Seven Points of Mind Training

Point 2 : Training in Bodhichitta

7: Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath.

Point Two, Relative Bodhichitta Slogans : Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath.

Commentary :

Sending and taking is a very important practice of the bodhisattva path. It is called tonglen in Tibetan: tong means "sending out" or "letting go," and len means "receiving," or "accepting." Tonglen is a very important term; you should remember it. It is the main practice in the development of relative bodhichitta.

The slogan says: "These two should ride on the breath." We have been using the breath as a technique all along because it is constant and because it is something very natural to us. Therefore, we also use it here, in exactly the same way as we have been doing in shamatha discipline.

The practice of tonglen is quite straightforward; it is an actual sitting meditation practice. You give away your happiness, your pleasure, anything that feels good. All of that goes out with the outbreath. As you breathe in, you breathe in any resentments and problems, anything that feels bad. The whole point is to remove territoriality altogether.

The practice of tonglen is very simple. We do not first have to sort out our doctrinal definitions of greediness and evil. We simply breathe out any old good and breathe in any old bad. At first we may seem to be relating primarily to our ideas of good and bad. But as we go on, it becomes more real. On the one hand, you can't expect a friendly letter from your grandmother with whom you have been engaged in warfare for the past five years. She probably will not write you a kind letter after three days of tonglen. On the other hand, sending and taking will definitely have good effect, quite naturally. I think it is a question of your general decorum and attitude.

Sometimes we feel terrible that we are breathing in poison which might kill us and at the same time breathing out whatever little goodness we have. It seems to be completely impractical. But once we begin to break through, we realize that we have even more goodness and we also have more things to breathe in. So the whole process becomes somewhat balanced. That always happens, but it takes long training. Sending and taking are interdependent. The more negativity we take in with a sense of openness and compassion, the more goodness there is to breathe out on the other side. So there is nothing to lose. It is all one process.

In tonglen we are aspiring to take on the suffering of other sentient beings. We mean that literally: we are actually willing to take that on. As such, it can have real effects, both on the practitioner himself and on others. There is a story about a great Kadampa teacher who was practicing tonglen and who actually did take another's pain on himself: when somebody stoned a dog outside his house, the teacher himself was bruised. And the same kind of thing could happen to us. But tonglen should not be used as any kind of antidote. You do not do it and then wait for the effect - you just do it and drop it. It doesn't matter whether it works or not: if it works, you breathe that out; if it does not work, you breathe that in. So you do not possess anything. That is the point.

Usually you would like to hold on to your goodness. You would like to make a fence around yourself and put everything bad outside it: foreigners, your neighbors, or what have you. You don't want them to come in. You don't even want your neighbors to walk their dogs on your property because they might make a mess on your lawn. So in ordinary samsaric life, you don't send and receive at all. 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, completely purified and clean. You try to hold on to as much as you can, and anything outside of your territory is regarded as altogether problematic. You don't want to catch the local influenza or the local diarrhea attack that is going around. You are constantly trying to ward off as much as you can. You may not have enough money to build a castle or a wall around you, but your front door is very reliable. You are always putting double locks on it. Even when you check into a hotel, the management always tells you to double-lock your door and not to let anybody come in unless you check them out first. You can read that in the Innkeepers Act posted on the back of hotel doors. That will probably tell you the whole thing. Aren't we crazy?

Basically speaking, the mahayana path is trying to show us that we don't have to secure ourselves. We can afford to extend out a little bit - quite a bit. The basic idea of practicing sending and taking is almost a rehearsal, a discipline of passionlessness, a way of overcoming territory. Overcoming territory consists of going out with the out-breath, giving away and sending out, and bringing in with your in-breath as much as you can of other people's pain and misery. You would like to become the object of that pain and misery. You want to experience it fully and thoroughly.

You practice putting others first by means of a very literal discipline, called tonglen. How are you going to do that in the ordinary sense? Should you just run up to somebody in the street and say, "Hey, take my candy and give me the Kleenex in your pocket?" Of course, you could do that if you like, and if you were versatile enough, you could probably do it without offending anybody. But that is experimenting with others on a very crude level. What we are doing is different. We have a way of practicing putting others first - by placing letting go and receiving on the medium of the breath. The first stage of tonglen consists of the practice of sending and taking mentally, psychologically, slowly and slowly. Then at the end one might actually do such a thing. It has been said in the scripture that one can even practice tonglen by taking piece of fruit in one hand and giving it to the other hand.

There are obviously a lot of obstacles to practicing tonglen, particularly since we are involved in modern industrial society. But you can do it step by step, which actually makes you grow up and become the ultimate adult. The main point is to develop the psychological attitude of exchanging oneself for others: instead of being John Doe, you could become Joe Schmidt. You might have a lot of pride and reservation, but nonetheless you can begin to do that. Obviously, to begin with, tonglen is more of a psychological state than anything else. If everybody began to give things away to each other, there would be tremendous conflict. But if you develop the attitude to being willing to part with your precious things, to give away your precious things to others, that can help begin to create a good reality.

How do we actually practice tonglen? First we think about our parents, or our friends, or anybody who has sacrificed his or her life for our benefit. In many cases, we have never even said thank you to them. It is very important to think about that, not in order to develop guilt but just to realize how mean we have been. We always said, "I want," and they did so much for us, without any complaint.

I'm sure you have a lot of stories about how badly you treated your parents and friends, who helped you so much. They dedicated their entire being for your sake, and you never even bothered to say thank you or write them a letter. You should think of the people who cared for you so much that they didn't even look for confirmation. There are many people like that. Sometimes somebody comes along out of the blue and tries to help you completely. Such people do everything for you - they serve you, they sacrifice themselves, and then they go away without even leaving an address or a number to call. All along there have been people who have done things for you. You should think of those situations and work them into your tonglen practice. As your breath goes out, you give them the best of what is yours in order to repay their kindness. In order to promote goodness in the world, you give out everything good, the best that you have, and you breathe in other people's problems, their misery, their torment. You take in their pain on their behalf.

That is the basic idea of relative bodhichitta practice. It is a very action-oriented practice. We give as much as we can give, we expand as much as we can expand. We have a lot to expand because we have basic goodness, which is an inexhaustible treasure. Therefore we have nothing at all to lose and we can receive more, also. We can be shock absorbers of other people's pain all the time. It is a very moving practice - not that I'm saying we are all in a train, particularly. The more we give our best, the more we are able to receive other people's worst. Isn't that great?

Tonglen seems to be one of the best measures we could take to solve our problems of ecology and pollution. Since everything is included, tonglen is the fundamental way to solve the pollution problem - it is the only way. Quite possibly it will have the physical effect of cleaning up pollution in big cities, maybe even in the entire world. That possibility is quite powerful.

Sending and taking is not regarded as proof of our personal bravery. It is not that we are the best people because we do tonglen. Sending and taking is regarded as a natural course of exchange; it just takes place. We might have difficulty taking in pollution, taking in what is bad, but we should take it in wholeheartedly - completely in. We should begin to feel that our lungs are altogether filled with bad air, that we have actually cleaned out the world out there and taken it into ourselves. Then some switch takes place, and as we breathe out, we find that we still have an enormous treasure of good breath which goes out all the time.

We start by thinking of our own mother or parents, of somebody we really love so much, care for so much, like our mother, who nursed us, took care of us, paid attention to us, and brought us up to this level of grown-upness. Such affection and kindness was radiated to us by that person that we think of her first. The analogy of our mother is not necessarily the only way. The idea is that of a motherly person who was kind and gentle and patient to us. We must have somebody who is gentle, somebody who has been kind to us in our life and who shared his or her goodness with us. If we do not have that, then we are somewhat in trouble, we begin to hate the world - but there is also a measure for that, which is to breathe in our hatred and resentment of the world. If we do not have good parents, a good mother, or a good person who reflected such a kind attitude toward us to think about, then we can think of ourselves.

When you begin to do tonglen practice, you begin to think of the goodness that you can give out, what you can give to others. You have lots of good things to give, to breathe out to others. You have lots of goodness, lots of sanity, lots of healthiness. All of that comes straight from the basic awakened and enlightened attitude, which is alive and strong and powerful. So what you give out is no longer just imagination, or something that you have to crank up; you actually have something good to give out to somebody. In turn, you can breathe in something that is painful and negative. The suffering that other people are experiencing can be brought in because, in contrast to that, you have basic healthiness and wakefulness, which can certainly absorb anything that comes to it. You can absorb more suffering because you have a lot more to give.

The idea of warmth is a basic principle of tonglen practice. What we are doing is also called maitri practice, or in Sanskrit, maitri bhavana. Maitri means "friendliness," "warmth," or "sympathy," and bhavana means "meditation" or "practice." In tonglen, or maitri bhavana, we breathe out anything gentle and kind, feeling good about anything at all - even feeling good about eating a chocolate cake or drinking cool water or warming ourselves by the fire. Whatever goodness exists in us, whatever we feel good about, we breathe out to others. We must feel good sometimes - whether it lasts a minute or a second or whatever. And then we breathe in the opposite situation, whatever is bad and terrible, gross and obnoxious. We try to breathe that into ourselves.

I would like to say quite bluntly that it is very important for you to take tonglen practice quite seriously. I doubt that you will freak out. The main point is actually to do it properly and thoroughly. Beyond that, it is important to take delight that you are in a position to do something which most other humans never do at all. 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 now we are on the mahayana path and the logic is reversed. That is fantastic, extraordinary! We are actually getting the inner "scoop," so to speak, on Buddha's mind, directly and at its best. Please think of that. This practice will be extremely helpful to you, so please take it seriously.

Tonglen practice is not purely mind training. What you are doing might be real! When you practice, you have to be very literal: when you breathe out, you really breathe out good; when you breathe in, you really breathe in bad. We can't be faking.

Start with what is immediate. Just this. This. You should feel that the whole thing is loose. Nothing is really attached to you or anchored to you; everything is detachable. When you let go, it is all gone. When things come back to you, they too are unanchored, from an outsiders point of view. They come to you, and you go out to them. It is a very exciting experience, actually. You feel a tremendous sense of space.

When you let go it is like cutting a kite from its cord. But even without its cord, the kite still comes back, like a parachute landing on you. You feel a sense of fluidity and things begin to circulate so wonderfully. Nothing is being dealt with in any form of innuendo, or in undercurrents. There is no sense of someone working the politics behind the scenes. Everything is completely freeflowing. It is so wonderful - and you can do it. That is precisely what we mean when we talk about genuineness. You can be so absolutely blatantly good at giving, and so good at taking. It is interesting.

In tonglen practice, we replace the mindfulness of the breath that doesn't have any contents with the mindfulness of the breath that does. The contents are the emotional, discursive thoughts which are being given the reference point of people's pain and pleasure. So you are supposed to actually be working hard for the sake of other people. You are supposed to be helping people. If somebody is bleeding in front of you, you can't just stand there holding the bandages - you are supposed to run over and put bandages on him, for goodness' sake! You just do it. And then you come back and sit down and watch to see who else might need bandages. It is as simple as that. It is the first-aid approach.

People need help. So we have to wake up a little bit more. We have to be careful that we don't just regard this as another daydream or concept. We have to make it very literal and very ordinary. Just breathe out and in. It is very literal, very straightforward. Discursiveness doesn't take over - unless you are possessed by a demon or the ghost of Julius Caesar or something like that. Just make it very direct, very literal and regimented. Your breathing goes out for that, your breathing comes in for this - that, this, that, this. You breathe out good and breathe in bad. It is very simple and very literal.

You don't practice tonglen and then wait for the effect. You just do it and then drop it. You don't look for results. Whether it works or not, you just do it and drop it, do it and drop it. If it doesn't work, you take in, and if it works, you give out. So you do not possess anything. That is the whole idea. When anything comes out well, you give it away; if anything does not work out, you take it in.

Tonglen practice is not a very subtle thing. It is not philosophical, it is not even psychological. It is a very, very simple-minded approach. The practice is very primitive, in fact, the most primitive of all Buddhist practices. When you think of Buddhism and all the sophisticated wisdom, philosophies, and techniques that have been developed, it is amazing that they came up with this practice, that we do such a simple and primitive thing. But we do it and it works. It seems to have been fine for several centuries, and those centuries have produced a lot of bodhisattvas, including Buddha himself.

Just relate with the technique; the discursiveness of it doesn't matter. When you go out, you are out; when you come in, you are in. When you are hot, you are hot; when you are cool, you are cool. Just cut into that situation and be very precise. Make it very literal and very simple. We don't want to make this into a revolutionary sort of imaginary, mind-oriented social work approach or psychological approach. Let's do it properly.

We have to be honest to begin with. That is a very important point. And we have to be very literal with the technique. It has already been worked on by generations of people in the past, and it has proven to be true. So we can afford to be literal. We don't have to research it any further. Instead we could be quite faithful to the practice as it is and just do it for a while. Then we might discover the impact of that and we could go on from there. Suddenly, we might find that we could attain enlightenment.

Sending and taking is just like field training, actually. It is like soldiers learning how to puncture a bag full of sand: regarding that as the enemy, they yell, "Hooooh!" (Vidyadhara makes slashing motion with fan), as they pierce that bag of sand with their bayonets. A lot of soldiers might have a hard time being involved with nature because they come from cities where people have no idea how to work with snow or the heat of summer; they don't know how to ford rivers or how to dry their clothes or how to work with dirt and cleanliness, so soldiers have to be trained in the field. In a similar way, warriors who follow the bodhisattva path go through the same kind of field training.

If we begin to get hurt by being genuine, that is good. That is the level at which we are capable of exchanging ourselves for others. We begin to feel that because we are doing such genuine, honest work we would like to invite others. It is not so much that we only want to give out our pleasure to others and bring in their pain. There is more to it than that. We want to give our genuineness out to others and we want to invite their hypocrisy into us. That is much more than just exchanging pain for pleasure. It is the greatest way of exchanging ourselves for others, and it is needed in the world very, very badly. Exchanging pain for pleasure is very simple and easy to do. For instance, someone across the street would like to take a hot bath, but when he jumps into the water, it is cold. So you might say, "Come over here and jump into my hot bath with me. You jump into my hot bath and I'll jump into your cold bath." That is fine, there is no problem with that - but jumping into each other's hypocrisy is more interesting. That is what we are trying to do.

Our genuineness has to be shared with someone. It has to be given up. Genuineness shouldn't be regarded as our one and only family jewel that we want to hang on to. We have to give our genuineness away to someone. We don't particularly lose it that way; instead, we bring other people's deception into us, and we work on our own genuineness along with that. So exchanging ourselves for others is something more than we might have thought. It is more than just jumping from a hot bath to a cold bath.

Beyond that, you begin to develop a sense of joy. You are actually doing something very useful and workable and fundamentally 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 hypocrisy, which is becoming thicker and thicker lately as the world gets more and more sophisticated, so to speak - more and more into the dark ages, in other words.

Sending and taking is an extension of shamatha discipline. In shamatha discipline, we do not dwell on anything, but we are processed by working with movement. We don't just try to hold our mind completely steady, completely settled, but we try to use the fickleness of our mental process by following our breath and by looking at our subconscious thoughts. We develop bodhichitta in exactly the same way that we practice shamatha, only our practice in this case is much more highlighted because, instead of working with subconscious mind or discursive thoughts alone, we are looking much further, to the content of our thoughts, which is either anger or lust or stupidity. So we are going slightly beyond shamatha technique, to include the contents of these thoughts.

The whole thing is that for a long time we have wanted to inflict pain on others and cultivate pleasure for ourselves. That has been the problem all along. In this case, we are reversing the logic altogether to see what happens. Instead of inflicting pain on others, we take on the pain ourselves; instead of sucking out others' pleasure, we give our pleasure to them. We have been doing the usual samsaric thing all the time, so we are just trying to reverse samsaric logic a little bit to see what happens. And what usually happens is that you become a gentle person. You don't become demonic, you become workable. You see, you have been so unreasonable all along that now, in order to make yourself a reasonable person, you have to overdo the whole thing slightly. By doing so, you begin to realize how to be a decent person. That is called relative bodhichitta. At this point, it is important to have that particular kind of experience, it is important to understand your unreasonability.

Tonglen is also very important in terms of vajrayana practice. Therefore, vajrayana practitioners should also pay heed to this practice. They should do it very carefully. Without tonglen, you cannot practice the vajrayana disciplines of utpattikrama (developing stage) and sampannakrama (completion stage) at all. You become a deity without a heart, just a papier-mache deity. There is a story about two vajrayana masters who were exchanging notes on their students. One said "My students can perform miracles, but somehow after that they seem to lose heart. They become ordinary people." The other one said, " Strangely enough, my vajrayana students cannot perform miracles, but they always remain healthy." The two teachers discussed that question on and on. Then somebody said, "Well, how about having all of them practice tonglen?" Both teachers laughed and said, "Ha! That must be it." From that point of view, it is very important for us to have a basic core of reality taking place, so that when we do vajrayana practice, we don't just dress up as deities, with masks and costumes.

Even in hinayana practice, we could just wear our monks' robes and shave our heads, and all the rest of it. Without tonglen practice, both hinayana and vajrayana become like the lion's corpse. (Because the lion is the king of beasts, when he dies, it is said that his corpse is not attacked by other animals, but is left to be eaten by maggots from within.) As the Buddha said his teaching will not be destroyed by outsiders but by insiders who do not practice the true dharma. At that point the Buddha was definitely referring to the bodhisattva path. It is the mahayana tradition and discipline that hold the hinayana and vajrayana together. Please think about that.