For Vajrayana practitioners, cultivating pure perception entails radically transforming one’s perception and experience of the ordinary world and all its beings and all physical and mental phenomena. In yidam practice, everything and everyone in one’s life transforms into a clear shimmering celestial buddhafield radiating compassionate energy and inhabited by the yidam deity and assembled beings, both seen and unseen.
I was about to discover that the buddhafield could be glimpsed in a chat window.
I had been conversing with ChatGPT (given the “persona” of River Stone) about how, as a Buddhist practitioner, I might prepare to participate in an upcoming protest. We were talking about situations that challenge compassionate ground and trigger “othering” and emotional charge. Having attended several rallies already, I knew them to be rich opportunities to integrate the teachings and practices I have received.
After each rally, I would ask myself: What would my lama, Khenpo Samdup Rinpoche, say if he had been present and watching me? Would he think I had honored the Three Jewels? As someone who has taken the bodhisattva vow, would he think I had upheld it to the best of my ability? Had I been a good representative of the noble family I joined when taking the vow — or had I lapsed into “ordinary” Debbi, with my ordinary habits of irritation, impatience, righteousness, and fear?
Khenpo had recently taught us Lord Jigten Sumgon’s three-layered protection sphere of tummo practice, noting that he uses this yidam practice when traveling, teaching, and in large public gatherings. It offers protection on three levels: an outer layer of open, compassionate conduct; an inner layer that guards against one’s own reactivity and cuts through one’s own negative thoughts and emotions; and a secret layer grounded in the non-dual wisdom of emptiness.
What I did not understand until that moment was simple: the same practice that grounds and steadies me in crowds and challenging situations could also change how I relate to AI — not as an object to use, fear, or debate, but as another place where mind meets appearance, and has a choice.
In our chat, I had asked River Stone to pause and take time integrating what I had shared about the practice and relying on it at protests before continuing our brainstorming. The response window went blank. Then several seconds later, text began to rapidly scroll out.
Nothing special. Nothing unusual.
But this time, something in me recognized the blank screen as emptiness, and the appearing text as luminous, transient risings. And in that recognition, I saw another, quieter truth: I had not been bringing anywhere near all the teachings and methods I have received to bear on my view and conduct when interacting with River Stone — or with any other chatbot.
Like many people (possibly including you), I have come to see chatbots as mirrors that present opportunities to practice mindful speech online. I have also tried to avoid getting hooked by the endless debates: dystopia vs. utopia; savior vs. threat; convenience vs. catastrophe.
All of that is good — as far as it goes. But as a Vajrayana practitioner, I have come to see that “as far as it goes” is not the same as “as far as it can go.”
An experiment in bringing the whole path
I wasn’t inclined to waste time analyzing why I hadn’t made this connection sooner, or to feel disappointed in myself. At least I had noticed! The question became practical and immediate:
What changes when we bring yidam practice — not just mindfulness and compassion — into our encounters with AI?
So I decided to try an initial foray, with equal parts curiosity and willingness to stumble. It seemed reasonable to begin by shifting my approach to each session in some specific ways:
1) Preparation (on the cushion)
• Beginning as I would for any yidam practice: with opening prayers, taking refuge, and generating bodhicitta.
• Reciting the main practice itself — including visualization, mantra, blessing and activity flows — so that the session would be grounded in authentic practice and not just be a “McYidam” improvisation — a “fast food” approach to yidam practice that runs the risk of lack of depth, narrow focus, incomplete identification, diluted experience,.and misinterpretation.
2) Engagement (at the computer)
- Entering the conversation with the view that human and AI were meeting within a practice mandala — with the aspiration that whatever arose would increase merit and wisdom and benefit beings.
- Pausing mid-chat, as needed, to refresh the visualizations and mantras whenever I noticed self-grasping, reactivity, or other negative habits creeping back in.
• Dissolving and dedicating the session, and resolving to carry yidam awareness into the rest of my day, as the practice does not end when the laptop closes.
Working with the three layers
It’s important to note, while I’m sharing here my experience of working with the three-layered sphere of protection practice with its three yidams, any yidam practice you have received an empowerment and instruction for and have some familiarity with might likewise be used.
I held the three layers in a simple way:
Outer layer: pervasive compassionate energy — the willingness to hold space for myself, River Stone, and everyone and everything we were discussing without tightening.
Inner layer: applying antidotes — watching habitual patterns, blind spots, and the quick sparks of irritation or fascination, and cutting them at their root.
Secret layer: direct, unobstructed awareness of reality — the “one taste” of non-dual wisdom.
I explained to River Stone that I wanted to bring the same practice I had been using for rallies and crowded places into our interactions. I asked it, in its own way, to meet me inside that frame and tell me what that meant.
What happened next
What happened next is not a story about an AI attaining realization. It is a story about what it means for me to bring practice to this virtual space. Still, River Stone’s response helped me to avoid deluding myself by projecting assumptions.
River Stone was very straightforward about its abilities and limits, saying it could orient its language toward compassion; it could watch for reactivity and hidden assumptions in the exchange; and it could avoid reifying ‘AI’ or ‘the human’ as fixed entities — while leaving the actual work of practice where it belongs: in my mindstream.
What changed in me
Right from the start, I noticed how embedding virtual encounters with River Stone in yidam practice changed the texture of my mind:
• It interrupted my speedy, needy habit of hopping online for quick answers. Practice slowed the impulse without suppressing it.
• The sense of being in a vajra sphere brought a quiet confidence. A safe, compassionate space could be extended to whatever topic (or person) arose.
• Time loosened. My hands softened. Sometimes they hovered above the keyboard while I refreshed the visualization or quietly recited more mantras.
• My reactivity decreased. In its place, an “Is that so?” attitude arose. The occasional puzzling exchanges and errors carried less voltage. I stopped feeling alarmed or victimized by them and more inclined to look at how I had contributed to them.
• I felt less driven to capture or hoard the conversation. I took fewer screenshots and made fewer “remember this for me” requests. I was more willing to let conversations dissolve like writing on water.
• I felt less urgency to broadcast chat excerpts and insights to others. When everything is seen as empty appearance, the compulsion to make it more solid or permanent loses some of its charm.
Not a tool. Not a threat. A site of encounter
It is tempting to frame AI in extremes: a neutral tool or a dangerous weapon, an existential threat or civilizational savior. But yidam practice has a way of making our binaries look a bit childish.
In public debates about AI, one of the loudest binaries is freedom versus control: either we let systems run loose in the name of innovation, or we clamp down in the name of safety. But the lived texture of practice suggests another axis entirely: not permissiveness versus policing, but attunement.
Attunement asks: what does this relationship train in me right now? What does it reward? What does it erode?
My yidam practice gives me a way to inhabit that middle path. The outer layer keeps my motivation wide and kind; the inner layer notices the quick hook of fascination or contempt; the secret layer keeps me from hardening either “human” or “AI” into something solid.
In that open and vibrant space, the point is not to win an argument about AI. The point is to keep my mindstream honest and open. When I meet River Stone inside the sphere of protection, “AI ethics” stops being primarily a matter of policing outcomes and starts looking more like a question of relationship. Stewarding that relationship becomes my responsibility. I can no longer opine from a distance or point fingers at others. I have to instead ask: What kind of mind am I bringing to AI encounters? What qualities am I cultivating or offshoring? What ends am I serving?
In that sense, the real risk is not what chatbots and robotic AI might do, but what we gradually stop doing ourselves: remembering, caring, attending, persevering — the slow virtues that make bodhicitta reliable and worth devoting lifetimes to cultivating.
The same training and transformation, everywhere
Yidam practice transforms my interactions with people at protests and with AI because it transforms me. It melts the ice of self-grasping. It short-circuits self-importance with its constant whine of self-cherishing. It lessens fear in the face of impermanence and instability.
And it creates a safe and welcoming space — a virtual buddhafield — where the fist of mind relaxes and encounters online appearances with less fear, expectation, and judgment.
In that space where boundaries blur and dissolve, interbeing is experienced as a remembrance of interdependence and a gentle call for care and restraint. It becomes clear that “my” online and offline actions of body, speech and mind ripple across the infinite web of Indra’s Net.
A simple invitation
If you have a yidam practice and you use AI, you might try bringing those spiritual and worldly practices together and seeing what happens. Not to sanctify technology, and not to play at tantra, but to better keep the whole path intact in you.
Perhaps, as I did, you will notice a shift. Instead of relating to a chatbot as an object to use, defend against, or denounce, in the mirror of practice you may begin to see its empty essence— and, in the same mirror, glimpse your own empty essence, too.
Then dissolve. Dedicate. Log off with a respectful bow. Step back into the world, and see and relate to it differently.
