The sByin-sreg - homa Fire Ceremony

Although we've been focussing on our Drala Jong blog of late, it is good to return here to the Sky Weaving site, and what better occasion that to mark our first ever apprentice event at our home in Monmouthshire.  The sun shone in Wales this weekend and the flames licked upwards, as our inaugural retreat was concluded with a Jin-sreg (Tib. sByin-sreg / Skt. homa).  The Jin-sreg is a fire ceremony whose roots are over three millenia old and which were certainly establish at the time of the Rig Veda and used to venerate the Vedic god of fire, Agni.

Within the Aro gTér Tradition the Jin-sreg most commonly occurs either as a method of consigning namkha to the elements (as here), or as part of an ordination ceremony for those joining the gö-kar-chang-lo'i-dé.  Namkhas were completed by all the apprentices including visitors from Lama Rig'dzin's sangha, and our vajra sister Naljorma Tsul'dzin (seen here, appearing to be immolated as the flames are enticed upwards by the offering of ghee).

Everyone managed to complete a weave during the weekend, which was excellent as none of the participants had practised namkha before.  With intermittant rain it wasn't certain we'd be able to have the fire ceremony, and for a while the sky weavings were all displayed on the patio.  If you've practised a great deal of namkha, especially if you tend to see them arise and dissolve as single weavings, it can be easy to forget how different they can appear even using only relatively simple combinations of increasing and decreasing elements.

One thing they all have in common of course is that they all end up in the same place - in the flames.  Jean-Michel battled the water element in the form of damp wood and intermittant downpours to build a fire over the hearth (Tib. sByin sreg me thba / Skt. homakunda).  For a while we had to place an umbrella over the site to keep the worst of the rain off.  His patient building and tending of the first spark was rewarded when the whole tower caught and was consumed.

The ground had first been prepared with a simple dKhyil 'khor (Skt. mandala).  In the style of the Aro gTér Ogyen Rig-nga this is circular, and in the wider mahayoga cycles there are different hearths for each of the four Buddha Karmas - Lé-kyi (Tib. las bzhi / Skt. chaturkriya) - circular for pacification (Tib. zhi ba) square for enrichment (Tib. rgyas pa), bow-shaped for 'influence' (Tib. dbang) and triangular for the wrathful activity of destruction (Tib. drag po).  In the Aro gTér the term magnetising is used instead of influence.

Once the fire has started, the sky weavings are added by their creators.  The stepped structure of the fire made it possible to insert the namkha vertically, and the flames licked up from their base, rapidly consuming them all. Jean-Michel, master of the hearth, is here placing the latest weave into the flames.

Whilst the weavings are added mantra is sung, and once they are all on the offering (in this case of ghee) is made as the mantra cycles through each of the elemental Buddha families.

Beer writes that the ceremony is traditional for the end of a long Vajrayana retreat, to 'purfiy any faults or transgressions that may have arisen during the course of the retreat'.  Fortunately for this first apprentice retreat there were no faults (save perhaps the rain - and that resulting in rainbows in the sky) but nonetheless Drowang said that he had enjoyed the ceremony so much that all our retreats should end on one.

It appears we have established our first sangha tradition.

The Cult of Tara (Resources - part 4)

The final book that readers might find interesting by way of some background academic material on namkha is the Cult of Tara - Magic and Ritual in Tibet by Stephan Beyer. Unlike the other texts to which I've referred, I have found links to e-book downloads of this text. I'm not including links here because the initial sites I saw that carried those download options didn't look entirely reputable.  Readers can make their own minds up about that option (the book is still in print).

I say that this is the final book I recommend to provide an academic background to namkha practice, but I should acknowledge there are other options. Using one of these texts and tracing back the references will find you a host of material of course.  I also thought I should note the other entries on the Wikipedia page on namkha as they are most obviously in the public domain. Of these, I've not had a chance to read:

- Peter Gold's Navajo and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom: The Circle of The Spirit which is a comparative anthropological study of the two cultures.
- Claudia Muller-Ebelling & Christian Rasch's Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas explores the practices of Nepalese Shamen and how pre-Buddhist traditions informed Vajrayana.
- Nebesky-Wojkowitz' Tibetan Religious Dances

I have read the Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava and Ellen Pearlman's Sacred Dance, but both carry scant reference to namkha which are not worth mentioning here.

Having noted other publically referenced sources, I shall return to Beyer. Beyer's work focusses solely on practices surrounding Tara (sGrol ma).  It has a similar bent to Nebesky-Wojkowitz' work, in terms of being something of a catalogue of mantra and symbolic activity. It contains a section which walks through one particular Tara namkha practice from start to end, and in so doing Beyer provides some incrementally useful background information about Vajarayana in general and namkha in particular.

Namkha is clearly a practice that is associated with a range of different awareness beings (yidams / meditational deities) and protectors and can be employed for a range of different effects. Different lineages clearly use different yidams in association with their own namkha traditions.

Beyer mentions that Tara, as a peaceful yidam, is associated with the first two more peaceful of the four Buddha Karmas - in Beyer's terms these are pacifying and increasing (although in the Aro gTér Tradition they are magnetising and enriching).  Nebesky-Wojkowitz' work mentions namkha in connection with a range of both peaceful and wrathful yidams, making accessible the wrathful Buddha Karmas of pacifying and destroying.

Beyer is the first of the writers referenced here who recognises four general modes of practice, sometimes employed in isolation across the range of Tara practices, sometimes all present - as in the Tara namkha.  This is valuable as the other writers have tended not to look beyond or through the elaborate external symbolism of the practice of namkha, and thus have failed to fully understand the practice.

These modes include self  arising - a soteriological practice where the practitioner dissolves their experience of self into emptiness, and then self-arises as the yidam; generation - where the yidam is visualised as external, used to effectuate practice, and thirdly the yidam is used to empower objects - such as the namkha itself, or the bumpa (water vase) during a tantric empowerment - used to apply the effects of practice.

The next blog will explore symbolism and the practice of self-arising.  There we shall start to square the circle of the highly ritualised, symbolic even magical world of mahayoga (which Nebesky-Wojkowitz did not see beyond) and the far less symbolic and in some ways mundane world of Dzogchen. Once this circle is squared, we'll then go on to address the namkha practice of the Aro gTér.