Sat, 29 Jul 2006
Deity Yoga
Someone asked on the Kagyu mailing list about the reality of deities we visualize in meditation. I didn't get to participate in that discussion, because I was too busy taking a chain saw to the VKL site. So here's my answer. The deities we visualize represent the Sambhogakaya aspect of the Buddha. What's that? Something neither you nor I can understand right now. Sadhana practice has a lot of places where we pretend to do things we can't understand right now. We dissolve everything into emptiness by imagining that everything disappears. We merge our mind with the deity by imagining light coming from the deity and dissolving into ourselves. We rest our mind in mahamudra by imagining our bodies dissolving and resting without thought. And, yes, we visualize the Sambhogakaya deities and their buddha fields by imagining ourselves as the deity with the deity in front of us in an elaborate palace, and so forth. None of these practices are any more than crude approximations to a reality that we currently can't understand. So to ask if the deities exist misses the point. So why have faith in these practices if we can't understand them? Simply because I've seen the changes these practices have on people when they're done diligently. I'll just mention Lama Gursam who has really changed from the time I first met him because of his retreat practice. I figure what has worked for him will work for me.
According to the Tibetan calendar (one of them, at least) today is the day Buddha preached his first sermon, thus starting the tradition we know as Buddhism. I will be starting a retreat and won't be posting to the weblog for a week.
