Traditionally, as soon as the person’s breath has stopped, the person’s wealth is offered to his or her gurus.
Another thing that is traditionally done when somebody dies is to make light offerings. According to how wealthy the person is, you can offer any amount of lights: 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, or more. Every day, up until 49 days after the person’s passing away, you can make light offerings. Or, you can make light offerings at the end of each week, using the practice for offering lights that I have composed.
If you are just doing the light offering practice, you can recite the prayers in that practice. However, if you are making extensive light offerings, you can use Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga or the Guru Puja, and make the offering during the offering section of the seven limb prayer, or at the beginning when you make the preliminary offerings. If you are making light offerings with other sadhanas, offer them when you come to the practice of the seven-limb prayer, in the part for offerings. If you are performing Chenrezig practice, which is the same as the nyung nä practice, there is a section for extensive offerings, and you can practice the meditation at that time.
One should perform the blessing when one is actually lighting the offerings. That is part of the normal practice. Before you do the extensive offering meditation, whenever you do group practice or when you perform a sadhana, it is good to recite the mantra of clouds of offerings. Even if there is only one light offering, numberless buddhas receive numberless light offerings. The Guru Puja merit field receives numberless light offerings. That mantra has the power not only to bless, but also to increase the offerings. It is very important to perform light offerings when somebody has passed away.
This is the minimum that can be done. But if somebody has more money, or people want to sponsor a puja for the person who died, there is the Namgyalma thousand-offering puja, and the middle and long Medicine Buddha pujas, which are extremely good to do, with many offerings. These pujas can be done at the end of each week, and especially at the end of the 49 days. They can be done in a Sangha community, and if there is enough money, the pujas can be sponsored and be performed in monasteries where there are many monks or nuns. This way, by making offerings to more Sangha, it collects more merit. You can request monasteries to perform these pujas. There is so much merit in making offerings to Sangha, as long as they are living according to their vows, especially the fully ordained. When money is offered to me after someone has died, I use it for pujas, to build stupas and prayer wheels, etc.
If you offer to the monastery by thinking that you are offering to the pores of your own guru, remembering your guru, you collect extensive merit. Any amount offered to all the ten directions’ Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and to the ten directions’ statues, stupas, and scriptures collects extensive merit.
Whatever money or property a person has, it is extremely good to use it for public service, in order to build monasteries, temples, centers, holy objects, and to support Western Sangha. That can make it most beneficial. Of course, the same applies to offering to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. If the offering is given to build holy objects, temples, or monasteries, whatever amount is given—$1, $5, $10—generates so much merit.
There is a story that just by offering a drink, one is born as a king in the human world. I think there was a very poor couple who offered medicinal drinks to some Sangha and they were reborn as kings in the place called Gashika, with an incredible amount of power. For millions of eons they were never poor through having offered food and drink. And that’s just concerning temporary happiness, without even mentioning ultimate happiness. One will receive so much happiness in all those lifetimes.
It is the same when building or buying a Dharma center, a hall for the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and for all sentient beings—a place for sentient beings to meet the Dharma, the unmistaken path to happiness. Through the unmistaken method, they can achieve future happiness, and more important, everlasting happiness, liberation from samsara, and most importantly, full enlightenment. This way, there is the deepest benefit by eliminating the root of suffering, which is deeply rooted in their minds. Nothing else can do that except Dharma,. Without Dharma, they will suffer without end. Even if they try to achieve happiness by other means, the happiness they achieve will be only temporary, and is actually in the nature of suffering. Creating the facilities for sentient beings to meet and practice Dharma brings them to the cessation of suffering and to enlightenment.
