Questions about Visualizing Ourselves and Others as Deities
If we are practicing tantra and one of the tantra practices is to try to view everything in a pure way – in other words, all beings as Buddhas and all environment as mandalas, and so on – isn’t that an obstacle to developing compassion?
This pure view of everything and everyone around us is only intended as something that we use as a method for when we have a disturbing emotion toward somebody, like getting angry at them. At those times when we think that they are inherently bad or stupid people or such alluring people (let’s say we have a longing desire for them), we see this disturbing appearance of them in terms of the voidness of that and focus on the pure nature of their minds as taking the form of a deity and so on. The same thing with the environment when we’re complaining about how polluted and terrible it is.
In other words, this pure vision is used as an opponent for helping us to overcome various problems, disturbing emotions. However, at other times, we would see people in terms of their ordinary situation, which then would allow us to develop compassion. If we view everybody as a deity, then obviously they’re not suffering, so we wouldn’t be able to develop compassion. We just use this pure vision when we need it.
Also, when we are viewing others in this pure way, that is with mental cognition. Visually, we see them in their ordinary form because that’s what appears to our eye consciousness. However, with our mental consciousness, we imagine that they are in these pure forms. All right? If we didn’t view things that way and tried to apply this in our daily life when we need it, we would smack into the wall and wouldn’t be able to cross the street; we wouldn’t be able to do anything. Obviously, it is not intended on that literal level.
Even on the complete stage when – with isolated body (lus-dben) – we immobilize the winds of the senses and withdraw them so that we don’t have this sensory cognition, that’s just in meditation. It’s not that it’s permanently like that – that after we do this first stage, we’re blind and deaf. It certainly doesn’t mean that.
In what we were just talking about, is it possible that it’s compassion that moves us to perceive that pure form, and so there is no contradiction when seeing them as deities on the basis of compassion?
In order to develop compassion, we need to be able to see that others are suffering and then wish for them to be free of that suffering. Viewing them free of that suffering and then becoming deities, that’s one way of looking at it. Obviously, we can also think that whatever causes of suffering that these others have – if we think in terms of voidness and so on, they’ve arisen from causes and conditions, and there are fleeting stains on the mental continuums of others – and the purity of their mind, which is free from all of that will appear in the form of a deity. There’s that way of looking at it as well, sure.
There are many ways of working with this type of teaching. We could see on one level that they have the Buddha-nature potentials to be enlightened, so that takes the form of the deity. However, because they are unaware of that, they suffer, so then “May they be free of the suffering.” We could look at it that way, but that’s still acknowledging that they’re suffering.
There are many different levels, many different ways, to approach any particular teaching. What Serkong Rinpoche emphasized was to have many, many different methods that we can use for dealing with the various problems that we encounter – like disturbing emotions – so if one isn’t particularly effective in a particular situation, we have other ones to rely on. Thus, we have many different arrows that we can shoot into the target to get rid of the problem that we are experiencing at that time, the disturbing emotion, and so on. It’s like when we are doing physical training. Trainers – good trainers – always say that it is detrimental to do the same set of exercises over and over again every day. We need variety so that it trains the muscles in different ways and trains different muscles. We don’t just repeat the one thing. Of course, with Dharma exercises, mental exercises, it’s a little bit more difficult because we need to have experience and training with each one of them before we’re able to just automatically apply them in different situations. Nevertheless, it’s good to have a variety of things that we can use as opponents.
Of course, the deepest, strongest method is the understanding of voidness. However, even with the understanding of voidness:
- We can think in terms of the voidness of the other person that we’re angry with.
- The voidness of me as the one who is so angry and offended.
- We can think of the voidness of causality in terms of what are the causes for the other person to act like that and what are the causes for us to get angry.
We can apply voidness in many different ways, so don’t just become stale in terms of always using the same approach in applying methods to oppose our disturbing emotions and confusion.
When we are practicing the tantric path, one of our commitments is to always view ourselves in the pure form of a deity. The question that I asked was actually about trying to develop and cultivate compassion while at the same time always perceiving ourselves as the deity, or shouldn’t we do that?
If we are thinking in terms of compassion for others, then being Chenrezig, for example, Avalokiteshvara, naturally helps to remind us to be compassionate. I don’t see that that’s in any way an obstacle.
Naturally, compassion – the wish for others to be free of suffering and the causes for suffering – needs to be based on renunciation, the determination to be free of our own suffering, so recognizing the suffering within ourselves and the wish to get rid of that, to get rid of the causes of that suffering in ourselves. Therefore, it’s absolutely necessary for a tantric visualization that we have this renunciation because what we are renouncing is our ordinary appearance and our grasping for a solid identity, being this ordinary appearance with this suffering and the problems of suffering. It’s not a denial of that, but it’s a way of dealing with that in terms of the understanding of voidness of the causal process, and so on, that brought about the suffering and the causal process that will allow us to see ourselves as a deity, the pure form.
Whether we are talking about our own suffering and the determination to be free of that or the suffering of others and compassion – “May they be free of that” – it’s very important not to go to the two extremes:
- Absolutism – that it’s concretely there and they’ll never get rid of it,
- Nihilism – that it doesn’t exist. “Well, they’re not really suffering. They’re deities. I’m not really suffering. I’m a deity.” So, we’re not dealing with overcoming it.
In both cases, one has to work with causality, cause and effect – that suffering comes from causes, and to attain a stopping of the suffering, we have to apply causes to get rid of it.
Prayer for Inspiration to Develop the Graded Pathway Minds (Lam-rim)
The Purpose of the Prayer
Next in the practice, is the prayer for inspiration to develop the graded pathway minds, lam-rim. Lam-rim, that’s usually translated as stages of the path. That word path (lam) is referring to states of mind. We’re not referring to a road. What we want to develop are levels of realization that build up, one on top of the other, and, in the manner of a path, lead to the goal. We’re talking about states of realization that we need to develop one on top of the other.
Now, there may be some people who will find that they haven’t really worked very much on these lam-rim stages before doing a practice like this, and so they use this as an opportunity to work on each of these stages. However, what is more the structure in which we develop ourselves is that when we’re doing a practice like this or especially tantric practices… I mean, it’s hard to say. Is this a tantric practice, or not a tantric practice? What is it? I think it could be done on many different levels; in any case, one needs to be prepared before doing this. It’s not as though we’ve never thought about refuge, we’ve never thought about bodhichitta, and all of a sudden, we start doing them – we come in off the street, and this is the first time that we think about them – it’s certainly not intended like that. What is intended is that we’ve worked with all of these things before, and so this is like a script in which we just recall – bringing it back again to mind – and do it in a fairly quick sequence.
As Serkong Rinpoche always used to say: When we are familiar with the lam-rim, the intention is that when we put one foot in the stirrup of a saddle – he used the image that Tibetans could relate to – in the time that it takes us to put our other leg over the horse (or yak) and get into the stirrup on the other side, we should be able to go through the entire lam-rim, every point. He used to say about death coming: Death doesn’t wait for us to set our meditation cushion right and light some candles and go through things nice and slowly. In times of disaster, like dying or whatever, we need to be able to get it all together like that, instantly.
When we have a lam-rim prayer like this, although one could stop and spend a half-hour on one verse and then next time a half-hour on the next verse, and so on, that’s one way of doing it. However, I think more in terms of what the intention is with the text, which is that we already have some level of realization of each of these stages, and now we are asking for inspiration to be able to brighten that, to uplift it – not to get the first insight into it, but to uplift it more. That’s the meaning of inspiration (byin-gyis rlabs).
There are various lam-rim prayers. There is a lam-rim prayer that is often said at the end of Lama Chopa (The Guru Puja). If one is going to do the type of lam-rim meditation in which we really want to spend a half-hour or an hour on each point, I think more appropriate for that would be something like the actual lam-rim prayer. Whereas if a lam-rim review is within a sadhana or in a guru-yoga like this, and so on, it’s intended that we’ve already done that work with the lam-rim prayer itself.
It wouldn’t be that we stop in the middle of this and take time out to do something else. We don’t take time out in a sadhana to analyze and so on, even with the voidness meditation in a sadhana, that’s not the time to do analytical meditation. That’s said quite clearly in the instructions. We’ve done all that analytical meditation beforehand. This is just to remind ourselves of it, to just generate it automatically like that.
If we want to extract this particular form of lam-rim prayer from this practice and use that as a structure for our lam-rim meditation, fine, perfect. However, when we’re doing the whole process of the guru-yoga, it’s a whole line of development that needs to flow, and don’t take time out in the middle of it. Now, of course, other teachers may explain it differently. As I said, there are many variants of doing things, but this is the way that I’ve been taught and the way that I’ve found useful.
When we are doing this in the manner that I explained or have hinted at now, for each verse – because we have worked with these points in the lam-rim already – we try to just generate the understanding and feeling that would go with it (there’s an emotional feeling with each of these points). We imagine that we gain inspiration – it can be in the form of lights and so on – that this uplifts and intensifies that feeling. It’s not that we’re analyzing at this point.
This is actually a quite challenging lam-rim practice. We take each of these verses – so the first in terms of the relation to the spiritual teacher, and then the next one in terms of the precious human rebirth. In the lam-rim, we have, of course, a very extensive explanation and many versions of the extensive explanation of each of these points. Further, each of these points is divided into many points, and they’re subdivided into many points, and so on. We need, of course, to have heard about all of them, to have remembered all of these points, to have thought about them, understood them, be convinced that they are correct, and really let them sink in. Then, we get an integration of all these points. For each individual step here, it’s all integrated into one understanding. It’s not just what we would call intellectual, but it is with a certain feeling – that’s very hard to describe, what we mean by feeling – some sort of emotional component, positive emotional component, that is with this understanding. It’s all integrated together into one state of mind based on all these various points and the understanding of the various points.
We think “spiritual teacher, the relation with my spiritual teacher” – and obviously, we need to have a fully qualified one or a very qualified one for this to actually work properly – but it’s a state of mind that we have in terms of how we relate to that spiritual teacher. It’s one state of mind, a very complex one, but it’s all integrated. It’s not that “Now I have to think of this little point, now I have to think of that little point, and I’m only going to feel this little point,” like that. If we forget it or if it becomes weak, maybe we have to remind ourselves of this or that little point, but what we’re aiming for is to have an integrated state of mind and feeling that then it is applied in real life.
Remember, this is a cumulative path. The spiritual teacher is not the seed of the path. It’s not that that’s the first thing that we would work with. Once we’ve gone through the whole path, then the spiritual teacher is like the root – gives us strength for the whole thing, anchors it. When a plant starts to grow, it’s not that first there’s a root and then it grows.
His Holiness always recommends that actually, the relation to the spiritual teacher should come at the end. When it is presented as the beginning, that’s because the audience for the lam-rim, and so on, were monks who were having a review of the path in order to take a tantric initiation, so they already had a spiritual teacher, and they had already worked with all of this material. For newcomers, it should come at the end. Before a tantric initiation, we’re supposed to have a review of the lam-rim, and since we are forming this tantric bond with the spiritual teacher, naturally, that’s going to be emphasized first. Nothing exists independently outside of a context, so always remember voidness, that nothing is established inherently from it within.
In any case, what I wanted to say was that, if we start with the precious human rebirth and then death and impermanence, it’s not that we forget about the precious human rebirth. Nevertheless, just as we want to have an integrated state of mind with the precious human rebirth and appreciate what we have, which is so incredible, we integrate that with the state of mind of death and impermanence. Now, we have an integrated state of mind that combines precious human rebirth and death and impermanence, and then it could fall to worse rebirths, so now we have the combination, the integration, of these three. Eventually, we want to have the integration of the entire lam-rim in one state of mind. This is extremely difficult because to get it, it really can’t be in words. If we have to say in words the whole thing, then we have to recite this whole text, which obviously takes a certain amount of time, no matter how quickly we do it. Eventually, we want to be able to just have a full understanding. I mean, come on, we’re aiming for the omniscient mind of a Buddha that has all of these realizations simultaneously.
When we are visualizing ourselves as one of these deities, all the different arms and legs, and so on, represent all these various points on many different levels simultaneously. The aim is not to be able to visualize what they’re all holding, and so on. That is not the point. The point is to develop our mind to be able to keep an enormous amount of insights integrated simultaneously. Tantra’s very, very advanced, not easy. Don’t trivialize it into just a visualization of what this weapon that they’re holding looks like.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The detail of all these weapons and things they are holding is not something to be ignored either. It has a purpose. What we are doing is training ourselves – not to be able to hold a lot of weapons – but we are training ourselves to be able to keep a tremendous amount of very tiny details simultaneously. Because if we are going to become a Buddha – we think about that and expand from the level of a teacher (who really needs to know all the details about the students) or a therapist (who needs to remember all the details about all their clients) – as a Buddha, we need to be able to know all the details of everybody. All the specific aspects of a visualization, although that’s not the major point, the major point is what they represent (and don’t go to the nihilistic extreme either of saying that the visualization is stupid), as it also trains us to be able to retain a tremendous amount of detail simultaneously.
Different Ways of Working with the Lam-rim
There are two ways of working with the lam-rim. There are many ways of working with the lam-rim, but two that we can differentiate are:
- When we are working with it initially, we work ourselves up first to have the initial motivation and then the intermediate motivation and then the advanced motivation. That’s one way.
- The second way is that we have the advanced motivation, so now we go back and work with each of the points as being important for being able to attain enlightenment. “I need to appreciate this precious human rebirth because I need it to be able to get to enlightenment, and I need to be able to continue having them in order to be able to reach enlightenment.” Then, each of the stages is within the context of the advanced level of motivation.
Also, in my writings on my website and in my teachings, I make a difference between Dharma-Lite and the “Real Thing” Dharma, and the difference between the two is whether or not we understand, accept and think in terms of rebirth (beginningless mind, beginningless and endless mind):
- With Dharma-Lite, we can work with these three levels of motivation basically just to improve this lifetime (because we don’t really believe in future lives, past and future lives). However, we shouldn’t fool ourselves. This is basically to improve our present samsaric life, and there are serious limitations to Dharma-Lite. The problem comes up most significantly with the discussion of karma because most of the results that ripen from karma do not ripen in this lifetime from what we do in this lifetime, so that can be rather discouraging. We’re going to have a problem with behavioral cause and effect if we’re only thinking within the limitations of this one lifetime. Although this Dharma-Lite version can be quite beneficial, don’t fool yourself into thinking that this is the “Real Thing” Dharma. That’s not the “Real Thing” Dharma. That would be a preliminary step before really getting into the real thing. It’s helpful, very helpful, but call it what it is. It’s Dharma-Lite.
- If we want the real thing, then we really need to consider quite seriously the whole discussion about how individual mental activity, the mind, has no beginning and no end. That is not an easy topic. We need, in fact, a little bit of understanding of voidness of causality in order to really understand it, so it’s not simple.
In the beginning, what we do is we give it the benefit of the doubt, which means that “I will presume that it is true because the great masters and my teachers are convinced that it’s true. I will presume that it’s true, although I don’t really understand it.” We can work with that, but that’s not a valid way of understanding something, of knowing something, I should say. If we presume that it’s true and then we do all the trainings on the basis of that presumption and see that it’s very beneficial, then that starts to convince us that maybe it is true. Then, in order to really have a conviction that is firm, it needs to be based on either inference or bare perception. Well, bare perception is quite difficult for this, so it needs to be based on inference, which is lines of reasoning, and that has to do with causality, basically.
Also, what’s quite convincing, at least from my own experience, is knowing some of these greatest tulkus, rinpoches, in two lifetimes and having this familiarity and seeing what carries over from lifetime to lifetime. That, at least in my case, was very, very helpful. However, that was because I had a very, very close relation over many years, every day, with my spiritual teachers, and that’s a rare really precious human rebirth. For most of us, we won’t have that personal experience, so we will need to rely on logic, and it is logical, actually, in terms of beginningless mind.
In our next session, our last for this seminar, we will finish up in the good Tibetan tradition, which is to spend an awful lot of time in the beginning and then just rush through the rest at the end.