Root Text of the Seven Points of Training the Mind
by Geshe Chekawa Yeshe Dorje
Introduction
V.C.T.R – Lojong is one of the mahayana contemplative practices taught in Tibet by Atisha Dipankara. [Atisha Dipankara visited Tibet at the beginning of the eleventh century, during the second revival of Buddhism in Tibet, after the time of Padmasambhava and after the period of persecution of Buddhists.] Lo means “intelligence,” or “mind”; it is that which can perceive things. Jong means “training” or “processing”; so lojong means “mind training.” It is similar to the concept of shinjang, which means “thoroughly processed.”
Atisha Dipankara’s teachings on lojong are presented as a sevenfold cleaning or processing of one’s mind, based on fifty-nine slogans designed to teach people how to become good mahayanists. These instructions were given to very simple people as well as to educated people. When the mahayana was first presented in Tibet, people were quite savage. So basic teachings, such as trying to be kind to your neighbors instead of destroying them, were revolutionary. In Tibet — or India for that matter — there was not much law and order, and so at first the mahayana teachers were simply trying to establish basic social norms. It took a long time for them to convince people that they could actually trust their nextdoor neighbors.
Lojong is a way of switching allegiance from your ego to buddha nature. It is a process of indoctrination in which your previous preconceptions are wiped out. Quite simply, you indoctrinate yourself into the bodhisattva path and the bodhisattva’s way of thinking by realizing that you have in your mind this monolithic principle called buddha nature, bodhichitta, or tathagatagarbha. You indoctrinate yourself so that you cannot get away from that.
The lojong, or mind-training, slogans are very simple, and not particularly philosophical. They are purely what one of the great Kagyu teachers referred to as a “grandmother’s finger pointing.” When a grandmother says, “This is the place where I used to go and pick corn or collect wild vegetables,” she uses her finger rather than writing on paper or using a map. In earlier times, quite possibly students were illiterate or not particularly versed in philosophy, so slogans were used. Jamgi:in Kongtrul’s writing on this practice also very much reflects that approach.
Lojong teachings are very powerful, particularly when you are facing difficulties. You should realize the importance of these slogans, understand as much as you can, and memorize them. What has been said is like a drop of golden liquid. There is a hard-edged quality of cutting down preconceptions and other ego battles, but at the same time, there is always a soft spot of devotion and simplicity that you can never forget.
The lojong teachings include several points of mahayana discipline, but the foremost discipline is to develop ultimate bodhichitta. Compassion comes from the level of ultimate bodhichitta, an unconditioned state where you begin to realize that you and others do not exist. Therefore, you are able to extend yourself, which gives you joy and further joy. It makes you smile and appreciate the world. But it is important to begin at the beginning, almost at the kitchen-sink level. It may not be all that entertaining, but once you understand the basics, you could play and dance and appreciate the phenomenal world.
It is important to understand the structure of the Atisha slogans. Each of them fits into a certain section of your practice. That is why we have seven different groups of slogans, or seven points of mind training. Some slogans apply to your sitting practice on the cushion, and others apply to what happens before, during, and after that. The first slogan is about preliminaries to mind training. The second set of slogans is about bodhichitta, beginning with ultimate bodhichitta and followed by relative bodhichitta. These slogans have to do with simplifying your practice into the ultimate bodhichitta level, and then applying bodhichitta and making it workable, starting with very simple things. Then there are the postmeditation slogans, which are connected with cultivating bodhichitta in your everyday life. These slogans are guidelines for transforming difficulties, working with both living and dying, evaluating your mind training, and developing discipline. They are general rules for how to conduct yourself.
In order to practice the slogans, your mind has to mix much more with the dharma. Rather than studying these teachings as a scholarly exercise, you have to learn how to listen to the dharma — how to study properly and apply what you have learned. It does not matter if you can come up with a bright idea. What counts is actually knowing how to apply the teachings. If you keep working with the slogans, you will begin to understand the geography of the whole thing. It is like driving into a town: once you understand the layout, you have no problem knowing which way to turn. You will know when to turn left and when to turn right. You begin to get a feeling for the town. If you had just memorized the names of the streets, you probably wouldn’t get very far. But once you learn the geography of the town, you even know how to take backstreets to avoid traffic.
You can practice the slogans on the spot, whenever a situation presents itself to you. But you don’t just say, “Now I’m going to practice slogan number four.” That would be absurd, because the situation may not exist to do number four. The idea is that slogans arise in response to a particular situation. The actual words of these slogans bounce in my mind always, even in my dreams. They are very powerful and significant to me. Likewise, they could bounce around in your mind — in your dreams, before dreams, and in relationships with people. They should always be in the back of your mind. When your mind is tuned in to such simple and beautiful words, these slogans arise naturally. It happens that way, rather than actually having to recall them like the Declaration of Independence. They are so innocent and absurd, in a sense, but their absurdity is so insightful.
Slogan practice is delightful. It is very direct and personal, and everything is spelled out. It is much better than the moralistic approach of thinking that you need to stop doing something wrong. The slogans are not particularly traffic signs, they are reminders. And each time a certain slogan occurs to you, the slogans as a whole become more meaningful.
Judy Lief – The source of this Mind Training (lojong) practice was the great Bengali master, Atisha Dipankara. Later, Geshe Chekawa organized these teachings into this series of 59 slogans, which are divided into seven “points” or categories. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche published his commentary, Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness in 1993. Atisha’s slogans provide an earthy, practical way to work with our ego-clinging and to cultivate tenderness and compassion, both through meditation and through the events of everyday life.
Ken McLeod – [Geshe Chekawa’s text, along with Jamgon Kongtrul’s commentary, were translated by Ken McLeod and published as The Great Path of Awakening: A Commentary on the Mahayana Teachings of the Seven Points of Mind Training (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1987).]
Emphasizing the application of dharma to everyday life is exactly the subject of The Seven Points of Mind Training. It is difficult for most of us to employ true intelligence and compassion in all circumstances. Our own interests, our own concerns for ourselves, constantly cloud and condition our perceptions of and responses to events around us. When our clinging to self is strong, we do not surrender it easily or willingly, and our attempts to use compassion and intelligence are clumsy and cause us regret or guilt.
If, however, we understand that ego is a sham, that the self we cling to is in fact nothing, and we become familiar with the habit of letting go of our own interests in a situation, we become more capable of surrendering ego, just as we are able to throw away without regret an old sweater that never fit us anyway. This understanding and familiarization are developed in the sitting meditation that employs the techniques discussed in this work. Sitting meditation is essential, for it is the only method by which this approach to the world can be developed. Yet, if our day-to-day actions do not reflect our practice, our meditation is not effective: that is, not only should we become more tolerant, less arrogant, more open and responsive, but also we should feel genuinely at peace with ourselves, naturally happy and cheerful even in difficult situations, and our actions should not cause us regret or shame.
Continual practice of meditation and attention to everyday conduct go together — they are two aspects of practice rather than two unrelated activities. For instance, people whose training in this technique is well developed will, whenever they encounter someone who is troubled or in pain, spontaneously imagine that they take on the suffering of that person. When we work with both aspects, the habits of ego-clinging fall away, and true intelligence and compassion, the realization of nonself and nonreferential compassion, will arise.
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P O I N T O N E : The Preliminaries, Which Are a Basis for Dharma Practice (slogan 1)
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SLOGAN #1. First, train in the preliminaries.
V.C.T.R. – Point one is just one slogan. The idea of first training in the preliminaries is that when you are practicing the slogans as well as when you are going about your daily life, you should always maintain an awareness of the four reminders.
The first reminder is the preciousness of human life and the particular good fortune of living in an environment in which you can hear the teachings of buddhadharma. The second reminder is the reality of death, which comes up suddenly and without warning. The third reminder is the entrapment of karma. It is the realization that whatever you do, whether virtuous or unvirtuous, only further entraps you in the chain of cause and effect. The fourth reminder is the intensity and inevitability of suffering for yourself and all sentient beings.
With that attitude as a base, you should call upon your teacher with devotion, inviting into yourself the atmosphere of sanity inspired by their example, and vowing to cut the roots of further ignorance and suffering. In the mahayana, you relate to the teacher as someone who cheers you up from depression and brings you down from excitement, a kind of moderator principle. The teacher is regarded as important from that point of view.
Furthermore, in terms of the spiritual path, it is traditionally considered that the only pure loving object is somebody who can show you the path. You could have a loving relationship with your parents, relatives, and so forth, but there are still problems with that: your neurosis goes along with it. A pure love affair can only take place with one’s teacher. Your connection with that ideal sympathetic object is used as a starting point, a way of developing a relationship beyond your own neurosis. So the relationship with the teacher is tied in very closely with the development of maitri, or loving-kindness.
This slogan establishes the contrast between samsara, which is the epitome of pain, imprisonment, and insanity, and the teacher, who is the embodiment of openness, freedom, and sanity as the fundamental basis for all practice. As such, it is heavily influenced by the vajrayana tradition.
Judy Lief – This slogan raises the question of what is the best foundation for dharmic practice. How should we prepare ourselves to dive into the slogans? This naturally leads to the further question of how we prepare ourselves to launch into anything.
Preparation is not something that we just do once and then forget about it. It is easy to enter into meditation and other practices, and just continue along. But along the way, we lose track why we decided to do any of this in the first place. By starting with the preliminaries, and going back to that starting point repeatedly, we can reconnect ourselves over and over again our initial inspiration. Trungpa Rinpoche used the analogy of combing our hair: each time, we go back to the root.
We need to keep reminding ourselves of the human condition, both sweet and sour—and not just the human condition in the abstract, but our own human condition specifically.
On the sour side: No matter how privileged we may be, there are many things we cannot control. We experience frustration and disappointment, and we find ourselves trapped by the decisions we have made and the circumstances we are in. We experience sickness, aging, and the certainty of dying.
On the sweet side: Something makes us ask, “Is that it? Is that all?” Something inspires us to really look into our experience and recognize that we have something to work with. We see how amazing it is that we have this precious fleeting life and the opportunity to awaken its potential, and we recognize our good fortune in encountering the dharma. At the same time, we see how many opportunities we pass by and how easy it is to simply sleepwalk our way through life.
We also need to remind ourselves of what made us think that it was even possible for us to change—not just according to our wishful thinking, but in reality. That shift could come about through an encounter with a teacher. We might simply have a sudden glimpse that it is up to us and that things could be otherwise.
Pema Chödrön – The preliminaries are also known as the four reminders. In your daily life, try to:
1. Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life.
2. Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone.
3. Recall that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, has a result; what goes around comes around.
4. Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.
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P O I N T T W O < generosity >
The Main Practice, Which Is Training in Bodhichitta (slogans 2-10)
V.C.T.R. – Point two includes five ultimate, or absolute, bodhichitta slogans, and four relative bodhichitta slogans. It begins with the ultimate bodhichitta slogans. These five slogans are very simple, actually, just another perspective on the practice of meditation. They provide reference points for familiarizing yourself with ultimate bodhichitta and are connected with the paramita of generosity. In fact, generosity is the foundation of both ultimate and relative bodhichitta. The paramita of generosity is based on not holding back, but giving constantly. It is self-existing, complete openness — and the best way to open yourself up is to make friends with yourself and others. The opposite of generosity is stinginess. It is holding back and having a poverty mentality. With generosity, you go beyond your poverty attitude and develop a sense of richness and self-sufficiency.
An understanding of ultimate bodhichitta can only come about through compassion. A purely logical, professional, or scientific approach does not bring you to that understanding. A lot of us, seemingly, and very shockingly, are not particularly compassionate. Therefore, we have to develop compassion. But to realize how to be compassionate, you first have to know how to be. Learning how to love your grandma, or to love your flea or mosquito, comes later. So ultimate bodhichitta is preparation for relative bodhichitta. That is why the slogans are presented in that order.
In ultimate, or absolute, bodhichitta practice, you are not trying to tell yourself why things are as they are, but you are simply coming back to a basic state of existence. It is like coming back to the breath in shamatha. The ultimate bodhichitta slogans are purely confirmations or ways of recognizing experience. According to Jamgi:in Kongtriil, slogan practice is known as an analytical approach to practice, but it is also a yogic practice. The slogans are experiential as well as analytical.
Absolute bodhichitta is similar to absolute shunyata. And whenever there is absolute shunyata, you need an understanding of absolute compassion at the same time. Shunyata is basically the realization of nonexistence or emptiness. The more we realize nonexistence, the more we can afford to be compassionate and giving. Usually we would like to hold on to our territory and fixate on that particular ground, and once we begin to fixate, we have no way to give. But when we begin to realize that there is no ground, that we are ultimately free, nonaggressive, and open — and when we realize that we are actually nonexistent ourselves — we can give. We have lots to gain and nothing to lose at that point. We are not — we are no, rather.
The experience of shunyata is also related to devotion. You begin to feel loneliness and aloneness at the same time. With shunyata, what you have heard and what you have experienced become part of your conviction.
The Open Wound of Compassion
Slogan practice is a way of training the mind toward compassion. It is based on a feeling of softness or sore spot. Compassion is said to be like having a pimple on your body that is very sore, so sore that you do not want to rub it because it hurts. Why? Because even in the midst of immense aggression, insensitivity, or laziness in your life, you always have a sore spot. You always have some point you can cultivate, or at least not bruise. Every human being and every animal has that kind of basic sore spot. It is always in you, whether you are crazy, dull, aggressive, or egotistical.
That such an open wound is always there is very inconvenient and problematic. We don’t like it; we would like to be tough. We would like to fight, to defeat our enemies on the spot and come out strong so that no one attacks us and we do not have to defend any aspect of ourselves. In that way, even if somebody decides to hit us back, we are not wounded — and hopefully nobody will hit us on that sore spot. But without exception, there always will be a sore spot.
That sore spot has nothing to do with Buddhism or with Christianity. It is just an open wound, a very simple open wound. With such a wound, at least we are accessible somewhere. We are not completely covered with a suit of armor all the time. Such a relief! Thank earth! Because of that particular sore spot, even cosmic monsters such as Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, or Hitler can still fall in love. Because of that sore spot, we could appreciate beauty, art, poetry, or music. We could be covered with cast-iron, but there is still that sore spot in us, which is fantastic. That sense of sore spot is known as embryonic compassion. We have some kind of gap, some discrepancy in our state of being that allows basic sanity to shine through. Our level of sanity could be very primitive. Our sore spot could be purely the love of tortillas or the love of curries, but that is good enough. It is an opening. It does not matter what we love, as long as there is a sore spot of some kind. That sore spot is good. It is where germs could get in and begin to take possession of us and influence our system. It is precisely how the compassionate attitude begins to take place.
Not only do we have an external wound, but there is also an inner wound, which is called tathagatagarbha, or buddha nature. Tathagatagarbha is like having immeasurable slits in our heart. Our heart is wounded; it is being sliced and bruised by wisdom and compassion. When the external wound and the internal wound begin to meet and to communicate, we realize that our whole being is made out of one complete sore spot, which is called bodhisattva fever. At that point, we no longer have any way to defend ourselves. That cosmic wound is gigantic — it is both an inner wound and an external wound.
That feeling of vulnerability is compassion. It is the living flame of love, if you would like to call it that. But we should be very careful what we say about love. Before puberty, one cannot understand sexual love affairs. Likewise, since we have not broken through to an understanding of what our soft spot is all about, we cannot really talk about compassion, we can only talk about passion. It may sound grandiose to talk about compassion, but actually the word compassion does not say as much as love. Love is very heavy, whereas compassion is a kind of passion, which is easy to work with. Compassion is like a slit in our skin; it is like a wound.
[From Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving Kindness:] The basic principle of the ultimate bodhichitta slogans is to rest in the eighth consciousness, or alaya, and not follow our discursive thoughts. Alaya is a Sanskrit word meaning ‘’basis,” or sometimes “abode’’ or “home,’’ as in Himalaya, “abode of snow.” So it has that idea of a vast range. It is the fundamental state of consciousness, before it is divided into “I” and ‘’other,” or into the various emotions. It is the basic ground where things are processed, where things exist. In order to rest in the nature of alaya, you need to go beyond your poverty attitude and realize that your alaya is as good as anybody else’s alaya. You have a sense of richness and self-sufficiency. You can do it, and you can afford to give out as well. And the ultimate bodhichitta slogans [slogans 2-6) are the basic points of reference through which we are going to familiarize ourselves with ultimate bodhichitta.Judy Lief – A Note about Absolute and Relative Bodhichitta: The mind training slogans are all about loving kindness or bodhichitta. They are about how we can live more sanely and with more effective compassion for others. But they do not immediately launch into the practical application of mind training, or relative bodhichitta. Instead, they begin with absolute bodhichitta and the importance of emptiness as the basis for bodhisattva activity. That is the focus of slogans 2-6. But why start there?
In general, we prefer to just get on with it. If the slogans are about cultivating virtues and helping others, why not just go ahead and do it? Why the emphasis on first establishing a certain view of things? Why start with absolute bodhichitta? How does that change things?
The benevolence cultivated in slogan practice is not simply another form of goody-goodyness. Doing good deeds is fundamental — the path of the bodhisattva warrior is not just about talk, but about action. It is important to cultivate virtue, but it is not sufficient. Our attempts at virtue can become heavy-handed and distorted. We can go so far as to use the activity of kindness as a method of self-aggrandizement in the disguise of helping others. Even when our attempts at kindness are not distorted, trying to do the right thing can be wearing. It is a struggle.
The point is that although the kind of behavior being cultivated in slogan practice may on the surface be simply another list of ethical injunctions to follow, underlying the entire list of slogans is the ground of absolute bodhichitta, which makes all the difference. For with this ground, or nonground, the basis for distorted kindness is removed, or at least lessened. Instead of struggling to be kind, we find that true acts of kindness are without struggle.
Our attitude as we go about practicing loving kindness or bodhichitta makes a huge difference. It’s like the old song that goes, “It’s not what you do but the way that you do it.” So in working with the remaining slogans, it is important not to lose sight of the ground of ultimate bodhichitta that is established at the very beginning.
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P O I N T T W O (A): Resting in Ultimate Bodhichitta (slogans 2 – 6)
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SLOGAN #2. Regard all dharmas as dreams.
V.C.T.R. – Regarding all dharmas as dreams is an expression of compassion and openness. The reason you can regard all dharmas as dreams is because of your training in shamatha and vipashyana. You can do this because you have experienced that your basic existence is questionable as an ego entity. According to this slogan, love and hate, pain and pleasure, aggression and passion — whatever comes and goes in your life — could be regarded as dreams. Nothing ever happens. But because nothing happens, everything happens. When you want to be entertained, nothing seems to happen. But in this case, although everything is just a thought in your mind, a lot of underlying percolation takes place. That “nothing happening” is the experience of openness, and that percolation is the experience of compassion.
Basically, everything we experience is a dream. We have been sleepwalking; we have been sleeping and dreaming for a long time, and are doing so right now. According to the abhidharma, nothing going on in the mind is registered properly and fully. Our mind has been working haphazardly, so we are really not good thinkers. According to this slogan, everything should simply be regarded as not real. We realize that thoughts of love and hate are just profiles of the things we see, and do not in themselves provide any benefit or harm.
The practice of this ultimate bodhichitta slogan seems to be primarily oriented toward the mind-only philosophical school of yogachara. According to yogachara, the phenomenal world is not to be regarded as solid, but as a dream. You can experience that dreamlike quality in sitting practice. When you are focusing on your breath, suddenly discursive thoughts begin to arise. You begin to see things, to hear things, and to feel things. But all those perceptions are none other than your own mental creation. In the same way, you can see that your hate for your enemy, your love for your friends, and your attitudes to money, food, and wealth, are all discursive thoughts. If you did not have a mind, you would not be able to perceive anything, but since you do have a mind, you perceive things. Therefore, what you perceive is a product of your mind, which uses your sense organs as channels for the sense perceptions.
Regarding dharmas as dreams does not mean that you become fuzzy and woolly, or that everything has an edge of sleepiness about it. You might actually have a good dream, vivid and graphic. Regarding dharmas as dreams means that, although you might think that things are very solid, the way you perceive them is soft and dreamlike. You realize that whatever you experience in your life — pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, grossness, refinement, sophistication, crudeness, hot, cold, or whatever — is just memories. Your memories may be very vivid, but they are not regarded as invincible. Everything is shifty. So things have a dreamlike quality, but at the same time the productions of your mind are quite vivid.
> > > Judy Lief – If the point is not to sleepwalk through life, but to be awake to our life, why would we want to regard all dharmas, or all phenomena, as dreams? Is that not a contradiction?
It is intriguing that this slogan comes right at the beginning, because it sets a tone that is a little intimidating. If we want to work with the slogans, we need to allow our reality to be bit more shifty. This slogan challenges our desire to make our world solid and reliable—solid objects, solid self, solid views, solid ideologies, solid opinions, solid relationships, solid everything!
We take ourselves and our world so seriously. Things seem so real, so intense and colorful, even overwhelming, but at the same time, everything we try to hold onto slips away. Nothing is all that substantial. It is amazing that there is anything at all! At the same time, nothing seems to be there in the way we would want.
Seeing the dreamlike quality of experience is not sloppy or vague, and it is not just spacing out. It is just the opposite. In fact, it is our habit of imagining ourselves and the world around us not to be dreamlike that is the delusion.
So the starting point of working with the slogans is to face up to our desire to make everything solid. When we lighten up on that particular scheme even momentarily, our mind opens up a bit and relaxes. And the more openness there is, the more slogan practice becomes gentle and natural rather than heavy handed or moralistic.
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> > > Pema Chödrön – Whatever you experience in your life — pain, pleasure, heat, cold, or anything else — is like something happening in a dream. Although you might think things are very solid, they are like passing memory. You can experience this open, unfixated quality in sitting meditation; all that arises in your mind — hate, love, and all the rest — is not solid. Although the experience can get extremely vivid, it is just a product of your mind. Nothing solid is really happening.
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Jamgon Kongtrul – What we experience — that is, the world and its inhabitants — are objects that we grasp at with our senses. These appearances are simply our mind’s manifestations of confusion. In the end, they are not actually existent in any way whatsoever, but are like the appearances in a dream. By thinking along these lines, train yourself to have some feeling for looking at the world this way.
