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Imagine Youre Enlightened
Posted By artgardner On May 22, 2010 @ 8:24 am In Articles,Training: articles | Comments
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This article first appeared in Buddhadharma, Fall 2007.
In 1974 I was translating for Dezhung Rinpoche, a
wonderfully warm and kind scholar and master who
had settled in Seattle in the early sixties, soon after
the Tibetan diaspora. He had come out of retirement
in response to the interest in Tibetan Buddhism that
had developed in the seventies and beyond.
A student asked about visualization practice and
deity meditation. Dezhung Rinpoche closed his eyes
and scrunched his forehead. He bobbed his head up
and down as if he were concentrating very hard and
said, You visualize the head of the deity, then you
visualize all those arms, then you visualize the
implements, then the palace, then you try to see the
whole deity clearly, but you lose one part, so you go
back to visualize that And its all gone. You start
again, and the same thing happens, again, and
again. Then he opened his eyes wide, looked right
at the student, smiled, and said, And then you have
a headache!
Deity practice is one of the central practices in
Vajrayana Buddhism, yet many people do not understand how it works and have even
questioned whether it is a valid form of Buddhist practice. When you look at the deities
depicted in thangkas (scroll paintings) and on temple walls, with their fantastic forms and
facial expressions and the obvious but highly elaborate esoteric symbolism, you may well
ask, What do these have to do with waking up?
Until relatively recently, Sri Lankan and other Theravadin traditions regarded Tibetan
Buddhism as little more than demon worship, a misconception that has fortunately waned
now that these different traditions are interacting with each other. And compared to the
simplicity and directness of Zen, the machinery and complexity of deity practice can be both
intimidating and puzzling. While Tibetan Buddhism holds the most complete and vibrant
transmissions of Vajrayana methods, even Western students in this tradition can find deity
practice confusing. Many of them often have a hard time visualizing the complex forms or
relating them to their lives in the modern world.
This difficulty is understandable. Deity practice developed in a very different culture and a
very different era: early medieval India, which was a largely agricultural society, with a myth-
based traditional culture that defined values, prescribed behaviors, and largely determined
what one could or couldnt do in ones life a sharp contrast to the trade-based world full of
individual choice that we live in today.
In order to help clarify the nature and purpose of deity practice, I discuss it here in a way
that gives one the actual flavor of this practice; that is, the sense of what might actually be
happening experientially in deity practice. I also suggest an approach to deity practice that
doesnt depend on ones ability to visualize vividly. After all, the purpose of this practice is
not to generate sparkling imagery but to transform the way we experience the world and
ourselves. Finally, for those who take up this practice, I suggest ways you might use the
deity to be awake and present in your life.
Classical deity practice uses traditional forms that represent the qualities and characteristics
of an awake personality. Perhaps the approach to deity practice presented here will be more
accessible to some of us who live and practice in a post-modern, post-industrial society, one
that has largely replaced myth with reason (for better or worse), and in which people have
to make personal choices about values, behaviors, and directions in their lives (again, for
better or worse).
continued on next page
Lets start by asking, What might deity practice look like if we eliminated the forms and went
directly to the actual experience of being awake?
Awake, in One Personality
Spiritual practice is primarily a destructive process. It destroys the habitual tendencies that
cause us to take subject-object duality, emotional reactions, conceptual processes, and
sensory sensations as concrete realities. In particular, we ordinarily regard ourselves as
existent entities, an identification that is intimately intertwined with our personality. In deity
practice, we experience personality as a fortuitous accumulation of habitual patterns and see
that, at its core, there is nothing with which to identify. With the destruction of the ordinary
personality, along with its dualistic fixation, all the qualities of being awake power,
openness, insight, and compassion are free to express themselves in our lives.
What is personality? Most people take it to be the complex of behavioral, temperamental,
emotional, and mental attributes that characterizes us as unique individuals. We usually see
personality as fixed. However, we dont have to look very hard to see that it varies radically
from situation to situation. We may display care, patience, and restraint at work but not
show the same patience or restraint with our families. Or we may be kind and loving with our
spouse and children yet angry and impatient with employees and colleagues. When
situations change, everything about us can change, too what we think, feel, do, how we
see the world, even what we believe and understand about life.
Far from having a single personality, we are like the shards of a shattered mirror, each piece
reflecting a different picture of the world. Yet we think of ourselves as the same person, a
single entity that is consistent throughout the day. We are largely unaware that we are
acting on the basis of the reflections of one shard in one moment, and another shard in the
next.
What would life be like if we approached life, our world of experience, consistently that is,
with a single personality, an awake personality, rather than as a collection of shards?
I use the term awake here instead of the more commonly used word, enlightened.
Enlightened implies a state of being based on an idealized conception of human perfection
an enlightened person as opposed to an unenlightened one. Awake is probably more
accurate, because it points to an experience, not a state. Awake also avoids the rational,
political, and philosophical associations connected with the Age of Enlightenment. Finally,
when asked what was different about him, Buddha Shakyamuni replied simply, Im awake.
continued on next page
To explore the process of embodying an awake personality, we can start with something
noncontroversial, namely, awake compassion. (Strange as it may seem, you can actually use
any personality in this exercise. They all work. Well come back to that later. For now, well
work with awake compassion.)
Awake Compassion
We all know what unawake compassion looks like: persistent caretaking that can cross over
into tyranny; a compulsion to rescue or help that ignores appropriate boundaries; a pitying
attitude that masks feelings of superiority; or a blind naivet that fails to see what is helpful
or harmful.
Instead, imagine being completely awake and present and, at the same time, embodying
compassion. Imagine how you go about your day. How do you walk? How do you sit? When
you see your spouse or children in the morning, how do you greet them? How do you
prepare for the day? How do you drive to work? When you converse with people, how do
you listen, how do you speak? What happens in you when you see another person being
mean or unpleasant? What happens when you see them succeeding in their lives? What
happens when you see someone in pain or struggling?
Reflect on these questions during your formal meditation sessions and during your day.
What comes up for you? In this approach, its good to begin with the body reactions, the
sensations that come up in your body when you consider being awake compassion. Then
include emotional sensations. Only when you can rest in the physical and emotional
sensations should you include all the stories and associations connected with being awake
compassion.
As you work with these reflections, at first you may feel a release from family, social, or
professional constraints and a clarity that allows you to connect with and help others openly
and naturally. After the initial opening, the quality of attention often drops a level and you
may become aware of other voices and other reactions. Does your body tense up? Do you
feel contractions around your heart, in your stomach, in your jaw? Do you feel alone,
exposed, or helpless, as if nothing can protect you from the pain of the world? Maybe you
discover that you dont really want to be present with anothers pain. Maybe you withdraw
or adopt a posture of pity, feeling sorry for those who suffer, so that a subtle sense of
superiority separates you from them. Maybe you feel that there are no boundaries. Maybe
you feel a terrible loneliness because you have to help everyone and there is no one for you
to turn to.
Just as in regular meditation, return to attention, return to being awake compassion.
Remember, you are completely awake and you see everything through the eyes of
compassion. Let this feeling permeate your body, your emotions, and your heart. You have
infinite resources to open and respond to the pain of others. You know nothing of tiredness
or fatigue. You see into the workings of the world. You dont have to withdraw from pain or
difficulty. You are clear, direct, sympathetic, insightful, wise, or responsive whatever you
need to be in each and every situation you encounter. You do not fear the pain of the
world. You dont need to fix it or make it go away. You can be with the pain, no matter how
bad or terrible it is.
As awake compassion, you experience no separation. You know that the apparent division of
experience between I and the world is a misperception and that even the subtlest sense
of superiority is a further delusion. Instead, you are present, and you let the pain in the
world tell you where the imbalance is. You know the imbalance so deeply that you know
what, if anything, needs to be done, and you know how to do it.
continued on next page
Transforming Negative Emotions and Identities
Now lets consider a negative emotion such as pride and explore what embodying awake
pride might mean. I remember a conversation I had with a teacher in Nepal, who after about
an hour looked at me and said, Ken, you have a problem. You are a little proud. You can
either be completely proud or not proud at all. But to be a little proud is a problem. To have
a little pride, I came to understand, is to not be awake in pride.
With ordinary pride, you feel you are special and arrange your world to be ongoing proof of
what you want to be true. You adopt set positions and rigid forms of behavior. You ignore
doubts and threats to your self-image and avoid anything that reminds you of them. Such
pride is obviously not about being fully awake and present.
How does the awake quality transform the expression of pride? Imagine you are awake and
present, yet completely embodying pride. You experience a total and complete equanimity,
regardless of what arises in experience. You are so special that you have no need to defend
yourself in any situation or to lord your knowledge or abilities over anyone. You dont need
others to treat you with an assumed deference or the appearance of respect. You are truly
above it all, expansive without being overbearing or overwhelming. You have no reason to
be impatient or insensitive. Instead, you are completely respectful and kind in all situations,
because from your broad, expansive point of view, they are all the same.
What about going beyond specific emotions to whole identities, such as being a loser?
Ordinarily, this self-image leads you to shrink from the world. The world becomes a world of
hopelessness, devoid of promise or fulfillment. Every defeat becomes a painful but
reassuring confirmation of your identity and status. You fear challenges because you know
you will fail and also because success would be as problematic as failure. You are full of
grandiose schemes and you tell everyone what you are going to do. But you never start,
because to do so would reveal who you really are. When you are forced to, you approach
situations unwillingly or with such a defeatist attitude that you undermine any support you
might have had. Things turn out badly, once again.
As the awake loser, however, you know you are going to lose. Its a done deal! You have
nothing to lose, nothing to risk. You accept losing as a given and engage your life, your
practice, your interactions with absolutely no expectations of what you may get or how you
may benefit. Victory and defeat or success and failure become meaningless considerations.
You pour your energy into new situations because you are not concerned with status or
outcomes. You engage whatever you are doing without personal expectations or
projections. Instead of talking about grandiose schemes, you end up doing just what needs
to be done.
Adopting the awake manifestation of an identity in this way connects you with expressions
of power, opening, understanding, and compassion that are not based on a sense of self.
continued on next page
No Half Measures
Needless to say, fully embodying an awake personality as a means of letting go of self is not
a beginning practice. It assumes that you have a solid relationship with basic attention,
mindfulness, compassion, and some experiential acquaintance with non-self and emptiness.
You have to be able to tolerate not being you, at least for short periods of time.
From these examples, you can see that any personality can be used in this practice. But
there is one requirement: whatever personality you pick, you have to embody it completely.
No half measures! You have to completely embody whatever you choose, and you
experience everything in terms of the union of awake mind and that personality, so that
there is no separation between you and what you experience. You leave no part of your
ordinary self in the picture. In fact, you let go of any notion of a centralized, solid self
altogether.
That release is the very point of deity, or yidam, practice. The Tibetan term yidam is often
explained as being composed of two words, yid and dam. Yid means mind, the emotional
mind, the mind associated with personality. Dam means to join to or to commit to you
commit to being awake in this personality.
Empowerment
A key step in deity practice is empowerment. In empowerment, the energy, experience, and
understanding of the teacher join with the confidence, trust, and ability of the student. This
joining creates the conditions for the student to experience vividly, if momentarily, what it is
like to be the deity for example, what it is to be awake compassion, awake pride, an
awake loser, or, to name some traditional yidams, The Great Sorcerer (Skt., Mahamaya), The
Lord of Mystery (Guhyasamaya), or The Savior (Tara). The personality or deity we work with
is decided in consultation with our teacher, who knows us and knows both our potential
abilities and our internal patterns.
If we are embodying compassion, for example, the experience of empowerment puts us in
touch with the emptiness, clarity, and fearlessness of awake compassion. We come to know
the difference between awake compassion and conventional forms of compassion such as
sympathy, pity, or doing good, which are often tainted with subtle expressions of identity,
pride, and control. For pride, the empowerment plants the seed of all-embracing equanimity,
free from any sense of complacency, and the seed of delighting in the richness of all
experience, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. If we practice without these seeds of
experience, we may flail around in a fog, grasp at phantoms, and be led astray by the ghosts
of our ordinary, self-obsessed personalities.
continued on next page
Some personalities will have more energy for us, some will bring more challenges, but each
of them can transform our understanding of what we are and how we experience the world.
The key is commitment, and the personality we commit to is called the commitment being
(Skt., samayasattva).
In the Tibetan tradition, deities fall into three categories: peaceful, semi-wrathful, and
wrathful. The personalities of the semi-wrathful and wrathful deities often embody the
energy of strong reactive emotions, such as anger or sexual desire. While they may resonate
more closely with a particular set of emotional knots, they are a little more dangerous to
practice. If the energy in our attention drops, we will fall right into a full-blown emotional
reaction. The peaceful deities, which typically embody the energies of compassion,
compassionate activity, intelligence, and so forth, are powerful in a more subtle way, as their
energy seeps deep into our reactive patterns and dissolves the corresponding
identifications.
Practicing as the Commitment Being
In formal meditation sessions, we let the mind settle, resting in the experience of breathing,
perhaps, or resting in natural awareness. Then we imagine being the embodiment of awake
compassion, awake pride, or whatever we are using, drawing on the seed of direct
experience planted through empowerment. We let the sensations connected with being
awake compassion or awake pride soak into us. As Suzuki Roshi once said, practice is like
going for a walk on a misty day we dont notice it at first, but we end up completely
soaked, wet right through.
This kind of practice requires an effort that is simultaneously gentle without being soft and
unyielding without being hard. Resistance may arise. Reactive patterns associated with the
ordinary sense of self push us to ignore, shut out, manipulate, or control what arises in
experience.
The commitment is to meet that resistance as the embodiment of whatever personality we
are using. If we are embodying awake compassion, for instance, we dont harden against
the resistance but rather are completely present with the resistance and the pain it protects.
If we are identifying with awake pride, we experience resistance with complete equanimity,
not judging it as good or bad. If we are working with the awake loser, we have no
expectations about the outcome of practice; we just meet whatever is arising.
To take the practice deeper, in our meditation sessions we can imagine taking the sense of
awake compassion or awake pride into specific scenarios and explore how we might meet
them. Maybe Im a schoolteacher with a difficult and demanding principal, and I have to meet
with her to discuss my contract for the coming year. Or maybe I have a beautiful and
valuable carpet in my home and a painter Ive hired has just spilled a can of paint on it. Or
perhaps a great job opportunity has opened up and the choice is between my co-worker and
me. My boss pulls me aside and asks for my opinion on my co-workers abilities.
We dont think about these situations or try to figure out what we might or might not do.
Instead, we put ourselves right into the situation and meet what arises as the embodiment
of the awake quality we have committed to. In other words, we dont try to figure things out
we experience being the awake quality and work from there.
continued on next page
During the day, we live our lives as the commitment being walking, talking, sitting, eating,
working, working out, everything. As reminders, we constantly ask questions. How does
awake compassion walk? How does awake pride eat? How does awake compassion talk?
We drop into being awake compassion and see how the conversation goes. We drop into
being the awake loser and walk into a job interview. We dont try to figure any of this out.
We just drop into being awake compassion and see what knowing arises. Surprisingly,
perhaps, if we dont try to figure out what we are meant to do, we may discover that we
already know. That knowing is naturally present in each of us. It is buddhanature, natural
knowing, original mind. It has a thousand names and it is the aim of all Buddhist practice.
We may not meet every situation as the expression of awake compassion or awake pride,
but our commitment and the continuity of our effort will bring us in touch with the resistance
whenever we dont. We can open to the experience of resistance and meet it with our
commitment, directly, naturally, without any particular idea of I should be doing this or I
should be doing that. In fact, the feeling of should will undermine our efforts. When we try
to live life based on an idea of being awake, our behavior will likely be strained and artificial.
The point is to make the awake principle alive and present in everything we do, to take it
from an ideal encumbered with mythical projections and make it the core principle by which
we live. Everything we encounter through our senses, through our feelings, and through
our mind we meet as awake compassion, or whatever weve chosen.
If this seems impractical, you might keep two considerations in mind. First, the reason we do
this practice isnt to become competent, knowledgeable, well behaved, or skillful. We are
engaging in this practice because we want to wake up and be present in life. Second, as
awake pride or awake compassion or awake loser, we are free free to find new ways to
relate to situations, free to envision possibilities in situations that we used to ignore, and
free to uncover abilities and qualities that we didnt know we had. A side effect of our efforts
may be making life choices that are more creative or intelligent or practical, but those are
side effects, not the intention, of the practice.
Practicing as the Awareness Being
The commitment being is like a commitment to be a musician, a teacher, or a doctor. We may
earn a license or certificate that certifies our competence in the relevant skills, but the
certificate doesnt really make us a musician, teacher, or doctor. We become that when we
play music, teach students, or treat patients on a regular basis. In this practice, we start
with a seed of direct experience and then we cultivate it through our commitment,
approaching all experience as the commitment being, and we do so day after day, month
after month, year after year.
Down the road, something happens. An understanding or awareness arises: we know what
it is to be a teacher, musician, or doctor. Something relaxes and opens inside. We notice a
confidence that wasnt there before, and we practice our profession in a different way. We
arent caught up in all the rules and regulations. We know what they are for, but we also
know their limitations. We realize that we do know how to teach, or we know how to make
the music sing, or we know how to diagnose and heal. Its the same in this approach to
practice. At some point, an intelligence or awareness arises and we just see the world this
way. Concerns and fears about who we are or how others see us evaporate. The sense of
being awake becomes alive in us. Weve stepped into open awareness. This shift signifies
the arising of the awareness being (Skt., janasattva).
continued on next page
With the arising of the awareness being, we are freed from the polarity of subject-object
fixation. Everything that arises as sight or sound is now experienced differently, not as
something out there. In the simple experience of I see a red car, we know that every
element in the formulation is a construction. What does I actually refer to? What is
seeing? And red car is only a phrase used to convey a whole set of associations.
Experiences arise like the appearances in a dream. The energy of our commitment and the
presence of awareness enable us to experience this dream with extraordinary clarity,
knowing it and everything in it to be empty of independent existence.
The awareness being and the commitment being have come together, just as the
commitment to being a teacher and the understanding of the profession come together. We
continue to approach the world as the embodiment of awake compassion, or pride, or
whatever we are using, but now it comes naturally. In both formal practice and our daily life,
we maintain a sense of being the union of the commitment and awareness beings and meet
everything that arises accordingly.
This approach is not without its dangers. If, when resistance arises, we dont know how to
stay present in the awake expression, we run the risk of becoming a cosmic gorilla, tearing
up or consuming the universe because our reactive patterns are running amok.If we are
unwilling to stay present in the emotional turmoil, this practice will, at best, do nothing. At
worst, the energy generated and released through our efforts will feed and power
habituated emotional reactions. We will end up worse off than we were before. Traditionally,
Vajrayana practice is likened to a snake entering a bamboo pipe. The snake either goes up
or it goes down. We, too, have only two ways to go: up, opening into progressively higher
degrees of awake presence as the energy generated in practice is transformed into
attention; or down, falling into progressively stronger reactive patterns as energy decays
into emotional reactions.
To guard against these possibilities, we need to receive instruction and guidance on how to
meet resistance, decide with an appropriately trained teacher what deity (or personality)
to use, and make sure we have had a direct experience of its awake expression.
continued on next page
Tradition and the Post-Modern World
This description of yidam, or deity, practice is based on notes from my teacher, Kalu
Rinpoche, comments from Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the writings of Jamgon Kongtrul the
Great, and my own limited experience. Traditionally, in doing yidam practice, one uses a form
that symbolizes the awake ideal or the reactive emotion. These forms have been faithfully
handed down from generation to generation. But once we genuinely know the principles,
you could, as Kongtrul famously said, use the personality of a clay cup.
Teacher and student, in the ceremony of empowerment, create conditions for the student to
have a direct experience of the deity; that is, the union of the quality of the deity and the
empty awake mind. The commitment being and the awareness being are generated through
a ritual practice known as a sadhana (method of practice) in which one works, as it were,
from the outside in. You first imagine the form of the deity as clearly as possible, then bring
in an appreciation of qualities represented in each aspect of the deitys form, and then
cultivate an unshakeable confidence that you are this expression of awake mind. As you
follow the ritual of the method of practice, you die (symbolically) to your ordinary life and are
reborn as the deity; you then live your life as the deity, die (as the deity), and come back to
your ordinary life, which, in deity practice, is regarded as a bardo, an intermediate state
between successive lives (i.e., practice sessions) as the deity. Mantra repetition transforms
the energy of speech into higher levels of attention, and other techniques generate and
transform emotional energy into attention and awareness. Using these energies, you
progressively internalize the experience of the deity, until the experience of being the deity
has replaced your fragmented habituated personality.
This form of practice plays a central role in Vajrayana practice in the Tibetan tradition. Yet
many people today have experienced difficulty understanding how to approach it and place
their hopes in just doing it as best they can. Yidams, in traditional societies, were living
presences first and symbols second. For many Westerners, they are symbols first and living
presences a distant second, if at all. We live in reason-based modern societies, not the
myth-based traditional cultures where these practices were originally developed. Some
Westerners try to regard yidams as a living presence, but relatively few people are able to
shed the cultural conditioning of a reason-based society to the point that they can live in a
mythic world in a healthy way.Instead of first visualizing the form, then incorporating the
symbolism, and finally identifying with the deity, you may find it more effective to focus on the
feeling or sense of being the deity and let the other aspects follow. While awake compassion
is traditionally depicted as a white being with four arms (representing the four
immeasurables of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity), in deity practice one
has chosen to commit to being awake compassion, not simply to having a certain form. The
deity, after all, is not the form. The deity is the actual expression of compassion and
emptiness in life.
Visualization of a symbolic form and precise performance of rituals are not the only way to
connect deeply with awake compassion or other expressions of awake mind. By connecting
first with the sense and feeling of being awake compassion or awake pride, we stop shifting
from one personality shard to another. We stabilize personality and work from the inside
out, letting the awake expression permeate our lives and everything we do. In this
approach, the formal sadhana or method of practice is the training the equivalent of
hitting tennis balls against a wall or playing scales and studies on a piano or guitar. The
actual practice is living our lives as the union of form and emptiness, feeling and emptiness,
and awareness and emptiness that each deity expresses.The compassion at the heart of
Buddhist practice is not just the compassion that arises from reflection on the sufferings of
others, nor the more natural compassion that arises when we see someone struggling with
difficulties we know through our own experience; for these are, in the end, emotions. It is
the unrestricted expression of direct awareness itself, an expression that arises because
emptiness frees awareness from the restrictions of self, thought, and projection, frees it to
respond to the imbalances that generate struggles and suffering in this world we
experience, and frees it to respond in any appropriate way.
This article by Ken McLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Article printed from Unfettered Mind: http://www.unfetteredmind.org
URL to article: http://www.unfetteredmind.org/imagine-deity-yidam-practice