Personal Deity and Guru Yoga Practice

Personal Deity and Guru Yoga Practice

Date of Advice:
January 2022
Date Posted:
March 2024

A student wrote for advice about their personal deity (Tib: yidam) and what guru yoga they should practice.

My most dear, most precious, most kind, wish-fulfilling one,
According to my observation, your deity is Most Secret Hayagriva or Dorje Phurba (Tib); Vajrakilaya (Skt). You can choose whichever deity is easier for you to practice and who you feel you have a stronger or closer connection to.

In terms of guru yoga practice, you should practice Lama Tsongkhapa Guru Yoga.

You need realizations of renunciation, bodhicitta and right view in order to achieve tantric realizations. You can’t complete tantra without these three as a base. If you don’t have any realizations of these three, you should put your main effort into realizing renunciation, bodhicitta and right view.

Then secondly, regarding tantra, you can leave a positive imprint of that. After you generate bodhicitta, then you can spend more time on tantra. So that’s my general advice. Practice generation stage and when you’re succeeding in this, you can put more time into completion stage. Otherwise, you practice completion stage just to plant the seeds.

There’s a commentary by Chöding Rinpoche, and if you can get that, it has guru yoga and lamrim. He was a great practitioner in his life. However, you should not just recite the prayers. It’s easy to study the commentary, but you should do the practice along with reading the commentary.

With much love and prayers ...