Buddhist Butter Lamps: Lighting the Path to Inner Peace and Enlightenment in Buddhism
Karme, commonly called Butter lamp offerings, are counted among the Mahayana Buddhists' five or seven pleasures, along with food, drink, incense, flowers, perfume, and water for washing. Butter lamps stand for the clarity and visibility that light brings. Thus, offering a butter lamp is regarded as a highly virtuous act of giving something necessary for life, just like providing food and drink.
One of the best presents one could offer another person in the past before there was electricity or other readily available light sources, was light, especially light without much smoke or pollution, like the light from butter or oil. To the Buddhas and other enlightened beings, butter lamp offerings were regarded as invaluable gifts.
The traditional offering of butter lamps can be traced a long way back to the historical Buddha Shakyamuni. In Tibetan Buddhism, lamp offerings symbolize Buddha's enlightenment. The darkness of ignorance that obscures the fundamental nature of the mind was banished by light and enlightenment. Every time a lamp is offered, we commemorate Buddha's enlightenment.
Offering a butter lamp symbolizes the practitioners' desire to become Buddhas, their enthusiasm to realize the pure light when they pass away, and their present-moment experience of freedom. It is connected to life's periods in this way. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition places a lot of emphasis on offering light. Light is a metaphor for the flame of an enlightened intellect, which understands reality clearly. Butter lamps represent the teachings, wisdom, and compassion of the Buddha, which dispel the darkness of ignorance. Nearly all Tibetan temples, homes, and altars use butter lamps. Traditionally, ghee butter is used to burn them. Silver, brass, copper, or white metal are typically used to make butter lamps.
Role & Significance of Karme: Offering of Tibetan Butter Lamp
Click here to view our Tibetan Butter Lamp Collection
The most potent offering is butter lamps because their light represents wisdom. Offering light from a butter lamp indicates eradicating the darkness of ignorance to achieve Buddha's exceptional clear understanding, just as a lamp dispels darkness.
Offering Butter Lamps fosters harmony and merit while encouraging achievement, success, longevity, and global peace. It also helps remove impediments, pacify the five-elemental disturbances, and heal illness.
Prayers are typically recited for the deceased's release in the bardo and rebirth in a Pureland when offered on their behalf. Because enlightened beings need to be able to view the lamps, people do not provide them. Instead, offering light eliminates our ignorance, bringing forth clarity and insight. People make offerings in the hope that their light may enlighten the lower realms and the bardo and ease the suffering of beings that live in the shadows.
Butter Lamps are traditionally dedicated to the dead to light their passage through the afterlife. We can additionally pray that this will guide every living thing in the six realms, removing all obstacles to their awakening to their true intelligent nature. Visualize that with your contributions, innumerable goddesses offer unfathomable light to all awakened beings with sincere faith and devotion.
According to Buddhism, the primary concern in the world is ignorance or a lack of consciousness, which is frequently symbolized by darkness. The finest thing one can do is to replace the darkness of ignorance, which represents ignorance, with the light of wisdom. To dispel the darkness of ignorance, the butter lamp is a symbol of providing the light of knowledge and understanding. As a result, it plays a significant role in the everyday rituals and practices of Buddhism that lead to enlightenment. The whole meaning of gifting butter lamps is lost if one is unaware of this symbolism, especially in this day and age when there are many means to banish the outside darkness.
How to make Butter Lamp offerings?
The entire butter lamp-offering procedure is also quite mystical and meditative. A butter lamp offering is traditionally made by washing one's hands, donning a mask to prevent contamination from one's breath, making the filament out of pure cotton, and cleaning the chalices with either a clean piece of cloth set aside for this purpose or with fresh lichen picked fresh from trees, which was frequently used in earlier times. The next step is to melt the butter, add the oil to the chalices without tipping them over, transport the lamps to the shrine, ignite them, or carefully put some of them somewhere clean. During this process, a person would be emotionally and physically absorbed if everything is done correctly.
Once the butter lamp is lighted, the user can additionally focus on the flickering flame and become aware of how transient and fluid life is and how interrelated everything is. The chalice must contain the butter, the correct consistency, and temperature; the burning element must be the suitable material, texture, and size, and a fire source must start the flame.
One can observe how the cycle of existence, through a wide range of interconnected causes and conditions, unfolds from moment to moment in connection and dependent origination by following the combination of numerous factors producing light and the flames being transferred from one lamp to another. Butter lamps can serve as a reminder of the passing and vulnerability of existence, the strength of light, and the innocence of awareness. To ensure that all sentient beings are free from darkness, donating a lamp should be followed by prayers of dedication.
Benefits of Karme: Butter Lamp Offering
Devotee acquires clear and healthy eyes and has solid understanding and perspectives.
The one whose lights do not break precepts and develops the "heavenly eye," which allows one to observe distant and subtle phenomena.
If one has perfect wisdom, one will reach nirvana. One will acquire the wisdom distinguishing between morally right and wrong.
Challenges or barriers won't impede the exercise of virtue and will see Buddhas transform into the perceptions of all sentient beings.
One's intelligence and clarity of thought will shine through, unaffected by foolishness, fortune will increase, and they'll be free and emancipated in body and mind.
One's life will be steady and tranquil, all of their needs will be met, and they won't have any worries on their minds. Also, their body will be robust, healthy, and full of life.
Different sutras point of view on Butter Lamo Offering:
- Avatamsaka Sutra
"Offering Lamps can dispel all darknesses."
- Treasury of Bodhisattvas Sutra
“Offering 10,000 bright lamps to confess and extinguish hosts of negative karma and defilements.”
- Cakrasamvara Tantra
“If you wish for sublime realizations, offer hundreds of lights.”
- Sutra of Giving
“Those who offer lamps, will possess the pure heavenly eyes and clear wisdom in the future.”
Butter lamps have a profound meaning that radiates from the center of Tibetan rituals. Their flickering flames illuminate more than just the material world; they also shed light on the spiritual journey, acting as a link between the divine and the human. The butter lamp's radiance is a beacon of knowledge, harmony, and unwavering loyalty in a world where darkness frequently rules.