The story of Ananda's awakening at the First Council touches me deeply. He is excluded, turns away in sadness, and then responds without hesitation when his name is called. There’s no deliberation, no strategy, no attempt to prove anything. Just a simple, immediate response: “Yes?”
Ken describes this as the activity of awakened mind—doing what needs to be done without preconception or self-reference. Mundane and ordinary though it may seem, Ananda's response inspires and sets a direction: to be present enough so that when life calls, one can respond without rehearsal—not from habit or identity, not from a need to help or fix, but simply because that’s what the moment requires.
Ken connects this way of living back to rituals, not as performances, but as training in attention. Offering torma to gods and demons acknowledges what pulls us into reactivity. Offering to dakinis and protectors nourishes the capacity to respond without thought, without delay, without “me” in the middle.
Seen this way, the activity of awakened mind is something we already touch, many times a day, and perhaps don’t notice. The practice, as Ken often reminds us, is about removing what gets in the way, so that when the moment comes, turning and saying “Yes?” is possible.
From Mind Training in Seven Points 5
Ken: Tibetan Buddhism, by and large, places a very heavy emphasis on ritual. You had rituals and ceremonies for almost everything. Any time anything went wrong in your life—for that matter any time anything went right in your life—you did a little ritual. So, these torma offerings are rituals, in which you prepare a bunch of stuff, and you recite a liturgy, and you do a visualization, and make an offering.
What is being acted out in the ritual is, in the case of giving torma to gods and demons, you are giving your attention to those things that hook us into reactive behaviors. Gods and demons are symbols, essentially, for those aspects, or those things that arise in our experience which feel good to us—those are the gods—and those things that feel bad to us—those are the demons. And ordinarily, when something feels good, we just feel good, and we attach to it, we want more, we’re attracted to it, and so forth. When something unpleasant happens, then we want to push it away, get rid of it, kill the messenger, and so forth.
By doing these little rituals, what you’re in effect doing is acknowledging, “Oh, that happened,“ and “Oh, that happened.” So you’re just noting it. And disengaging from the habituation which causes us to make a big deal, one way or the other, out of it. That’s the essential idea here. I’ve thought about this for many years, and I’m still at a loss as how to translate that ritual-based practice into the way we live life here in the West. If any of you have any ideas about that, I’m very open to them.
And then, offering torma to dakinis and protectors. Dakinis and protectors are symbols of the activity of awakened mind. And what does this phrase, the activity of awakened mind, mean? It means when we do something naturally from just knowing what to do without any preconception. We do this all the time, actually, we just don’t notice it. The story of Ananda’s enlightenment is relevant here.
Ananda was excluded from the conference following Buddha’s death, the conference of the senior students who were all arhats—a degree of enlightenment—who were going to decide what was going to be preserved of the Buddha’s teaching. It was very unfortunate Ananda was excluded from this, because he’d been at all of the Buddha’s teaching throughout the whole life of Buddha Shakyamuni, and he had a phonographic memory, so he had it all. And the story is told—this is the Zen version of the story, the Theravadan version is a little different—that Mahakashyapa, who was one of the top arhats, said, “No, you can’t come in because you’re not enlightened.” Ananda turned away very sadly, and Mahakashyapa said, “Ananda!”
And without any thought whatsoever, Ananda just turned around and said, “Yes?” And those kinds of simple responses, where we’re just right there, that is what the dakinis and protectors are symbolizing. You walk into a situation, and you see what needs to happen, and without any thought you just do it. That is the manifestation of the awakened mind. There is no sense of, “I am going to do this for this person.” It’s something that just happens like that. [Finger snap]
So, what you’re doing here, again, in these little rituals, is nourishing that quality in your own experience. In essence the offering of torma is an offering of attention to, on the one hand, those aspects of experience which pull us into reactive patterns, and on the other hand, those aspects of our experience and activity which are an expression of being awake.