When I first encountered deity practice, I didn’t know what to make of it. I was in my early twenties, new to meditation, and unable to sit in the traditional posture. Before me were a few sheets of paper with three lines of writing: Tibetan, English phonetics for the Tibetan, and English words translating the Tibetan. The Tibetan might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics and the English phonetics random syllables. None of it made any sense to me. I could read the English words, but what was I meant to do with this description of a white four-armed being clothed in silks and jewels that belonged to another culture in another age? A white body? Four arms? I had been told that this being was connected in some way with compassion. I was to visualize that I was this being and then recite the mantra. By doing so, apparently, I would not only become compassionate, but I would also know emptiness, which I took to be some kind of mystical experience. I did not know how to meditate and could not even count my breaths with any consistency, let alone visualize myself in this form. I could recite the mantra, but I had no idea how that connected with the deity or with meditation. After a few days, I gave up and asked my teacher if I could do ngöndro (groundwork practice). After several requests, he reluctantly agreed. I opted for refuge and prostration practice. It was physically demanding, but at least I knew, or I thought I knew, what I was doing.
Fast forward a few decades. I’m still not very good at deity practice, but it has now become like an old friend—a friend who embodies talents and abilities you can only dream about. It takes a while to come to know this friend, but once you do, you can enjoy his or her company for both the companionship and the new possibilities that are revealed when you are together.
For instance, take the practice of taking and sending. It is one of the core Mahayana practices in the Tibetan tradition and goes back at least as far as the 8
th
century. Shantideva mentions exchanging yourself for others in his
The Way of the Bodhisattva
(Skt.
Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra
). In this practice, you imagine taking in the suffering of all beings and sending out your happiness and well-being. Initially, this practice makes no sense. Why would you take in the suffering of the world? My teacher’s response was simply, “If, with one breath, you could take in all the evil and suffering of the world and free all beings from it, would you hesitate?” In other words, the practice is about a compassion that goes beyond conventional or even conceptual understanding. It speaks directly to a compassion beyond words that lies deep in our hearts.
Still, it is a difficult practice. The meditation itself is not hard. Because it is based on the breath, you always have something to come back to when you are distracted. As visualizations go, it is about as simple as it gets: thick black smoke (illness, emotional reactions, and evil wherever they arise in the world) coming in to you, silver white moonlight (your health, good fortune, virtue, joy and spiritual understanding) streaming out to all beings. The difficulty lies elsewhere.
When I imagine taking in injury and illness, I’m not exactly enthusiastic, but I can do that. There is resistance in the body, of course, and emotional resistance, too. If I stay with the practice for a while, those forms of resistance start to break down. Then I really begin to feel the suffering and evil of the world coming in. Quite different levels of resistance rise up like steel walls. How do I take in other people's cruelty, criminality or insanity? Do I really want to imagine giving away my health, my financial resources, or my home? Still more resistance arises when I think of giving away such qualities as intelligence, or musical talent, or artistic ability. Practice and resistance rub against each other. The friction generates heat. The heat ignites a fire. You may not be aware of the fire, but it burns inside you. The only sign of the fire may be a sudden disinclination to continue. However, if you can stay with the fire and let it burn, practice and resistance burn up together—over a period of months or years. A deep peace opens up, an openness and an emptiness you cannot put into words.
For some people the fire is too intense. They cannot stay there. Maybe it is something from their past. Maybe it is something they cannot face. Maybe it is just how they are. Sometimes for me even now the fire is too intense, particularly when taking and sending has taken me into the realm of deeply held beliefs about who and what I am, the root, you might say, of my identity. Resistance is based in beliefs that feel massive and solid, fixed and unmoving, like the granite cliffs of Yosemite. To take in the beliefs, struggles and weaknesses of others feels deeply wrong, as if I am violating a rigid taboo. That is why the fire is so intense. It feels like I will shatter into a million pieces and plunge into a black void beyond comprehension. It is just a thought or feeling, of course, but this level of resistance can be overwhelming, and I have learned that to push directly against such rigidity and resistance only reinforces it.
Here is where my old friend comes in. In one of the traditions in which I was trained (the Shangpa tradition), there is a practice that combines taking and sending with Chenrezi meditation. Chenrezi is the white, four-armed being I mentioned earlier. Chenrezi (Skt.
Avalokiteshvara
) means “he who looks over the world.” He looks over the world and hears the groans of all who suffer. In this way, Chenrezi is the embodiment of awakened compassion.
How does Chenrezi meditation work with taking and sending? Instead of struggling with my own resistance to taking and sending, I first imagine that I am Chenrezi and then do taking and sending. As Chenrezi, that is, with this identity, I have infinite reservoirs on which to draw—generosity, discipline, patience, energy, stability, and understanding, to name just a few as well as unfathomable depths of loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
I am not limited by the fears and concerns that haunt me when I am just my ordinary self. Instead, I sit at ease. My body radiates light. My heart is filled with compassion. I know and understand the suffering of every single being, from those who dwell for seeming eons in ethereal bliss only to find themselves dazed, battered and confused by the nitty-gritty of life to those whose cold and bitter hatred turns their worlds into icy wastes. Resting in a peace that goes beyond words and beyond understanding, I joyfully take in the pain, illness and evil of the world and send out streams of health, ease, well-being, joy and understanding. When resistance to any part of this exchange stirs in me, I welcome it for what it is, a movement in mind. I take in the pain on which it is based and send out understanding and joy to those parts of former me that feel shut off and denied any possibility of joy, ease and well-being.
None of the above is real. It is all imagined. But so what? By stepping out of my conventional conditioned identity, I discover new possibilities and a completely different way of experiencing life. By side-stepping my ordinary reactions, I can do taking and sending with a depth and scope of a completely different order. It may all sound quite fanciful, but the hard fact is that if you repeatedly imagine yourself feeling this way, how you see and experience the world will change.
In deity practice, many people put their effort and attention into a clear and stable visualization. If you can do this, great! Such a clear visualization makes the whole process more vivid. But I have had students who could visualize clear and detailed forms with little effort and still could not connect with the spirit of deity practice. As I said before, visualization does not come easily to me, so I follow my teacher’s advice and put my effort into feeling I am Chenrezi. As in any meditation practice, I sometimes forget what I am doing and get lost in thinking. But sooner or later, I recognize that I am lost and then I just come back to being Chenrezi and continue with taking and sending. For me, the essential point is not visualization. It is to give my heart to the practice and let it permeate me as completely as possible, penetrating the layers and layers of resistance and confusion that my ordinary sense of self throws up in protest. Imagining I am Chenrezi puts the resistance, the overwhelm, as well as any feelings of incompetence and failure, into a larger context. They lose their solidity and become figures and elements in a dream. And then I just let the practice work on me.
As some teachers have said, practice is like going for a walk in a fog: it may not seem like much, but after a while you are soaked to the skin. In this context the “after a while” usually means months, if not years. Change of this order does not happen overnight.
The essence of Vajrayana is to step out of our ordinary way of experiencing life. When you imagine you are a deity, the ordinary reactive patterns have no place to take hold. Your body is a body of light. Your speech is a magic spell. You know that everything that arises is like a dream, a mirage, an echo. When you let the spirit of the deity take you over, when you let yourself become the deity, the experience of the emotional reactions of resistance changes. Here we come to the heart of the magical component of Vajrayana. In magic, you effect change by changing how you experience life. As you become used to letting the spirit of the deity take over in you, you are more likely to see the emotional reactions of resistance as just stuff—powerful stuff, perhaps, but in the end, just stuff.
In the three-year retreat, we did about a year of heavy-duty deity practice, three months on one deity, three months on another deity, and so on. At one point, I was consumed by the idea that my life was a complete failure. Every minute of every hour of every day, thoughts that I had accomplished nothing and would never accomplish anything ran amok. This story had no discernible connection with the deity practice. Yet day after day, it arose with overwhelming and consuming intensity. For a few moments here and there I remembered the meditation, and then thoughts of failure took over. Now and then I could imagine the form of the deity, catching quick glimpses of the arms or the face, only to drown in a torrent of thoughts and feelings of abject and utter failure. I tried reciting the mantra, but usually managed only a few syllables before I forgot what I was doing. I knew these thoughts were ridiculous. My life was not over. I was only thirty years old. Yet they persisted. This volcanic obsession erupted almost continuously for two weeks, and then it stopped as suddenly as it had started. What happened? Where did it go? There were no obvious answers. If I had been doing some other form of meditation, I’m not sure how I would fared. In another situation, I probably would have thought there was something wrong psychologically. Because I was doing deity practice, neither the obsessions nor my ideas about the obsessions had a place to take hold. This mania about failure was a powerful wave of internal material, no doubt, but it is the nature of waves to come and go, and this one was no different.
Deity practice has many dimensions. People experience it in very different ways. It can also go wrong in many ways. It is a skill, like cooking or playing music. Learn the principles from a capable teacher, and then work at it, patiently and methodically. You will go through all kinds of ups and downs, but that is the way it is with any art or skill. Over time, however, you will form a relationship with the practice. It will probably not be what you thought it would be when you started, but again, that is how it is with most arts and skills. At a certain point, it becomes part of you, and then, as I said at the beginning, you have a friend, a friend in whose company you see new possibilities in every direction.