Finding Our Yiddam
By Michael Erlewine
A yidam is a Tibetan word for a practice that leads to what is called “Recognition,” recognizing the nature of our own mind, which eventually can lead to enlightenment, our own enlightenment, and it starts out with an authentic dharma teacher pointing out to us how to recognize the nature of the mind itself.
And Yidams come in several flavors. Often a yidam is given to us by our root guru, with no choice on our part necessary, or we can choose our own yidam from a list of major divinities and follow that pattern, and finally, we can create our own yidam based on our actual dharma experiences, and create or form the recipe for our recognition.
Ultimately, looking back, our yidam is exactly what it takes to allow us to recognize the actual nature of the mind itself. It takes this and exactly that, not one iota more or less. The path we were treading at the moment of recognition, obviously, was exactly what it took.
I’d like to continue with how we become familiar and get to know our own mind in more detail. A key reminder is throughout the dharma literature a great deal is made of the statement that there are 84,000 kinds or types of dharma paths.
That means there are at least 84,000 different ways to become enlightened. Not many would know all of those 84,000 dharma paths. That’s why I do not consider myself a dharma teacher because I only know of one path, the path I am taking. And I am nowhere near enlightened. I just, with the help of my root guru the Ven. Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, became familiar with one way to recognize the nature of the mind and I am still busy expanding and extending that.
However, what I can do is share something of what I have learned with anyone interested.
As pointed out earlier, the world is not short of qualified dharma teachers, although you may have to hunt one up that is to your vibe. What we are short of is qualified students, recipients for those teachings. And that could mean you.
The teacher reaches out but the student has to be open to the teaching. It’s like an electrical connection, the different poles of the conduit have to be matched.
In my own experience this involved being very, very alone until I could stand doing what had to be done because above all we each must enlighten ourselves, day by day and hour by hour. I was not used to that. I assumed that the dharma teacher would enlighten me, which was a big mistake.
To give you a clear example, as I moved through my practice for years and then decades, of course I would read of the many descriptions of the path various dharma practitioner’s experiences took.
However, at almost every turn my own experiences did not match up to what I read in the teachings and pith texts. This did concern me. Why was I always the outrider, the one who deviated from the norm? I just wanted to fit in.
Yet, the truth is the truth and better to face it than to try to go around it because nothing is more true or beyond the truth.
And what I describe here was not an isolated incident but was consistently true year after year. Somehow, I was on my own path and it deviated or was different from all the other stories I read. Once again, I felt like the Black Sheep, the odd-man-out.
As to explaining just why this was so I may do later, instead I want to offer whatever information I can that may be useful to you right now.
An analogy might be that of a string of pearls or a succession of precious jewels or a series of correct moves or steps that combined become a path, our particular or unique path. Better our own path poorly than copy someone else’s.
Just like when I was a little kid, I used to have these Chinese wooden puzzle boxes that only could be opened by a long series of very exact moves. In my experience, pointing out the nature of the mind so that we actually get it is similar.
As mentioned earlier, a key phrase and important concept is the particular path each of us must fashion to reach any kind of realization, much less enlightenment, and it is called the ‘yidam’.
The Yidam is the particular dharma path that will work for us and perhaps no one else. And the kicker is that it is up to us to make those moves and take those steps to create our own yidam, taking up whatever tips or pointing out of the dharma that others share with us. Dharma teachers can do this, point out the way.
And to drive this home, even when I took those hints or advice and did the work involved, which took even more years, it took a longer time yet before I had the confidence to acknowledge my own individual truth as authentic, meaning that it actually worked! And it helped that my root guru blessed what I came up with. That’s how uncertain I was until I was certain.
And so, we might ask how to use this pointing-out information to further our own dharma path.
The first and the most important step is to own our truth, whether that is good, middling, or disappointing. That first step in a string of experience-beads has to be owned and locked in before we can add a second.
If we don’t accumulate the path of our yidam, we remain where we are. We have to turn the wheel of our own dharma. Our dharma path has to materialize and arise, step by step, because we have to create and maintain it as we walk it.
And if our experience does not follow the line of the dharma texts we read, don’t discount or discard it. Your path, as was my own, may be strikingly different from the average and for the longest time I tried to discard it because it was not popular and did not seem to fit in. Own your own truth.
My advice is to protect it and wait for what your dharma-karma has in store for you. We each assemble our own personal yidam much like you would make a statue of clay. Yes, we can be given or choose a traditional yidam and use that, but in my experience I finally allowed one of my own making to arise and lock itself into place (step by step) and that turned out to be just perfect, even though it did not readily resemble one of the traditional ‘storebought” yidams. Have faith in your own path.
My own yidam, which I finally allowed to accumulate, was different just as I am a bit different from the average dharma practitioner, but it fit me to a ‘T’. I just had to allow it and give it my support SINCE it was my yidam, either way.
All I had to do was tell the truth, witness the truth of my own experiences instead of dismissing and belittling them because they did not meet the mold of what the textbooks state.
I’ve always wanted to fit in, go along, but almost at every turn I don’t fit in and thus I can’t go along and pretend to be part of what I am apart from. I had to dare to be different.
I believe that nature is always trying to grow us our yidam and we defeat it because it’s not what WE had in mind or how the books read. It’s comical that we don’t know our own mind and yet we have opinions about what or what not it has to be like.
That’s a problem MANY of us have.
We are trying to shape our future armed with no experienced information. We want to give advice when we don’t yet know how to receive the teachings.
Learning receptivity is key.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.