Karmé is one of the main offerings that Buddhist make but not unique to Buddhists. It is an old Indian religious practice. Other religions such as Christianity also light candles. Thus, lamp offering is a common religious practice.

Buddhists consider ignorance or lack of wisdom and knowledge as the main source of all problems. The biggest problem the world faces is ignorance, which is often presented or metaphorically portrayed as darkness. Destruction of ignorance or darkness is the best thing one can do. The offering of butter lamp is the offering of wisdom and light of knowledge to eradicate darkness or ignorance. Therefore it has a crucial place in Bhutan’s daily rituals. The physical darkness symbolizes the inner darkness of ignorance and the butter lamp symbolizes the inner light of wisdom and knowledge. If one is not aware of this symbolism, the real purpose of offering butter lamps is lost.

In a world where there was no electricity, one of the best things one could give another person is light, particularly a light without much smoke and contamination such as the light from butter or oil. Other forms of creating light such as from firewood or coal emit pollutions. In this latter case, one creates light but also creates darkness through the pollution. In a society and era without electricity, butter lamp offering was a pure and precious gift one could offer to the Buddha and enlightened beings.

The whole process of offering butter lamp is also a very spiritual practice. The traditional practice of preparing a butter lamp starts from washing one’s hand, wearing a mask to protect from contaminating the butter lamp through one’s breath, making the wick out of pure cotton and cleaning the chalices with a clean piece of cloth reserved for this or fresh mosses from the trees, which was commonly used in old times. The whole process is a meditative spiritual practice, which engages a person both physically and mentally, if the person knows and practises it according to the norms.

In an ideal practice, one does not simply light a butter lamp but must also pray that ‘as one lights this butter lamp one is lighting wisdom for the world and dispelling the darkness of the world’.

A practitioner would also visualise the whole universe as chalice containing the butter, the butter as divine nectar and through the act of lighting the butter lamp, the person must visualise that darkness of ignorance is dispelled from the whole universe.

Once the butter lamp is lit, the person would focus on the flickering flame and realise how impermanent life is, how everything including the butter lamp is inter-dependent. The chalice has to hold the butter, the butter has to be of the right temperature, the wick of the right material and texture, the butter has to flow up through the wick and then some source of fire to trigger the flame. The whole combination of things, giving rise to light, reminds one of theory of dependence, which is a central Buddhist concept.

One shouldn’t be stuck with the thought that things are fixed and real. One can understand the fluid nature of things by looking at the flickering flame of the butter lamp. When the second lamp is lit, the flame from the first one does not move there. The first flame can continue but the second one can’t come into existence without carrying on the flame from the first one. It’s the same with third, fourth, fifth and so on and it shows the process of cycle and how existence evolves in this manner. This is a very important Buddhist understanding of existence and causation.

After lighting the butter lamp, there are lots of prayers one can chant. The most popular of all is the marmé mönlam. If one lights a butter lamp without any of the mental and spiritual input, there is no difference from just lighting a bulb. The final prayer people make while offering butter lamps is to dedicate the merit one has accumulated during the practice to free all sentient beings from darkness.

Karma Phuntsho is the Director of Shejun Agency for Bhutan’s Cultural Documentation and Research, founder of the Loden Foundation and the author of The History of Bhutan. The piece was initially published in Bhutan’s national newspaper Kuensel in a series called Why We Do What We Do.