Deity Practice in the Vajrayana

June 30, 2020

Recent Articles

In honor of Lama Tharchin Rinpoche’s birthday, Guru Rinpoche Day of the fifth lunar month (June 30, 2020), which celebrates the birth of Guru Rinpoche, we are offering Rinpoche’s 2011 Drupchen teaching at Pema Ösel Ling on the “Collection of Seven Treasures Daily Practice (Thuk Drub Sangwa Dupa)” by Dudjom Rinpoche. With his characteristic warmth and inimitable personal style, Lama Tharchin Rinpoche explains why, as Vajrayana practitioners, we engage in mahayoga practice, utilizing the path of the symbolic deity in order to realize the ultimate wisdom deity of our innate unchanging true nature.

Stream the full 48-minute video on Vimeo or YouTube. If you'd like to support our activities by purchasing the download, you can find it here.

Collection of Seven Treasures Daily Practice 2011-07-05 excerpt from Lama Tharchin Rinpoche on Vimeo.

From the teaching:

“Actually, the whole idea of mahayoga practice, which is deity yoga, visualizing the deity and reciting mantra, is based on the whole idea… that deity (lha) is not the creator of anything outside. [With] all this Vajrayana practice – the outer manifestation, the inner source – ultimately when temporary obscurations are purified, then [recognition of] the original ground is purified. That is the result. The result is not something else.

[Deity yoga] – mahayoga in Sanskrit, kye-rim in Tibetan – is exercise. Kye is to visualize or imagine. Why do we have to imagine? Because we have no clue about wisdom. We do have familiarity with material phenomena. We don’t need to visualize it. We’ve accomplished it already. Our concrete, solid, material phenomena is stabilized. We are samsara mahasiddhas! We got the result. Everything [in samsara] changes and that causes suffering, which is what we don’t want.

Therefore, [deity] yoga is exercise, but it’s not intellectual exercise. It is the method that will introduce you to the original true nature wisdom deity.”

Join the Guru Rinpoche Hundred Million Mantra Retreat online today, June 30, at www.vajrayana.org.

Lama Tharchin Rinpoche was born in Kongpo, Tibet, June 29, 1936, Lunar Fifth Month, Tenth Day.

Video filmed by Anne Laurent, 2011, produced by the Lama Tharchin Rinpoche Heritage Foundation, 2020.