The Bodhisattva Path of Wisdom and Compassion

by Chogyam Trungpa

  STARTING WITH YOUR MOTHER. In tonglen, you start by thinking of somebody you really love and care for, a motherly person who was kind, gentle, and patient with you. Because of that person’s affection and kindness, you think of them first. In medieval India and Tibet it was traditional to choose your mother as the primary example of someone you feel warm and kindly toward, but in modern society, there might be a problem with that approach, since some people have developed hatred toward their mothers. However, although you might be a completely angry person, you cannot say that in your entire life nobody has helped you. Somebody has been kind to you and sacrificed themselves for you; otherwise, you would not be here as an adult. So you could still try to work with that medieval idea of the mother principle.

  If you cannot think of such a person, you may be in trouble. You may begin to hate the world, but there is a measure for that: you could breathe in that hatred and resentment. If you do not have a good mother or good person to think of, you could think of yourself.

  You might be a completely angry person and have a grudge against the entire universe, or you might be a completely frustrated person, but in spite of that, you could still reflect back on your childhood and think of how nice your mother was to you. You could remember that there was a time when somebody sacrificed her life for your life and brought you up to be the person you are now.

  You could appreciate your mother’s way of sacrificing her own comfort for you. You could remember how she used to wake up in the middle of the night if you cried, how she used to feed you and change your diapers. You could remember how you acted as the ruler in your little household and how your mother became your slave. Whenever you cried, she would jump up, whether she liked it or not, in order to see what was going on with you. And when you were older, she was very concerned about your security, your education, and so forth.

  When you reflect on your life, you realize that throughout your life there have been people who have gone out of their way for you and made sacrifices for your benefit. You should think of those situations and work them into your practice. There have been times when people came along out of the blue to help you, and then went away without even leaving an address or a phone number. You may never have thanked any of those people, but you should. We all have stories about how badly we have treated our parents and other people who helped us. It is very important for you to think of such occasions, not in order to develop guilt, but to realize how mean-spirited you have been.

  The development of that quality of gratitude, kindness, gentleness, and appreciation of your world is the realization of basic goodness. You develop a feeling of positiveness. At that point, you can begin to relate to the main practice of relative bodhichitta, or sending and taking.

  EXTENDING YOUR PRACTICE. Reflecting on your own mother is the preparation for relative bodhichitta practice. With that understanding, you can begin to extend your sense of nonaggression, nonfrustration, nonanger, and nonresentment beyond your own mother to your friends and to more neutral acquaintances. Eventually you could even try to feel better toward your enemies and the people you do not like. Step by step, you could extend that sense of gentleness, softness, and gratitude toward your own mother to include the rest of the world. Through tonglen practice you are making yourself so soft and reasonable that finally you even begin to feel sympathy toward your bedbugs and mosquitoes.

  In the practice of exchange or tonglen you are taking on the pain and misery of others, and you are giving away your own pleasure and luxury. You are training yourself in giving away your own pleasure and taking on others’ pain naturally. As your breath goes out, you should give those people the best of what is yours, in order to repay their kindness. In order to promote goodness in the world, you should breathe out everything good, the best that you have. And as you breathe in, you should breathe in those people’s problems, misery, and torment. You should take in their pain on their behalf.

  APPLYING TONGLEN IN ORDINARY LIFE. Tonglen is usually done in the context of sitting meditation, but you also can join it with any action. But how are you going to apply tonglen in ordinary life? Should you just run up to somebody in the street and say, “Hey, take my candy and give me the dirty Kleenex in your pocket”? You can do that, if you like, and if you are versatile enough, you can probably do it without offending anybody. But that way of experimenting with others is very crude. The actual application of tonglen is more subtle.

  You can react to whatever circumstance or situation comes to you by practicing tonglen or applying lojong slogans. In sitting meditation you use your breath as a medium, and in postmeditation you use the fickleness of your mind. When you are speaking, for instance, you do not use your breath in the traditional style of sending and taking. Instead, since your mind is tuned in to your speech, you use that: you work with conversation, with how you project your voice and listen for feedback.

  So tonglen is not just about doing your basic breath practice or breathing out the good and breathing in the bad. In any circumstance, you can exchange pleasure for pain. Tonglen is quite demanding, but it can be done, it has been done, and it will be done.

  Removing Territoriality

  When you practice tonglen, you are letting go of yourself; you are practicing egolessness. As you go out there is less thinking about “I am.” You do not hold on to what you are doing, but you keep letting go of this, so this becomes more diffused. You keep going out and expanding more and more, and at some point, you will find that your own problems and pain are no longer a big deal. That is when you begin to realize the benevolence of the bodhisattva ideal: when there is no big deal about this.

  The point is to remove territoriality altogether. The usual samsaric approach is that you would like to hold on to your goodness. You would like to make a fence around yourself and put everything bad outside of your fence, such as foreigners, neighbors, or what have you. You don’t want them to come in. You do not even want your neighbors to walk their dogs on your property because their dogs might make a mess on your lawn.

  So in ordinary life, you do not send and receive, at all. Instead, you try as much as possible to guard those pleasant little situations you have created for yourself. You try to put them in a vacuum, like fruit in a tin, and keep them completely pure and clean. You hold on to as much as you can. Anything outside of your territory is regarded as problematic; you do not want to catch the local influenza. You may not have enough money to build a moat around your house, but you keep your front door locked and are constantly trying to ward off as much as you can. The mahayana path is trying to show us that we do not have to try to secure ourselves. We can afford to extend out a little bit—in fact, quite a bit.

  For a long time we have wanted to inflict pain on others and cultivate pleasure for ourselves. That has been the problem; that is what we have been doing wrong. With tonglen, you are reversing that logic altogether. Instead of inflicting pain on others, you take on the pain yourselves. Instead of sucking in others’ pleasure, you give your pleasure to them. You are trying to reverse samsaric logic to see what happens—and what usually happens is that you become a gentle person.

  It is important to experience and to understand your own unreasonability. Since you have been unreasonable all along, you have to slightly overdo the whole thing in order to make yourself a reasonable person. By doing so, you begin to realize how to be a decent person. That is what tonglen is all about.

  Stages of Tonglen

  Tonglen makes you grow up and become the ultimate adult. Although there are a lot of obstacles to practicing tonglen, particularly in modern industrial society, you can practice it step by step. When you first practice sending and taking, it is almost like a rehearsal. You would like to experience it fully and thoroughly, but at this stage tonglen is mainly a psychological practice. You are developing the psychological attitude of exchanging yourself with others. Instead of being John Doe, you practice becoming Joe Schmidt.

  From that stage of mentally or psychologi
cally sending and taking, tonglen practice progresses very slowly until, in the end, you might actually be able to do such a thing. It has been said in the scriptures that you can even begin to practice tonglen by taking a piece of fruit in one hand and giving it to the other hand. However, if everybody literally began to give things away to one other, there would be tremendous chaos and conflict. But if you develop the attitude of being willing to part with your precious things and to give them to others, that can begin to create a good reality. So it is essential to practice tonglen with conviction and certainty.

  You cannot practice tonglen while thinking that it is just imaginary and that it is not going to affect you. When you actually do it, practicing tonglen will affect you. The proof is in the pudding. On one hand, after a few days of tonglen, you probably will not get a kind letter from your grandmother with whom you have been at war for the past five years. On the other hand, sending and taking will definitely have a good effect quite naturally. It takes time, but it works.

  Depending on your level of development, in tonglen practice you could be really suffering for others or just having that aspiration. It could be either or both. But we mean it literally. It is said that one of the great Kadampa teachers could actually take the pain of another onto himself. When somebody was stoning a dog outside of his house, he was actually bruised. Such a thing could happen to you; you might actually be able to alleviate someone else’s suffering. However, the point is not to wait for an effect. You should not look for results, but just do it and drop it, do it and drop it. If it does not work, you take that in; if it works, you give that out. The whole idea is that you do not possess anything.

  Genuineness and Hypocrisy

  When you feel that you are doing genuine, honest work, you may not only want to give out your pleasure and bring in others’ pain, but you may also want to give out your genuineness and invite in their hypocrisy. When you go out driving or shopping, you could practice tonglen in this way. This is the greatest way of exchanging yourself for others; it is needed in the world very, very badly. So exchanging yourself for others can be more than simply exchanging pain for pleasure. It can also be jumping into each other’s hypocrisy, which is more interesting.

  By sharing your genuineness and bringing in other people’s deception, you do not particularly lose your own genuineness, but you develop joy, because you are doing something very useful, workable, and wonderful. You are not only teaching yourself how to be unselfish in the conventional sense, but you are also teaching the world how to overcome its hypocrisy, which is becoming thicker and thicker as the world gets more and more sophisticated—more and more into the dark age, in other words.1

  An Inexhaustible Treasure of Goodness

  Meditation in action is the saving grace of the mahayana. It is not exertion or higher insight that distinguishes mahayanists from hinayanists, but their skillfulness in practicing within day-to-day life. It is in knowing how to live life through the paramitas and by applying the slogans. The slogans and the paramitas go hand in hand.

  Relative bodhichitta practice is very action oriented. We give as much as we can give and we expand as much as we can expand. We have a lot to offer because we have basic goodness, which is an inexhaustible treasure—and because of that we can receive more, as well. We can be shock absorbers of other people’s pain. Tonglen is a very moving practice: the more we give our best, the more we are able to receive other people’s worst. Isn’t that great?

  Tonglen practice is extremely powerful and helpful, so you should take it seriously. Tonglen could be one of the best measures for solving our ecological problems. It could have the physical effect of cleaning up pollution in big cities and maybe even in the entire world. We might have difficulty taking in pollution, but we should take it in wholeheartedly and completely. We should feel that our lungs are filled with bad air. We should feel that we have actually cleaned out the world and taken that pollution into ourselves. Then a switch takes place, and as we breathe out, we find that we still have an enormous treasure of good breath going out all the time.

  Proceeding with tonglen requires courage, humor, and gallantry. How-ever, sending and taking is not regarded as proof of one’s personal bravery or virtue, but as a natural course of exchange. It just takes place. Bad and good are always there, neurosis and sanity are always there. The problem with most people is that they are always trying to give out the bad and take in the good. That has been the problem of society in general and the world altogether. But on the mahayana path, the logic is reversed, which is fantastic, extraordinary. You are actually getting the inner scoop on Buddha’s mind directly and at its best.

  Although tonglen is a mahayana discipline, it is also very important in terms of both hinayana and vajrayana practice. In the hinayana, without tonglen you are just dressing up in monks’ robes and shaving your head. In the vajrayana, without tonglen, you are just dressing up as a deity. So it is the mahayana tradition and discipline that holds the hinayana and vajrayana together.

  Without tonglen practice, both the hinayana and the vajrayana become like a lion’s corpse. As king of the beasts, a dead lion is not attacked by other animals, but it is left to be eaten from within. Likewise, the Buddha said that his teaching will not be destroyed by outsiders, but by insiders who do not practice true dharma, the bodhisattva path. Remember that.

  Tonglen is like skydiving or parachuting. Fear is involved, and so is personal possessiveness. You may not want to give away your personal possessions. You may be afraid, but you could extend yourself and fly. I don’t think you are going to get into any trouble or crash into the rocks. You could fly like an eagle, fly like a skylark, and enjoy the space. You could breathe out goodness and take in the pain of others. You could be brave. If you are brave, in the end you will begin to enjoy tonglen. You could be a warrior and parachute with a smile.

  8

  Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue.

  The three objects are the objects of love, hate, and indifference. The three poisons are passion, aggression, and ignorance. The three virtuous seeds are the absence of passion, the absence of aggression, and the absence of ignorance. With passion, you want to magnetize or possess. With aggression, you want to reject, attack, or cast out. With ignorance, you couldn’t be bothered; you are disinterested and indifferent. It is a kind of anti-prajna energy.

  Whenever any of the three poisons happen in your life, you should do the sending and taking practice. You should look at your passion, aggression, and ignorance, but not regard them as a problem or as a promise. Instead, when you are in a state of aggression, you should think, “May this aggression be a working base for me. May I learn to keep my aggression to myself, and may all sentient beings thereby attain freedom from this kind of aggression.” For passion and ignorance, you should do the same: “May this passion or ignorance be mine. By virtue of keeping it to myself, may others be free of passion or ignorance.”

  When we reflect on our enemy, we have already inspired aggression. We should let that aggression be ours so that our enemy may be free from aggression. With passion inspired by our friends, we should take that neurosis into ourselves so that our friends may be free from passion. And with those who are neither enemies or friends, who are indifferent, unconcerned, ignorant, or noncaring, we should bring their neurosis into ourselves so that such people may be free from ignorance.

  Interestingly enough, when you begin to possess any of the three poisons completely, when you take charge of them, you will find that the logic is reversed. By holding the anger as your own, you let go of the object, or intent, of your anger. But without an object, you can no longer hold on to that aggression, so the aggression falls apart. It is impossible to have an object of anger, because the anger belongs to you. Likewise, if you have no object of passion or ignorance, you cannot hold on to that passion or ignorance.

  In this slogan, the interesting twist is that you can cut the root of passion, aggression, and ignorance by
dealing with others rather than by dealing with yourself. If you give your compassion to the object so that it does not provoke your anger, then what are you angry with? You find yourself just hanging out there with no one to project onto. If the projection is freed from those problems, the projector has nothing to project onto.

  9

  In all activities, train with slogans.

  The idea of this particular teaching is to give our blood and flesh to others. That is a very powerful thing to do. It is like saying, “If you want me, take me, possess me, kidnap me, control me. Go ahead, do it. Take me. I’m at your service. You could cut me into pieces or anything you want. Without your help I would not have any way to work with my journey at all.” Langri Tangpa, who was one of the Kadampa teachers, had a saying: “May I receive all evils, may my virtues go to others.” He said, “I realize that all mistakes belong to me and all virtues belong to others, so I cannot really blame anybody except myself.” Such an idea sounds terribly self-flagellating, if you look at it the wrong way. The popular idea of blaming everything on oneself has in it an ultimate guilt concept. But this slogan is not based on guilt or on the feeling that we did something terribly wrong. It is based on seeing things as they are.

  Another saying goes: “Profit and victory to others; loss and defeat to myself.” It would be good to put that little phrase up on the wall and memorize it. In Tibet, we used to stick phrases like that on our door handles. In the Vajradhatu community,2 when we create a dharmic environment such as a practice center, we post the slogans on a wall in order to remind ourselves of them. The point is to catch the first thought—and in catching the first thought, that first thought should have words. By “profit and victory,” we mean anything that encourages us to walk on the path of the dharma, which is created by the world. At the same time, we are filled with loss and defeat, which is ours. We are not supposed to sulk about that, but to take pride in it.