IV - Meditation

It is perhaps immediately useful to think about the path than the end result, and meditation practice is an important part of that. One of the words used for this means something like "put into practice", to "familiarise" or to "cultivate". It may refer to a process that begins with studying and learning teachings on a subject, such as, for example, the unique opportunity presented by being human. The process then moves on through thinking about them and pondering them. The third stage is cultivation or "meditation". Here we can see that the word "meditation" has as much to do with "internalising", with living in accordance with the teaching, as it has to do with sitting still "practising meditation".

On the other hand, formal sitting practice is of course also strongly emphasised, and the techniques on how to do this vary enormously. Some emphasise calming the mind, and some meditators temporarily experience thoughts slowing to the point where they even seem to stop.

Deities and Lamas

In the vajrayana traditions (i.e. those which teach the tantric methods which were largely, though not exclusively, preserved in Tibet), meditation involving "deities" is used a great deal. These deities are looked on as forms of the Buddha. They may be simple and peaceful or they may use elaborate, even lurid, symbolism. They are not, however, "merely" symbolic. We might be tempted to think that they do not really exist at all. Understanding them entirely in a symbolic sense easily fits modern ideas. At the other extreme, it is a fact that they are sometimes treated as external gods who might come to the aid of the worshipper.

Practice based on these deities only makes sense if the practitioner can really feel, even if only dimly, that enlightenment is already at the core of his or her nature, and that the deity is being "called" out of the nature of reality itself. It involves the use of creative religious imagination, and is related to poetry and art. It is, of course, very personal.

Guru yoga

Guru yoga rings alarm bells for some people. The guru or lama in a guru yoga is often not someone whom one could meet in the ordinary way. A guru yoga of Milarepa (a famous yogi of the Kagyu tradition who meditated in caves in the 11th century CE), for instance, may consist primarily of calling on Milarepa to grant his blessing so that the practitioner may recognise the true nature of his or her own mind, together with silent meditation. In this practice Milarepa will represent all deities and gurus, particularly the practitioner's own lama. While the religious aspect is clear, it is a long way from the kind of guru-cult that most of us would want to reject

Risks

It must be admitted that there are a number of westerners who seem to cast their teacher or lama into the role of lord and master over their very lives, one whose every action is mysteriously appropriate, and whose every word an infallible pronouncement and a profound truth. This puts lamas into a very difficult situation, especially when they are removed from all the checks and constraints of traditional society. Inevitably there have therefore been some lamas who have succumbed to the temptation that this has presented. A few have even turned into fully-fledged abusers of their circle of followers, while the followers have become adepts at covering the situation up. It is as well to recognise this clearly at the start, and not to take your intelligence off in order to put premature devotion on!

The significance of devotion to the lama is mainly concerned with receiving "blessing". In a more technical sense this means receiving the "four empowerments", which are crucial for later stages of tantric practice. To reduce this profound transmission to a cult of obedience and of turning a blind eye would be to make a sad caricature of this devotion. The West is supposed to be critical, but surprisingly it seems to be the West that is most susceptible to this mistake.
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