Tsok

Tsok is a communal Vajrayana offering practice in which food and drink are offered, blessed, and then shared out among everyone present. The Tibetan word means "gathering", and it applies to all of it at once: the gathered offerings, the gathered practitioners, and the merit and wisdom accumulated in the practice itself. In Sanskrit it is called gaṇacakra, the circle of the community.

What happens

Everyone who comes brings something. Sweets, fruit, nuts, bread, cheese, something savoury. Meat and alcohol belong on the table too, in small quantities, and that occasionally surprises newcomers. The reason is not that this is a party. Tsok works precisely with what the ordinary mind sorts into pure and impure, permitted and forbidden, and that dividing line is what the practice examines.

The offerings are laid out with care, arranged well, the way you would set a table for someone you love. Then comes the liturgy. In our minds what stands on the table becomes an offering that fills entire worlds, presented to the lineage, the yidams and the dakinis. At the end the blessed tsok is distributed. Whatever is left you take home, so a container or a bag is useful.

Why we do it

Three reasons come up again and again. The first is gratitude, plainly meant. The second is the accumulation of merit, for which offering together is among the most powerful means the tradition knows. The third is the repair of samaya, the bond between teacher and student and among practitioners. It gets damaged, in all of us, more often than we notice. Tsok is where that is put right without anyone having to be called out.

Beneath all this lies something further. The offering is not handed over to someone standing outside us. It makes visible that appearances are already a feast, and that we are the ones who turned them into bookkeeping.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling we practise tsok on Guru Rinpoche day, the tenth day of the Tibetan lunar month, and on Dakini day, the twenty-fifth. There is no charge, and everyone is welcome, including those coming for the first time.