There is no denying that, historically, the mind training teachings evolved in the context of Buddhist practitioners whose primary goal is to seek enlightenment, in fact buddhahood, for the benefit of all beings—the highest aspiration of a Mahayana Buddhist.

And the mind training instructions and practices were recognized by many such aspirants to be a highly effective set of contemplative practices to achieve this end.

In addition, it was those meditators who were single-pointedly dedicated to the pursuit of full awakening who found these instructions to be a source of deep inspiration and personal transformation.

One need only recall such examples as the story of the “three Kadam brothers”—Potowa, Chengawa, and Phuchungwa; the ever-weeping Langri Thangpa; Chekawa, the teacher of the lepers; Ben Gungyal, the famed robber turned hermit; and Shawo Gangpa, who inscribed self-exhortation lines on the posts he erected in the four cardinal directions around his meditation hut.

This said, as the history of mind training testifies, much of the popularity and success of mind training teachings lie in their universality, their relevance to the everyday lives of people from all walks of life, not just serious meditators.

Furthermore, since the order in which the various aspects of mind training are enacted depends principally on where we are as spiritual aspirants, as the early lojong teachers would say, there is something in mind training practice for everyone.

A central theme of mind training practice is the profound reorientation of our basic attitude toward both our own self and fellow sentient beings, as well as toward the events we experience.

In our current naïve everyday attitude, we not only grasp at an intrinsically real “self ” as being who we truly are, we also cherish this “me” at the expense of all others. We feel hurt when someone insults us, disappointed when someone we love betrays us, outraged when provoked for no reason, pangs of jealousy when others are successful, and all of these tend to strike us more intensely the stronger our self-cherishing.

The mind training teaching challenges us to question this. By deeply understanding others as friends “more precious than a wish-fulfilling jewel”—as Langri Thangpa puts it in his Eight Verses on Mind Training—and recognizing that our true enemy lies inside ourselves, we overturn our habitual self-centeredness.

It is self-cherishing that opens us to painful and undesirable experiences. Mind training teachings admonish us to instead “Banish all blame to the single source. / Toward all beings contemplate their kindness.”

This somewhat paradoxical instruction that if we truly cherish our own happiness, we must seek the welfare of others captures a powerful insight into our human condition.

Whether in the domain of our relationships, our sense of purpose in life, or our overall degree of contentment, today researchers are increasingly telling us that what matters most is a basic feeling of connection with others and a need to care for others’ well-being.

In other words, modern research seems to be telling us the simple truth that excessive self-centeredness is costly, in terms of both our own personal happiness and our relationships with others and the world around us.

The moral of these findings is clear: All of us, those who care for our own well-being, need to shift our basic attitude and move closer to a stance rooted in caring for others.

As an important step toward this other-centeredness, the mind training masters admonish us to view our fellow beings not with rivalry and antagonism but rather with a feeling of gratitude. We cultivate this feeling of appreciation regardless of whether others mean to be kind to us or not, for the fact is that we owe everything in our life to others. From birth to basic survival, from simple joys of eating a meal to a deeper sense of contentment, in every way, the presence of others is indispensable. Today, research on happiness increasingly points to the truth of this basic lojong teaching.

One of mind training’s most evocative contributions to world spirituality is the practice of tonglen, or “giving and taking.” Tonglen is a seemingly simple meditation practice of giving away one’s own happiness and good fortune to others and taking upon oneself their suffering and misfortune. The meditation is meant to enhance loving-kindness and compassion.

In mind training, this practice is combined with our breathing, whereby when we breathe in, we imagine taking from all other beings their pain and misfortune, relieving them of all their negative traits and behaviors—visualized as streams of dark clouds, as smoke, or as brackish water—entering our body. These become like an antibody, attacking the virus of excessive self-centeredness.

Then, when we exhale, we imagine giving to others all our happiness and good fortune, as well as our virtuous traits and behaviors. These are visualized as white clouds, bright lights, or streams of nectar, radiating from us and entering the bodies of other beings, bringing them joy and calm. The Seven-Point Mind Training presents this practice most succinctly: “Train alternately in giving and taking; / place the two astride your breath.”

In Tibet lamas often would advise their disciples, especially if they happened to fall ill, to focus on tonglen meditation. The idea is to seize the opportunity presented by your sickness to recognize the universality of suffering and creatively use misfortune to reflect on others’ suffering. You might cultivate the thought, “May my suffering serve to spare others from similar experiences in the future.” Imagining that you are taking upon yourself the same illness afflicting many others right at that moment, you imagine that you thereby spare them from their illness.

So tonglen practice helps you to be courageous in the face of suffering while at the same time empathically connecting with the suffering of others. This is a beautiful spiritual practice, which practitioners of other faiths, such as Christianity, or even of no faith, can easily incorporate into everyday life. Indeed, that is happening in many parts of the world today.

Since a key goal of mind training is the radical transformation of our thoughts and habits, remedies for the various ills of the mind are a dominant feature of these teachings. To begin with, as the instruction “Purify whatever is coarsest first” puts it, there is the practical advice to tackle our most glaring mental afflictions first. Then comes the admonition to “overcome all errors through a single means,” namely the cultivation of compassion.

In addition, we find the crucial injunction to ensure the purity both of our initial motivation and of our state of mind upon concluding an action. The Seven-Point Mind Training expresses this injunction as “There are two tasks—one at the start and one at the end.”

Finally, we are advised to make our own self the primary witness to our thoughts and actions presented in the line “Of the two witnesses, uphold the primary one.” A witness here means a kind of overseer, someone watching to make sure we do not go astray. If we rely only on others to be witnesses to our conduct, there will be occasions when we have no witness. And even if others are watching us, it is not always easy for them to gauge the internal states driving our actions.

In contrast, we can never escape from ourselves. More importantly, if we can establish a positive self-image, then every time we encounter a situation that tempts us to behave in a way that is contrary to our self-image, we will recognize such conduct to be unbecoming and reject it. Being a witness unto ourselves in this way can be a most effective means of guarding against destructive tendencies.

If, after all of this, we fail to recognize that the ultimate nature of all things is without substantial reality, and we continue to fall prey to self-grasping, we are advised to learn to view all things from their ultimate perspective, as dreamlike.

Given our deeply ingrained tendency to reify—to project concrete reality on to—anything we deem worthy of attention, once our remedies for self-cherishing prove successful, we risk grasping at the remedies themselves and finding ourselves still in bondage to mental afflictions. So we are told, “The remedy, too, is to be freed in its own place.”

On the spiritual path we meet all kinds of circumstances, both positive and negative. To be successful, we need a way to remain steadfast in the face of difficulties. In this, the mind training teachings excel brilliantly.

The Seven-Point Mind Training puts it this way:

When the world and its inhabitants are filled with negativity,

transform adverse conditions into the path of enlightenment.

Say we are slandered by someone with no justifiable basis; we can see the situation as a precious opportunity to cultivate forbearance. If we are attacked by someone, we can view the assailant with compassion, seeing that he is possessed by the demon of anger.

The masters of the mind training teachings extend this principle to all possible situations. They speak of taking onto the path both good luck and bad, both joy and pain, both wealth and poverty.

In a beautiful stanza, the Kashmiri master Śākyaśrī, who came to Tibet at the beginning of the thirteenth century, writes:

When happy I will dedicate my virtues to all;

may benefit and happiness pervade all of space!

When suffering I will take on the pains of all beings;

may the ocean of suffering become dry!

When we as spiritual practitioners learn to relate to all events in this radically transformed manner, we will possess something akin to the philosopher’s stone, able to transform every circumstance or event, whether positive or negative, into a condition conducive to enhancing altruism.

No wonder the early mind training masters compare this teaching to an indestructible diamond, to the all-powerful sun, and to the mythological wish-granting tree. If we lived our lives according to the principles of mind training as instructed by the great masters of the tradition, we could easily relate to the sentiments of Chekawa:

Because of multiple aspirations,

I have defied the tragic tale of suffering

and have taken instructions to subdue self-grasping;

now, even if I die, I have no remorse.

One of the central themes running throughout the mind training instructions—whether it is cultivating gratitude for others’ presence, or recognizing how self-destructive obsessive self-centeredness is, or transforming adversities into opportunities, or being one’s own principal witness—is the notion of genuine courage. This is not a courage based in foolhardiness; rather, it is a courage rooted in a clear understanding of the complexity that is our human condition.

Instead of adopting a simple stoic approach to life’s inevitable sufferings, lojong instructions show us a different path, a way that each of us can become more connected with and caring for the complex, messy, entangled web that is the deeply interconnected world of sentient beings.

The mind training teachings show us a remarkable way, whereby while maintaining courage in our immediate personal concerns, we also remain totally connected with the needs and concerns of others and learn to relate to every event from such a compassionate standpoint. This is a fine balance.

The vision is this: a carefree mind rooted in a deep joy. The following stanza attributed to Atiśa captures this quality succinctly:

He who sees as spiritual teachers

the objects that engender afflictions—

be they enemy or friend—

will remain content wherever he is.

For me, and perhaps for many others too, one of the greatest attractions of the mind training teachings is their earthy practicality.

Unlike many other established teachings of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, such as the rigorously systematic approach of the stages of the path teachings, the somewhat mystical approach of mahāmudrā and dzokchen teachings, or the highest yoga tantric meditations, with their ritualized deity visualizations, the mind training teachings are down to earth.

In fact, the masters of mind training extol its simplicity, lack of systematic organization, and unadorned pith.

Mind training is not ostentatious, but it is nonetheless very powerful. Even a single line can be said to encapsulate the entire teaching of the Buddha, in that a single line has the power to subdue self-cherishing and the mental afflictions. Unlike other teachings, mind training has no complicated structure, no confusing outlines, and it requires no complex philosophical reasoning. From their earliest stages, the mind training teachings became a shared heritage of all the Tibetan Buddhist schools.

There is a wonderful story about how mind training teaching became public in the early stages of its development. The thirteenth-century master Sangyé Gompa speaks of how Chekawa shared the mind training instructions first with individuals suffering from leprosy. Public censure of lepers was apparently a major social issue in central Tibet at the time, and Kadam teachers were deeply concerned about this. Legend has it that even Dromtönpa himself, one of the founding fathers of the Kadam school, devoted the latter part of his life to nursing lepers and eventually became himself a victim of the disease. As word spread about the mind training teaching within the leper community, more and more lepers gathered to hear Chekawa’s teaching and engage in the practice, such that the teaching came to be referred to as “teaching for the lepers.”

Perhaps it was the mind training instructions on how to rise above both fortune and misfortune and transform adversities into opportunities for spiritual growth that provided them the much-needed solace and strength to cope with their difficult life situation.

Source: Thupten Jinpa. Translated, edited, and introduced by Thupten Jinpa. Essential Mind Training: Tibetan Wisdom for Daily Life. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2011.

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