Yes, there are such practices in Tibetan Buddhism. The breath meditation for one, which is taught to beginners. You can take that as your main practice and do it throughout your life. There’s absolutely no need to do any other practice at all, if you connect well to the breath meditation. No need at all for any “deity visualization”.
Then of course, there is practicing basic morality, and practicing generosity, loving kindness, compassion, etc. That’s a sadhana too. Eventually your whole life is your sadhana. and there is no distinction between your meditation and your “ordinary life”. That again is part of the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism as in all the Buddhist traditions.
They aren’t “deities” anyway in the normal sense. Chenrezig for instance is meant as a visual representation that evokes unbounded compassion. If you connect to compassion, you connect to Chenrezig and it doesn’t matter what visual form you associate with it, or none.
The idea is that they are external not to us as such, but to our normal closed in limited way of looking at things. If I think of it as “my compassion” then it’s going to be limited, something I can possess. While if you relate to it as somewhat external then it may be easier to relate to it as the open unlimited compassion that you may think you aren’t capable of. But as they teach it, we all have that already.
So the only reason for doing those meditations is if you find they make a special connection with compassion, wisdom and so on. There isn’t any intrinsic value in learning to be able to visualize the actual form, except possibly as some kind of blessing connection to be able to do the practice properly in the future. For those who connect to them in that way they may find a special inspiration of that sort. They are images that Tibetan practitioners saw long ago, which they found brought the message of compassion to them in a vivid and immediate way.
Even if they have that inspiration and connection, the practitioners who do the “deity” practices need to drop all the images and visualizations at the end. Otherwise the very images that helped them connect to compassion and wisdom originally may become an obstacle preventing them from opening up to it completely.
Some people find a connection anyway without needing any images to help them.
You can also recite sutras as a form of meditation. For instance reciting the heart sutra is a popular practice in Tibetan Buddhism. You can also do “Tong len” - practices of exchanging self and other, in meditation. It often has visualization accompanying it, but it’s not what you are calling “deity visualization”. Many other such practices I’m sure.
But you don’t have to do those either. You can make the connection without any such practices. You can practice Tibetan Buddhism much as practitioners practice Zen Buddhism, or as the Therevadhans practice meditation, just with the breath, all the way through.
Sometimes the breath meditation is taught as if it was a form of shamatha meditation, with the aim to develop single pointedness or samadhi, as if the aim was to be able to focus more and more on the breath to the exclusion of everything else. You can do it like that. But you can also practice it with an open spacious quality, as you welcome your thoughts as friends and then return to the breath. Done that way, focusing and samadhi is not really what it is about. Indeed everything you need on the path is in this meditation.
I’ve been a Buddhist for over 35 years and my daily meditation is the basic meditation on the breath. There is no need at all to do anything else. My teacher taught me that you should treat whatever meditation you do as the only meditation needed on the path to enlightenment. That way you aren’t continually thinking “what if I did this other one instead”. You don’t need anything else. After all, according to the sutras, when Buddha himself became enlightened, the meditation he used was a simple meditation on the breath which he remembered doing as a young child. He didn’t do any of these elaborate “diety visualization” meditations, or even the “tong len” visualization. He just did the simple meditation on the breath.
If you go to Tibetan teachings you may find you are surrounded by people who are taking every possible initiation, who are visualizing maybe not just one but dozens of these “deities”. But you don’t have to do that. There is no need to take a single empowerment or to do a single visualization practice.
If you have a teacher or teachers who teach you meditation, try asking for help, or if necessary you may need to try other traditions. It’s definitely possible in the Tibetan traditions but your teachers may take a bit of convincing because they are so used to Westerners coming to them and saying “let me have this empowerment and this one and that one…” and they end up teaching them all sorts of practices just because they think that’s what Westerners want, not really based on whether they think they will help them. I’ve heard it described as like giving out sweeties (candy) to children. Teachers that don’t do that find that their students have a tendency to migrate to the teachers who do. Though they are usually careful not to teach them meditations that are actually harmful if used incorrectly.
It’s rather childish I think, The practices themselves are genuine. They do carry that inspiration if practiced properly, well see no reason to doubt that.
But what the Westerners do - apart from a few who probably do connect properly to the teachings - is more like a blessing connection. They aren’t really doing those practices, which they’d normally do only after working with a teacher for years, but rather they are making a connection with those visual forms which perhaps in the future in this life or another life might lead them to doing the practices properly.
So, if you don’t want to do it like that, well that sounds great to me :). Hope you find a teacher or teachers who can support you in it.
Also these practices in Tibetan Buddhism are often tied up with the idea of finding a guru. You don’t have to have a guru to do them. But many Westerners in the Tibetan traditions have a great urgency to find “their guru” as quickly as possible.
You don’t have to find a “guru” at all though. I don’t have one, after 35 years practicing as a Buddhist in mainly the Tibetan traditions. It’s good to have teachers, but finding yourself a guru is something else altogether. Only a few people ever have gurus even in Tibetan traditions, and it would normally happen only after several years of working with them (though for some people it can happen very quickly in some stories they meet someone and instantly take them on as their guru presumably because of some past connection in previous lives).
The idea is that we are caught up on focusing on our sense of self all the time. To follow advice of someone else lets you do things that are in some way - just slightly have a reduced sense of it all being about yourself and your decisions and so on. Helps to ease off slightly. That’s basically the reason that practitioners take on others as their guru. Nobody else can say to you that they are your guru. But you may meet someone who somehow manages that magic of helping you connect somehow to this wider approach, not so much that focus on self in everything you do.
But there is no need at all to do that either. Most Buddhists don’t even in the Tibetan traditions, many don’t even meditate either. In the southern schools they don’t even have this idea of a guru. Even in Zen Buddhism then the idea of a zen master is not really the same as the Tibetan idea of a guru. You don’t expect to see them as Buddha, while in Tibetan Buddhism the idea is that by seeing your teacher as Buddha you come to see all beings and the world itself also as your teacher and as Buddha.
“But please be very clear about this: Zen teachers are not gurus. They – we –are not perfect masters. A real Zen teacher is completely, unambiguously， human with a full complement of challenges and shortcomings. Every teacher has flaws. The task is not to find a perfect teacher (you can’t) but to find one who, warts and all, can be a good-enough guide on the Zen path. You need to he ready to be surprised.”
From Zen Master Who? A Guide to the People and Stories of Zen By James Ford extract on website of Soto Zen Buddhist Association
It’s also a natural thing, also, this teaching that comes from outside yourself and opens you up to something other than your narrow limited focus where you always are so aware of your self, present in every moment, even though you may not really be thinking about yourself as such. Even when you are thinking about others, helping others, there may always be this sense of yourself as the self who is doing all this, which you may begin to notice is having a limiting effect, narrowing your vision in a way. Once you notice this, you find you can’t do anything about it. If you try to do anything, then there is an even stronger sense of your self as the one who is trying to get out of this. It just makes it worse, though you may not realize you are doing this. So that may be a point where you look outside, to try to find an “other” who can help you out of this situation.
Well, you don’t have to take on a guru in a formal way in order to get this “other” perspective breaking through. Might be something your teacher says, ordinary teacher not a guru in the formal sense. Maybe something someone does in your daily life that opens you to compassion and wisdom in a way you didn’t realize was possible. It can also be a message from seeing a flower, hearing a bird sing, watching a stream or a wave in the sea, as in the flower sermon of Zen Buddhism.
(What is the Flower Sermon and what is its significance for Zen Buddhism?)
Buddha didn’t have a guru in the story of the Pali canon. But - he doesn’t do it all by himself either. He has the four signs for instance, when he sees a sick person, and old person, a dying person and a mendicant. Those were his guru, I think you can say. Also as a young child when he sat beneath a rose apple tree and spontaneously entered a deep meditation state - perhaps that is like the external world also - creating a moment somehow that let him meditate in response. That’s what he remembered when he wondered how to proceed just before the night when he became enlightened.
Also there’s the meal of rice milk given to him by Sujata - his first meal for 49 days which gave his body the nutrition it needed for his meditation when he became enlightened. That again was his teacher in a way, the world coming together to create conditions for him to be able to reach enlightenment.
Sujata offering milk-rice to the Buddha and the slave girl Punna is watching
For a short life of the Buddha: Life of the Buddha (in art) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
It’s the same in the Tibetan teachings - even in the stories that bring out guru devotion at its strongest, it’s not just the guru on his or her own guiding the practitioner. Throughout, their life weaves in with teachings from the world, for instance Milarepa’s broken pot, this is when he was living on nettles which he cooked in a pot and which turned his body green:
“One day Milarepa happened to stumble outside his meditation cave Dragkar-taso while he was quite naked and carried an earthen pot - he was almost always quite naked. He slipped on a stone right outside the cave and fell down. The handle broke, the pot rolled away from him and broke asunder, but then another pot emerged from inside of the broken pot. The new pot was green and made of encrusted nettle soup that had fastened on the wall of the earthen pot. Now Milarepa understand how little lasting earthly things were, and sang a song:”
“The pot of clay once existed, but now it does not.
“This is how all things must pass sooner or later.
“Therefore I shall carry on.
“The pot was all I owned.
“By breaking into a thousand pieces, it has become my guru (teacher).”
So if you don’t buy into this whole idea of doing the “deity” practices, or the idea that there is an urgent need to find yourself a guru, or indeed find one at all in this life, well it may be just that you have a slightly more mature approach to it all :). But do be compassionate towards the child-like other practitioners. It doesn’t mean you are on a better path than them. It’s just a difference of personality and approach. There are many stories of people reaching enlightenment through faith and devotion and sometimes the simplest of practices .
For some people the faith based approach, with deity visualization practices that they don’t really understand, and haven’t really connected to, just doing them because they think that’s what they need to do, and everyone else is doing them, and because they like doing the practices, a bit like a child asking for sweeties - but that they have a lot of faith in them - that may work for them. Even if they aren’t connecting to the inspiration of unbounded compassion or wisdom when they do the practices, still they may work for them even so, make a connection, their minds calmer, happier, easier to connect to compassion and wisdom and so on in the ordinary sense, because their minds are calmer. And if nothing else they may well be doing it as a kind of Shamatha or mindfulness practice, helping to calm their minds down by focusing on a single image. And amongst the many thousands of Westerners who do these practices, there surely are a few who are doing them properly, truly are connecting to unbounded open compassion and wisdom whenever they do those meditations, not just doing some kind of mindfulness of form.
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