Mabon Ritual, Bon Style

I think Sunday Quint and I are going to celebrate the Mabon pagan holiday in a Bon Buddhist-flavored fashion. While this might seem like a clash of magical cultures, I still believe that if we could go back far enough, we’d see that both traditions spring from a common root.

Mabon and its predecessor on the pagan calendar of red-letter days, Lughnasadh, are both about reaping the growing season’s harvest and making an offering of part of it as a gesture of respect and gratitude toward harvest gods. I’ve got some dried herbs I grew earlier this year, so I might use those in our ceremony.

In Bon, offerings are made constantly. At the close of a Bon Buddhist meditation session, practitioners dedicate the benefits of any merit they’ve generated to the benefit of all sentient beings. In one Ngondro meditation exercise, practitioners imagine chopping and cooking themselves up as an offering to sentient beings in this and other realms. None of the Gobi Desert dwellers I met during my trip to Mongolia would consume vodka without offering some to the spirits first. But for this ritual, Quint and I plan to offer fingerprint Tormas to any spiritual entities that may be planning to make our lives hard.

Tenzin Wangyal wrote about fingerprint tormas in Healing With Form, Energy and Light.  To make them, you mix up some flour (Tibetans use barley flour) until it’s got the consistency of Play-Doh. (I might include some of my dried herbs in this mixture.) Then women squeeze a lump of dough in their left hands and men in thier right in order to make the torma. It should have the imprint of all five fingers in it. You touch this torma to areas of your body where you suffer affliction. Then you make the torma an offering by tossing it away from you, where malefic influences can feed upon it and become satisfied, hopefully becoming motivated to leave you alone.

If you want to get technical about it, you can so some research to determine the exact direction in which you should throw your torma.  Based on your birthday and your Tibetan astrological sign, one of twelve points on the compass is dedicated to you, and bad influences come from the opposite direction. That’s where you need to throw your torma.  There’s a table in the back of the book that helps you figure that out.

Still don’t know where we can go for this activity. Outside would be nice. But it’s hard to find a place outside where strangers won’t be likely to tramp through at any given time.