Wylie:DA ki ma rnams kyi gtor 'bul
This[1] is the last of the addenda to the Severance feast activities in the Zurmang tradition that seem to be connected to Tekchok Dorje’s compilation Source of All Qualities. It is a beautiful and quite graphic text, but unfortunately there is no author statement identifying the poet.
Torma (gtor ma) is literally “that which is thrown out or scattered,” and it refers to the custom of creating sculpture out of flour or other malleable material that represents either the offerings in the ritual or the recipient of those offerings, such as the deities. The creation of torma is a vast and elaborate art form in vajrayāna practice. In particular, the torma at a feast offering may be represented by one or more feast torma sculptures and supplemented with many other edibles, or the edible offerings themselves may simply be designated as the feast torma. That seems to be the case here, where the “torma” is one’s body that has been separated from consciousness and creatively prepared in imagination for the various recipients.
In this liturgy, those recipients are specifically all ḍākinīs—hundreds of thousands of them—affectionately called ḍākimas here. The principal one is Vajravārāhī, who always plays an important role in Severance. She is goddess, yidam, ḍākinī, lineage holder, and one’s own consciousness. Designated here as “the birth mother of the buddhas,” she is identical to the Great Mother, the perfection of wisdom. A hundred thousand ḍākinīs emanate from each aspect of her body and her accessories. But there are trillions more ḍākinīs of basic space, trillions more from the twenty-four sacred sites of India, and many, many others. All of them are invoked to receive the feast torma and then reminded about their sacred pledges. Finally, their powers are commandeered to avert all kinds of calamities, disease, and just plain bad luck.
- Other notes
- BDRC Link
- VolumeI1CZ3976
- BDRC Content Information
- No note on contents
Information about Unicode Tibetan and the digitization of this text
As the only available unicode Tibetan text at the time, Nitartha International's version of the Paro Edition of the gdams ngag mdzod is provided here. However, note that it has not been thoroughly edited and that there may also be mistakes introduced through the conversion process. Eventually we will provide a fully edited version of the entire Shechen Edition, entered and edited multiple times by Pulahari Monastery in Nepal, but as of fall 2017 that project has not been finished. Note that the folio numbers that appear throughout were added by Nitartha Input Center at the time of input.
Provided by Nitartha International Document Input Center. Many thanks to Lama Tenam and Gerry Wiener for help with fonts and conversion.
