Sadhana Meditation

This talk was written for a Triratna Order Weekend in March 2018 but never delivered as a talk.

We are talking about meditation practices that involve the visualisation of particular symbolic forms of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Sadhana means ‘practice’ or‘means of accomplishing something’.

A sadhaka is someone who practises. Yidam is from the Tibetan, meaning ‘bond’, being firmly bond with the pure and liberated mind. Sadhana practice focused on the Yidam is about becoming firmly bonded with the Yidam. The phase of visualisation is the beginning. From there the practice moves more and more in the direction of the practitioner becoming the Yidam.

Visualising the Yidam is about creating the Yidam, filling the image with life and qualities. It is not about seeing a picture. It is something much more dynamic than that. Just as a person changes all the time and is not static like a photo, so too, the Yidam is always changing. We are not trying to create some sort of static picture in our minds, but a living presence. The qualities, colours, mudra, implements and attributes all add to the sense of presence, the sense of personality and aliveness.

As Bhante Sangharakshita puts it: “When you visualise a Buddha or Bodhisattva, you aren’t just doing a visualisation exercise as you might visualise a ball or a spade. The visualised form represents an embodiment , from a particular aspect or a particular angle, of the spiritual ideal itself, and it is that that you are trying to get in contact with, in a very direct and tangible way.”

Then we bring an attitude of devotion and receptivity to that. It is good to compose our own verses of devotion and even puja, not to share with others necessarily. Most of us should not share these devotional outpourings for two reasons: very few of us have great poetic ability and the more our devotional verses get used the less connection we have with them. It is good to write ,or compose or sing or recite our devotion, often and in different words, so that it stays alive and vital and expresses the current state of our bond with the Yidam. That changes over time. I have noticed myself that I am much more able to surrender to the Yidam now than I was even ten years ago, never mind thirty years ago ,when the connection was first formed.

As well as devotional verses there is also prayer and dialogue with the Yidam, expressing an attitude of openness and receptivity and a yearning for an ever closer bond. In most sadhanas there is a stage of receiving blessings and we need to surrender to this, to fully allow the blessings to reach us and transform us. The blessings shouldn’t be like a shower of rain that falls on us and falls off us. It is more like having the temperature turned up gradually so that the whole of your being becomes a fire of devotion and receptivity and burns up the defilements and the pettiness of egotism.

We are entering into a bond with the Yidam that means totally surrendering to the Yidam and allowing ourselves to merge with the Yidam, pushing out all of our poisons and replacing it with the wisdom, compassion and energy of the Awakened mind.

But the actual sitting practice of Sadhana is only a preliminary to bringing the sadhana into everyday life. Again to quote Bhante: “the Buddha or the Bodhisattva is not just a being outside yourself. That’s what it seems like at present, but in reality that Buddha or Bodhisattva represents what you yourself can become. On a deeper level, on a very much deeper level ( and I usually use this language only with caution) they are yourself, outside time, outside space.”

What do we mean by becoming the Buddha or Bodhisattva and bringing the sadhana into everyday life? To start with we mean finding ways to constantly remind ourselves of the bond. By using the mantra, by being aware of the colour in our environment; whatever helps us to remember the bond with the pure and liberated mind. But as I said at the beginning Sadhana means a means of accomplishing something and what we are trying to accomplish is to become completely imbued with or saturated with the qualities of theYidam, so that we act as the Yidam would, speak as the Yidam would think and feel as the Yidam would. This is the devotional path to Insight. It is a surrendering of self to something much higher and more expansive. In essence then a Sadhana practice is about what we call spiritual death and rebirth, which are two sides of the same coin. Spiritual death is the death of the delusion of an unchanging and separate self and spiritual rebirth is being suffused with qualities of the liberated mind; the expansive Compassion and Seeing that means there is no room for the pettiness of self-centredness and opinionatedness.

These are metaphors and other metaphors could be used. For instance, instead of death, the metaphor of victory could be used. As the Buddha says in the Dhammapada: “better than victory over a thousand men in a thousand battles is victory over oneself”. (verse 103) Or the metaphor of surrender could be used, giving up victory, as the eight point mind training puts it:

When others, out of jealousy
Treat me wrongly with abuse, slander, and scorn,
May I take upon myself the defeat
And offer to others the victory. (www.dalailama.com/teachings/training-the-mind/training-the-mind-verse-5-6) The defeat here is the defeat of egotism; spiritual death or victory over the lower impulses.

The problem with metaphors is that they can be literalised so easily and they carry so many connotations that if literalised they become a sort of hardened set of views. That’s why it is important to realise that we are using metaphors and to be flexible with our metaphors. For instance, when we think of death we may have in mind two states that are very different from each other, being alive and being dead and a sudden transition from one to the other. But perhaps for most of us dying is a better metaphor than death; a gradual dying of delusion rather than the sudden death of delusion. Otherwise we may be expecting that our Sadhana practice or other practices are going to grant us some big cataclysmic experience after which we will never be the same again. This may happen, just as some people die suddenly, but it is much more likely that death will be anticipated and gradual. So also it is much more likely that spiritual practice has a gradual and often almost imperceptible effect.

We could see Sadhana as like a gradual seeping into our being of the qualities of the Yidam like a coloured dye gradually seeping into a cloth or liquid. If you are a Green Tara devotee you might think of yourself as being slowly coloured by the spiritual equivalent of green.

My own Yidam is the Buddha Ratnasambhava. I have maintained the connection for the thirty years since ordination although I don’t often do the formal practice. I have found other ways of maintaining the connection and I have experienced the gradual colouring of my experience by this association with Ratnasambhava. I have also found myself surrendering more and more to Ratnasambhava. Sadhana is really quite an extraordinary practice – it makes use of the imagination to transform a mundane mind of mud and shackles into something much more pure and free and the whole process happens in a realm of beauty and fascination.