Guru Puja

The Guru Puja practice provides us with a unique opportunity to come together in Dharma friendship and share in the joyful and meritorious activity of offering thanksgiving to all our most kind teachers.

It lays the foundation of the whole path to enlightenment on our mind stream, connects us more strongly to our teachers, allows us to accumulate skies of merit and purifies eons of negative karma. The text is available at the Centre and is conducted in both English and Tibetan. This puja is traditionally celebrated on the 10th and 25th days of the lunar, Tibetan calendar month.

Guru Puja is a practice consisting of making offerings to and requesting inspiration from the spiritual master.

Spiritual vows and commitments which might have degenerated are also restored through the practice of tsog offering (feast offering). In this practice, we unite our minds with the holy mind of the spiritual master, who is considered the root and life-force of the spiritual path in order to receive blessings and generate realisations on the path to enlightenment.

We need merit, or positive energy, for our enlightened potential to grow and become perfect and one of the best ways to do that is to make beautiful offering and prayers to the Three Jewels and to our spiritual teachers. This is what happens in the Guru Puja. A special type of offering called tsog is made. Here we offer platefuls of fruits and biscuits, which are distributed afterwards to the participants. The tsog can be eaten by oneself or shared with friends who have faith in the Three Jewels, but should not be given to animals or thrown in a dirty place.