Kha Kyab Rang Dröl: Accomplishing the Purpose of Beings Throughout Space
When accomplishing the meditational deity practice, it is much better to accomplish one deity, to pray to one deity, because, if you consider that in your lives you are trying to accomplish your worldly goals as well as your spiritual goals, it is very difficult to accomplish both. This is always a conflict that arises for you because you want to spend more time doing dharma yet you are always spending a little more time doing your worldly things. It stands to reason that if you simplify your spiritual endeavor and try your best to accomplish one deity, then you will be able to accomplish that deity rather than trying to accomplish many.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having many deities, but the problem is you don’t have time to accomplish them all. So you pack them all in and try to practice a little bit of each one but you are never able to get any accomplishment for any of them because you aren’t able to spend enough time accumulating the mantra. It wasn’t like this for the lamas of the past who had time to go into caves and practice for their entire lives. You are lucky if you practice for just an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, and then you call yourselves practitioners. This is just scratching the surface.
So in the short time that you allow yourselves for practice, you should make sure that it is truly quality practice time, and spend it with single-pointed concentration accomplishing the main deity you are working with. You should get up earlier, and you should recite more mantra. It’s very important that you accumulate mantra.
To accomplish the deity it is necessary to accumulate hundreds of thousands of recitations of the essence mantra of the deity. Then the deity becomes accomplished. And you need to have strong faith that this will happen. Otherwise, if you put only a little bit of effort into your practice, and go on like this for a year or a few months, then, because you haven’t done a lot of intense mantra recitation, and haven’t really focused on accomplishing that one deity really well, you never have any sign. You never have a vision of the deity, you don’t experience any change in your mind, and you don’t receive any blessings. Because of that you become discouraged and you develop incorrect view. Then you stop wanting to practice and you abandon your practice. This is really very, very wrong. So it is important to know that if you can accomplish one deity very well, then this is best, and if you can accomplish Avalokiteshvara, then this is excellent.
Excerpt from an oral teaching given by Yangthang Rinpoche on the Kha Kyab Rang Dröl practice. The complete teaching is published by Vimala as Commentary on the Avalokiteshvara Practice Practice Called “Accomplishing the Purpose of Beings Throughout Space”.