In this interview with Matthew O’Connell on the Imperfect Buddha Podcast, Ken reframes Vajrayana deity practice for those who struggle with visualisation. Rather than using imagery, he emphasises touching compassion and emptiness directly and letting the feeling of being the deity arise from that experience. It’s a shift from image-making to feeling-being, and it changes the whole flavour of practice.
He shares striking examples: practitioners forming deep relationships with figures like Green Tara through sustained devotion; the way deities function as living presences rather than symbolic artefacts; and how, for Western practitioners, meaningful connection may come more readily through familiar figures such as Mary or Christ. The heart of his point is that an authentic relationship with a deity evolves from experience, not from forcing the traditional forms.
I first reached out to Ken for advice on the difficulties I was experiencing with Vajrayana visualisation, and the communication challenges I faced in taking practice questions to my teacher, a young Tibetan tulku who spoke little English. Ken invited me to set imagery aside and let the practice speak to me. That shift helped me stay with the long arc of ngöndro. In time, I came to see that the 100,000 repetitions of these practices, day after day—stretching to five years in my case—built capacity in attention, which later supported deeper forms of practice.
Many years afterwards, something unexpected happened: a sense of devotion began to flow naturally, and now I find myself spontaneously reciting the 100-syllable Vajrasattva mantra and singing the Heart Sutra, and forming an awe-struck relationship with Niguma through recitation of The Magic of Faith. This conversation with Matthew O'Connell is a reminder of how relationships with deities are lived, felt, and discovered over time rather than achieved through effort or visualisation.
Matthew: So I wonder, I'm one of those people that finds visualization and energy stuff pretty easy. That comes to me quite naturally. And so I don't necessarily have a huge problem visualizing these quite elaborate entourages of different beings with eight arms and all of this stuff going on. But within that I quite enjoy exploring the simplification of it too. And then shifting my attention to appreciate different aspects of it.
So sometimes the detail is quite interesting to explore. Sometimes just a kind of quite bland, almost universal colour or something like this might be interesting. And sometimes I use traditional symbols and then I change them to other things too.
And I feel I can get away with that because I've been practicing for quite a long time. I wonder to what degree we may lose something if we change deities too much or not? So I guess that's a side question. But the real thing I'd like to do is again go back to the suggestion I made before, which is how can deities, in your view, open up possibilities? And as the second part of thour would be, do you think we can thoroughly westernize the kinds of deities and the symbology attached to them that we might be looking at?
Ken: Oh, this is a complex question. I think the first point is, what is a deity? I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about that.
Every deity in the Tibetan tradition is the union of compassion and emptiness. That's our nature. And not everybody has your facility with visualisation. In fact, as you probably know, visualisation is almost an insuperable obstacle for many people when they try to practice Vajrayana. So I wrote the section on deity practice [in The Magic of Vajrayana] with that very much in mind, but also drawing on my own experience. The starting point has to be the unity of compassion and emptiness. And what I suggest in the book is something that I took from the Nyingma tradition: by hook or by crook—to use an English phrase which I'm sure you're familiar with—touch emptiness and compassion. And these are not concepts, of course, but an experiential shift. And let the experience of being the deity grow from there, rather than trying to visualise it, per se. That is an approach which is going to involve feeling being the deity, rather than visualising being the deity. Suzuki Roshi once said, our practice is based on absolute confidence in our fundamental nature. And so when you do deity practice, you take as your fundamental nature the unity of compassion and emptiness, and you let yourself trust that to the umpteenth degree.
Now that's quite a jump right there. And as you let yourself absorb that and let that permeate your whole way of being, then the sense of being the deity can come alive. And that may come alive in the forms of the deity, particularly if you're familiar with the forms. Because one has to remember that all of these deities were at one time or other, religions, and they were the central figure of a religion in its own right. And it was over the process of centuries that these things came together. And the Tibetans went over and just brought everything they could back and put it all together into this thing we call Vajrayana. But it's not how it was practiced in India at all. Tibetans would say, "The Indians practiced one deity and saw hundreds. We practice hundreds of deities and don't see any."
So the sense of really being the deity, and take say, Green Tara, who's the protectress, right? What's it like to have an intimate relationship with this figure? And it's very, very much a relationship. It's your personal god. Taking on as one's personal god a figure from another culture is a difficult transition. A colleague of mine, Michael Taft, feels that many people will do better taking on the Virgin Mary, or Christ, or some other figure. Because we have to come to terms with those figures, too, I don't know what the answers are. But I do know the answers are to "How this is going to evolve?" and things like that.
I was able to develop a relationship with these deities, and I know how to point people in the direction of doing that for themselves. But you really are taking on. At first I thought I had a relationship with one particular deity, and then I found, rather to my surprise, that there's a different deity who feels like a companion to me now. I never feel particularly separate from him, but I know other people feel the same way about other deities. I mean, my own teacher, his teacher, after he had completed his training, was the tailor in the monastery, which was a big job, because you had all of these banners that had to be renewed all the time and things like that. It was a lot of work to do.
And he decided at a certain point, "This is a complete waste of time," and he shut himself in one of the latrines in the monastery. You can imagine what a latrine in a Tibetan monastery was like. Not porcelain, scrubbed every day.
He didn't leave it for seven years. And during that whole time, he prayed and meditated on green Tara. And so there he is, in this basically stone and concrete shithole. After a couple of weeks, they started putting food under the door for him, but he wouldn't unlock the door. That's how he formed a relationship with Green Tara. And it's very much about forming a personal relationship and letting the spirit, and this goes straight to your shamanic training, letting the spirit of the deity come into you and take over in you. That's what it's about.