Best Foot Forward by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

Author:Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

PREPARATIONS FOR MAKING THE BODHISATTVA VOW

If you are a practitioner of the Mahayana path, having laid the foundation of your practice by taking refuge, it’s now time to take the Bodhisattva Vow. Whenever great masters visit holy places, they make the most of their time by making the Bodhisattva Vow, or at least renewing it.

According to the Mahayana tradition, before making this vow you should first accumulate some merit, for example, by reciting a Seven-Branch Prayer.

The Seven-Branch Prayer

The Mahayana offers a wonderful combination of wisdom and skillful methods that is easy to execute, yet brings about remarkable results. You might think that in order to accumulate infinite merit you must make enormous sacrifices way beyond your ordinary capacity—like offering your own flesh and bones or your home. But material offerings are not the only kind we can make—if they were, it wouldn’t be a very practical system! Most of us don’t have large sums of money or property to give. Fortunately, the Mahayana path has the wisdom and skill to accommodate all practitioners, not just the wealthy, because it offers methods for visualizing offering substances that generate exactly the same amount of merit as material offerings. To put it another way, the Mahayana path is easy, blissful, and not painful, yet if you employ its methods, you will reap the same amount of merit and wisdom as if you had offered material offerings.

An example of one of these extraordinary methods is the Seven-Branch Offering. This practice involves seven different ways of accumulating merit, each of which serves a specific purpose: prostration, offering, confession, rejoicing, requesting the turning of the wheel of the Dharma, asking buddhas not to pass into parinirvana, and dedication of merit. Many versions of this prayer appear in the sutras and an untold number of Buddhist practices, and it’s up to you which one you recite. Choose whichever you like best.

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