notions of offering, offerer, and recipient of the offering are abandoned. It is not necessary to eat everything; what is crucial is to practice the deity’s wisdom, which does not discriminate the offering as pure or impure and does not eat out of attachment or aversion but as a way to strengthen the bond with the reality of things, the lineage, and the other participants, as well as with all sentient beings. It is very important to maintain a mind free from conceptual extremes and to eat without judgment.

A Bit of History

There are two particularly significant events of dana (donation, generosity) in the life of the Buddha Sakyamuni.

One is told in the Jataka, the stories of his past lives. One of the Jataka recounts that when he was a boy in another life as a Bodhisattva, he offered his own body as food to a tigress and her cubs. He was able to do that due to his realization of the dreamlike quality of his body and present life, and the wisdom detachment that comes from that.

The other important event was in his last life as a Bodhisattva, when he was born and given the name Siddhartha, just before becoming the Buddha. After a period of extreme asceticism where he ate almost nothing for seven years, he abandoned extreme asceticism and accepted a bowl of milk rice from a girl named Sujata. It was with the energy of this offering that he finally sat under the Bodhi tree and, meditating there for seven days, attained enlightenment. The Buddha’s followers up to that point, also hardcore ascetics, immediately abandoned him. He did not correspond to their ideals of asceticism, after all, he was someone who started eating relatively normally, not in minimal quantities, full of restrictions. The sweet rice offered to the Buddha is described as an extremely delicious delicacy, the milk having its origin in the offering of a cow that had only drunk milk, and whose mother cow had only drunk milk, and so on, for seven generations. The fact that this offering was also made by a young and beautiful woman is also described, and this, of course, was also a reason for disapproval by the somewhat fanatical ascetics who idolized the Buddha up to that point.

These two events in the Buddha’s life and in his past lives are mirrored in the Vajrayana practices of chod (literally cutting through, that is, the separation between the practitioner and self-attachment, where one symbolically offers one’s own body as food to various classes of beings) and tsog itself, where we train the non-judgmental and non-dual mind, unconcerned with what others think, or with purity or impurity, or with avoiding pleasures and pains, gains and losses—as well as restoring the connection with this vajra-like quality of indestructibility through the renewal of commitment to the lineage and the renewal of vows. Similar to the Buddha after eating sweet rice, it is right after tsog, after the purification of broken commitments—not in reunion with fanatics holding various religious opinions, but united with the very nature of things as they are—that siddhis or spiritual realizations are granted.

Tsog is one of the main meditations of Vajrayana, as a practice of non-dual offering, the purification of broken commitments occurs through the use of the five senses, as the substances that come into contact with them are consecrated as expressions of wisdom through the pure vision of the vajra master. Thus, eating tsog is not only a training in self-identification with the deity but also a purification of our usual dualistic perception—which, in the end, is exactly the same thing. It is the very remedy for the many breaches of commitment that lead us not to recognize the true nature of things.

Moreover, in a profound sense, tsog is a form of chod, and chod is a form of tsog. In other words, the ultimate nature consumes all things of samsara and nirvana without leaving a trace. This is also why the interdependence between beings who may have suffered for the production of the offering substances is considered extremely auspicious: the animal that has a part of its body offered as practice certainly makes a connection with the Dharma—but also the underpaid workers in all production chains, the bosses who exploit them, the people who committed non-virtues in shady deals and emitted environmental degradation gases in transportation, the insects that died from pesticide use, and so on. All these beings participate in the auspicious gathering and are practicing together with the yogis of the development and completion stages, and thus, one day, they will all attain a state of true happiness, beyond the extremes of beginning or end.

Tsog is also a fire puja, a cerimony in which all duality is burnt and transformed into wisdom fire. In this case, it is a inner fire puja, we metabolize duality into wisdom.

The truth is that without a foundation in sutra and tantra, without understanding something of emptiness, it is absolutely impossible to understand what offerings are in Buddhism. The objects of refuge in Buddhism, the deities, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, gurus, dakinis, protectors, etc., do not have intrinsic existence; they do not exist in a dualistic way. Theistic religions hold extreme and dualistic views regarding their objects of refuge, and thus, offerings are made expecting certain spiritual or worldly results. There is no context of merit and wisdom, that is, habit creation, practice, change of perspective, opening of possibilities—in conjunction with the understanding of things as they really are. In Buddhism, we need merit to find, understand, and apply the teachings, and we need wisdom to recognize the true nature of things. Offerings are made in this context of merit and wisdom. To offer, in the ultimate sense, is to understand the emptiness of offerings, to understand their true nature—and that of the other two spheres, the offerer and the recipient—as one thing, that is, also emptiness.

The sources of refuge in Buddhism are not the creator of all things or omnipotent beings; they are merely holders of limitless wisdom and compassion. This is quite different from eternalist beliefs like those of the Abrahamic religions or the spiritual materialism of other traditions where exchanges, bargains, or negotiations are made with superior beings. This is not the same view, and therefore, it cannot be the same practice, even if the same term “offering” is used. This is merely a matter of language limitations and occurs because terms depend on context.

If someone offers something to please a superior being in order to gain advantages or solve some life troubles, this is a conventional perspective of samsara, which will only produce more samsara, which in the end is just suffering. This kind of negotiation will produce almost no merit and definitely no wisdom. If a person engages in Buddhism in this way, it may not be a heresy or something completely harmful, but it is at the very least a tremendous waste and a total lack of view according to what the Buddha taught.

I prepared this text based on eighteen responses I have given over the past few years to people who have seen photos of my tsog offerings, which I perhaps recklessly post on some social media platforms and in my YouTube communities. Sometimes I weigh the benefit of posting against the potential harm of revealing the secret practices of Vajrayana and my own practice. In general, since there is nothing there that is extremely incompatible or strange in our culture (aside from the strange mix of things), and because other aspects of the practice (such as images of deities or the text) would be much more problematic to share, I consider it acceptable to post these photos, which do not reveal my entire altar. The benefit of this is sharing the practice: although the unaware person who comes across the photo of the tsog offering cannot use their nose, fingers, tongue, or ears to consume the offerings, they can benefit through the sense of sight—and thus connect with Vajrayana.

Vajrayana uses a lunar calendar in which every month there are two especially auspicious days to perform tsog: Guru Day and Dakini Day. In addition to these two days, there are, two days before each of these days, the “Tara Days.” That is, for a practitioner with a certain level of engagement, participating in two or four tsogs per month—two for Tara, one for Guru, and one for Dakini—is common. There are other dates when it is appropriate to perform tsog, such as during certain eclipses, anniversaries, or parinirvana (passing) of spiritual masters, at the end of retreats, every day during certain retreats, and other special occasions. This practice can be done alone, although the ideal is to do it with a group of practitioners, if one of them can lead the practice. It is also possible to do it online with some dharma centers, preparing one’s own offerings while participating in the live video in the Buddhist community, or, best of all, one can go to the Buddhist community or dharma center and do it in a larger group with one’s teacher. If none of this is possible, one can contribute money for the purchase of the substances offered in some of these contexts.

Regarding leftovers, after eating what you want, you can save what you think is appropriate to eat later or offer it to people with pure samaya who were not present. What remains should not be thrown in the trash but taken to a clean place in nature.

In any case, it is impossible to learn a Vajrayana practice alone through the internet. If you want to practice Vajrayana, you need to find a teacher in person.

• To find out the dates for tsog, use the sacred dates calendar of Chagdud Gonpa, which uses the time zone of São Paulo/Porto Alegre to define the dates when the moon changes at the cusp of the day. (The two monthly Tara days, and the Guru and Dakini days are the days to perform tsog, but you certainly need instruction from qualified teachers and to practice in a sangha group before attempting to do it alone).

◦ Dharma centers I endorse, article on tzal.org.

◦ A YouTube short with some of my tsog offerings.

ALL-OTR

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