14

Training the Mind and Heart: The Lojong System

KEN MCLEOD

B. ALAN WALLACE

JUDY LIEF

What does the word lojong mean?

KEN MCLEOD: Although lojong (blo sbyong) is often translated as “mind training,” the meaning of the term in Tibetan is closer to “refining” rather than training. Lojong is counterintuitive in the sense that it’s opposed to our ordinary way of relating to the world. It is intended to create friction between our habitual patterns and the experience of the present moment. This friction generates heat to burn up our habituated patterns.

B. ALAN WALLACE: Lojong is largely a matter of reframing our perspective on the phenomena that arise before us. We perceive them from a fresh perspective. Rather than taking the usual tack of trying to transform our external circumstances, we shift and refine our way of viewing, experiencing, and engaging with reality.

JUDY LIEF: Lojong takes us through a three-step process. First we move from our habit of putting our own interests above everything else to the provocative thought of putting others’ interests somewhere on our horizon. Then we move to putting others ahead of ourselves. Finally, we transcend that altogether. It’s not simply replacing a this-that orientation with a that-this orientation. It’s going beyond this and that altogether.

The real issue is egolessness. Ego of self and ego of other are equally limited views of reality. Ego of self is the sense of self-fixation and fascination, clinging to a notion of who we are as something solid that can be separated out from other aspects of reality. Ego of other, or ego of phenomena, is taking what we perceive, all of our perceptions, experiences, moods, and thoughts, and solidifying them into “other.” We estrange ourselves from the basic fabric of reality when we let our mind have a bias in either direction. Lojong is designed to remove that estrangement.

B. ALAN WALLACE: Lojong runs right in the face of the inclinations that have kept us in samsara for a long time. In general, we are driven by self-grasping, so our natural inclination is certainly not to take in the negativity of the world and give away everything good in our lives. Quite the contrary.

When people are first introduced to lojong, they often have a hard time with the notion that self-interest isn’t really the ground of life.

B. ALAN WALLACE: It is said that the Dharmakāya is the perfection of the Buddha’s self-interest (rang don), while the samboghakāya and nirmāṇakāya are the perfection of the Buddha’s other-interest (gzhan don). It is not the case, then, that the Buddhadharma entails turning your back on your own aspirations to be free of suffering and achieve enlightenment. That would be a weird distortion of the Buddhist teachings. Rather, we’re counteracting the self-centeredness that prioritizes one’s well-being over that of everyone else, especially where one’s interests seem to be in conflict with others. But our own aspirations are part and parcel of the Buddhadharma all the way to enlightenment.

JUDY LIEF: One of the reasons that mind training is such a marvelous body of teachings is that it can work for people at all levels of familiarity with Buddhadharma. A danger can arise, though, if you don’t have some understanding of emptiness. Then the lojong sayings can be perverted into moral credos, and tonglen (gtong len) can become a kind of martyrdom. It is important to understand that the flow of energy is not being held anywhere by anyone. Rather, one is working with an energetic reversal that goes beyond our usual sense of virtue, of who’s good and who’s bad.

Once we overcome that misapprehension, we find that the practice is very earthy, practical, and relevant. One can work with every one of the slogans in many different ways, and at many different levels of understanding.

Do you need a teacher to guide your practice of lojong?

B. ALAN WALLACE: If you can find a qualified teacher of lojong, there’s no question that’s best, as it is for learning virtually any other skill. But if there are no teachers around, you can pick up a good text on mind training and follow that as carefully as you can.

Whether you have a teacher or not, I feel one important element is required. Just as Vajrayāna has its root system deeply embedded in the Mahāyāna, so does the Mahāyāna tradition have its root system deeply embedded in the early teachings of the Buddha. Mind training is not an introductory teaching, or at the very least, it would be a very steep step to be making at the outset. For the lojong teachings to make much sense, they need to rest on the fundamental framework of the Four Noble Truths and the basic constituents of the practice: ethics, meditation, and wisdom.

JUDY LIEF: I never present lojong without presenting at least some preliminary ground of mindfulness and awareness. You need to let the mind settle and rest with uncertainty—get down to the bare bones. It helps to have a sense of the logic of the Sutrayāna, and without a basic meditation practice, lojong can become just a way to be goody-goody.

KEN MCLEOD: What I’ve found is that lojong, and particularly tonglen, taking and sending, is for many people an immediate way to get in touch with compassion. So I’m not sure that it can’t be used as an introduction. If it is presented as a natural expression of innate compassion, people can connect with it quite easily and quite deeply. Lojong can take you right to the heart of the intention to be awake, bodhicitta. It can allow you to be completely awake to all aspects of your experience in order to correct your basic imbalances. The practice of sending and taking has that kind of power.

B. ALAN WALLACE: Putting tonglen into a secular context can be helpful, but lojong is more than the practice of tonglen. I don’t see how one could properly work with the meaning of bodhicitta—the achievement of enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings—without having a sense of who the Buddha is, what the Four Noble Truths are, and so forth. These are not isolated meditative practices. They come to us as very theory-laden, textured, multifaceted disciplines of practice. I don’t see how they really make any sense without the whole package.

JUDY LIEF: I’ve certainly presented tonglen as a very practical thing to do, separated out from the context of lojong. For example, it’s very helpful as an applied practice in working with health care professionals, who are dealing with death and dying on a regular basis. They don’t need much background, and it opens up an incredibly awakened, tender experience for people. It’s very useful, but I agree that it isn’t the same as doing the full lojong practice.

The ultimate bodhicitta slogans at the beginning of the seven-point mind training can be quite challenging, such as investigating the nature of unborn awareness.

KEN MCLEOD: Dealing with ultimate bodhicitta is where things get interesting. Frequently when you say things like, “Regard everything as a dream” and “Be a child of illusion,” there’s usually at least one person in the room who resists this strongly. That person is usually expressing the fears of everybody in the group. They fear openness, the lack of reference points, particularly social reference points and connections. Taking the perspective of ultimate bodhicitta, trusting in an awareness, which is no thing, can be very intimidating.

B. ALAN WALLACE: If you do start to get it, it challenges your very sense of personal identity, which you have been cherishing as the most precious thing in the universe. Suddenly that is being challenged right at the very core.

JUDY LIEF: That’s when the lojong practice starts to bite. This is the heart of the practice that underlies the more relative benefits of cultivating kindness. However, if you simply lapse into philosophical musing about the nature of reality and not paying attention to what is going on day by day, the relative slogans can offer their own bite, lest you become pretentious about your view of reality while treating everyone around you like dirt.

I find that if you memorize the slogans and study them on a regular basis, they just pop up at the most embarrassing times. When you’ve really blown it and you’ve lost your mind and you’re completely freaked out, a slogan pops up in a provocative way. In that way they are almost effortless (annoyingly so). They pop up whether you like it or not. And when they arise for me, it’s not as if I have unraveled all the sources of my multitude of neuroses, but somehow the neuroses at least get pricked a little bit. The slogans are almost like mosquitoes buzzing around your ears, frustrating your neurotic patterns.

KEN MCLEOD: A very old metaphor is that compassion and emptiness wisdom are like the two wings of a bird—without both, the bird goes nowhere. One has to keep in mind that the aim here isn’t really to make the world a better place; the aim is to know one’s own experience completely. What arises out of that, from a Buddhist point of view, is universal good. But to know one’s own experience completely is to know its nature, which is emptiness. To relate to it as it is, is compassion. The two are inextricably bound together.

The relative bodhicitta sayings provide an interesting interplay between wisdom and compassion. Perhaps we could unpack a couple of the relative bodhicitta slogans. One of the most provocative and important is “Drive all blames into one.”

KEN MCLEOD: That “one” is the tendency to attach to a sense of self, which in Buddhism is understood as the source of all suffering. Suffering is our reaction to experience., and that is always based on a sense of self. We drive all blame into that tendency to attach to a sense of self, because that’s where our suffering comes from. When we react based on preserving self, we create suffering for others, so the suffering of others comes from attachment to a sense of self, too.

JUDY LIEF: This is one of those slogans that is easily misunderstood. It is in some ways more difficult for women, because it can be understood in a superficial sense that is belittling to one’s self relative to others, which is merely a cultural pattern.

Like most of the slogans, this one can work at many levels. It can work at the profound level of dissolving ego, that which separates us from the fabric of reality, but it can also simply counteract our tendency to always seek some reason outside of ourselves for why things go wrong. Dropping that habit can provide tremendous relief.

B. ALAN WALLACE: The import of this is not looking at the disasters in the world and saying they’re all my fault. Rather, it says that since each sentient being is the center of their own universe, the suffering they experience stems from their attachment to the self. But it is not saying that everything is blamed on one’s own self. That would just be flat-out silly.

JUDY LIEF: One thing that’s interesting about this slogan is the sense that there is no other reality; there is nothing from which we are totally separate. Taking the blame onto oneself is not structurally all that different from the bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings. If you can take all blames onto yourself, then you can actually generate compassion for all beings. It’s the same sense of no separation.

Since Buddhist practice clearly has goals, what is the meaning of “Abandon all hope of results”?

JUDY LIEF: This encapsulates the dilemma we see throughout all the Buddhist teachings. One moment you are told, “Practice hard, hold your discipline, and maintain strong posture,” and the next moment you are told, “Relax and just let things hang loose.” You are told, “Try to be enlightened, but don’t be attached to gaining anything.” It’s Buddhist humor.

If you have ever had to do something hard, you find that the gearing up begins to get in the way. But when you are actually fully engaged in something, you do abandon all hope of results, because you just do what you are doing. The hope seems intimately connected with fears of goofing up and not achieving results. All that gets in the way, so why not abandon it?

This slogan makes it abundantly clear how we always cook up hopes of results before we have hardly done anything at all. Over and over again, our hope for results immediately transforms into fantasies of having achieved the results. This slogan puts a mirror to that. It is a tool for our mindfulness that lets us know how, in the slightest little thing we do, we start fixating on the goal and miss out on what is actually going on moment to moment.

B. ALAN WALLACE: From an ultimate perspective, there is nothing to be transformed, nothing to be thrown off, and nothing to be acquired. The essential nature of awareness is primordially pure and all that needs to be done is to unveil it and to be perfectly present with it. On the other hand, we have thousands of skillful means and teachings about transforming ourselves, and we can apply criteria to determine whether we are getting any result, such as the saying “All Dharma is included in one purpose.” That purpose is to free ourselves of self-grasping, and we are asked to investigate to what degree that is happening. On a relative level, then, we are on the path of developing toward enlightenment. On the ultimate level, it is all simply a matter of being present with the perfection that is already there.

At the end of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s commentary on the Seven-Point Mind Training, he says that when you come to the very end of the path, you lose even the preference for nirvana over samsara. You relinquish even the desire to achieve enlightenment. But you don’t want to lose that too soon. Otherwise, you end up mucking about in samsara, like we all have been for countless lifetimes.

JUDY LIEF: It’s also important to be careful not to view any slogan purely in isolation, as if it were an eternal truth. The slogans work as a system and they balance one another. If you become too generous, so to speak, perhaps you need to sharpen up. If you are too sharp, perhaps you need to soften. If you take the slogans personally and you let them be mirrors, they expose the obstacles, shortfalls, pretenses, and mistaken views of all sorts.

People often wonder when they practice sending and taking whether they are really helping others or simply cultivating their own bodhicitta. If you do sending and taking for a person who is ill, do you actually have an effect on their health?

B. ALAN WALLACE: It can happen, but one doesn’t bank on that. The primary reason for engaging in tonglen practice is to overcome your own tendencies for prioritizing your own well-being over that of others. Nevertheless, one hears many anecdotes about people being able to affect others with whom they have a strong karmic connection.

KEN MCLEOD: To look at doing tonglen as actually having an effect on others is right in the area of hoping for results. Regarding the anecdotes one hears about something magical happening, it is very difficult to attribute a given result to a given cause, so I do not encourage people to approach things that way. This is a practice that refines your attitude to the world and not something you use to heal people. Jamgön Kongtrül is very clear about that in his commentary.

JUDY LIEF: I think the practice of tonglen does help to connect you with another person sometimes, especially in the context of health and healing. Simply being present with another person while doing tonglen has an immediate effect on the connectedness of self and other. Beyond that, though, I definitely agree that one shouldn’t view oneself as the great tonglen healer.

KEN MCLEOD: The essence of compassion is being present with suffering, and what comes out of that presence no one can predict. Very wonderful things may happen, but approaching this with the intention of getting a certain result contradicts the spirit of the lojong teachings.