Beloved Garden
Brief Notes on the Offering and Gift of the Body

Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Thaye

Homage to the guru and Great Mother.

The practice called Object Severance Mahāmudrā presents the perspective and intention of the middle turning of the Dharma wheel in conjunction with the mantrayāna’s vanquishing conduct for training in awareness. It is a radical method for cutting through the inflation of self-fixation through the willingness to accept what is undesirable, the direct subjugation of adverse circumstances, the realization that gods and demons are in your own mind, and the knowledge that you and everybody else are utterly equal.

Without such an understanding, [some people go around] repeating hūṃ hūṃ phaṭ phaṭ while seeing the enemy in their own deluded projections and engaging in all kinds of outrageous behavior in the hopes of defeating demons and bad spirits, or to gain fame, fortune, and food. This is known as perverted Severance (gcod log) and is an egregious distortion of this approach. So from the outset focus your mind in the right direction without confusion.

There are a great many systems [for the practice of Severance], as it is well known in all the Old and New [schools of Tibetan Buddhism]. However, in this Zurmang system it is considered a special legacy (bka’ babs). This means that there have been continual and extensive profound instructions that have never diminished and that the authority of realization, familiarization, assurance, and blessing has remained intact. Therefore it is especially elevated.

The cycle of visualizations for the feast activities and so forth in this tradition are elucidated elsewhere. Here the daily practice of donating the body is roughly contained in a thirteen-point outline:

I. Preliminaries

A. Arousing the awakening mind

B. Going for refuge

C. Gathering the accumulations

D. Purifying the obscurations

E. Presenting offerings

II. Main practice

A. Transference of consciousness

B. Body mandala

C. Three cycles of white distributions

D. Cycle of three red distributions together

E. Feast activities

III. Concluding practice

A. Dedication and aspiration

B. Dissolution phase

C. Integration