Readings of ntideva's Guide to Bodhisattva Practice by Jonathan C. Gold;Douglas S. Duckworth;

Author:Jonathan C. Gold;Douglas S. Duckworth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

8

BODHICARYĀVATĀRA AND TIBETAN MIND TRAINING (LOJONG)

Thupten Jinpa

All Tibetan sources agree that Śāntideva’s Guide to Bodhisattva Practice (Bodhicaryāvatāra, hereafter Guide), one of the most celebrated Indian Buddhist texts, constitutes a principal origin for the Tibetan mind training or lojong tradition. Mind training refers to a specific genre of instructions and their associated spiritual exercises, which include, among others, the famed practice of tonglen, “giving and taking,” and traces its immediate origin to the legacy of the Indian Bengali teacher Atiśa, who came to Tibet in the middle of the eleventh century. As in the Guide, the central concern of lojong is to cultivate Mahāyāna Buddhism’s highest spiritual ideal of bodhicitta (the altruistic intention to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings) and to live one’s life in accord with that aspiration. The Tibetan term for mind training, lojong, is composed of two syllables, with lo standing for “mind,” “thought,” or “attitudes,” while jong connotes “to purify, cleanse, refine, exercise, or train” (as in sports training). Associated, originally, with the Kadam School of Atiśa (982–1054) and his principal Tibetan disciple Dromtönpa (1005–64), over time, the lojong tradition became part of the common heritage of all Tibetan schools.

Today, as Tibetan Buddhism becomes more widely accessible to the world outside Tibet, it is often the lojong instructions that the Tibetan teachers share first with their new audiences. For example, when His Holiness the Dalai Lama spoke to a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand in New York’s Central Park in 1999, he chose the “Eight Verses on Mind Training” as the basis of his talk. When the Dalai Lama returned to speak once more in Central Park in 2002, he chose as the topic for his talk Atiśa’s “Bodhisattva’s Jewel Garland,” an important source text for lojong.

On the surface, the relationship between the Guide and Tibetan mind training appears fairly straightforward. First and foremost, there seems to be a direct link, if not an equivalence, between the exchanging of self and others as outlined in chapter 8 of the Guide and lojong’s “giving and taking” (tonglen) meditation, which involves imaginatively taking on others’ suffering, misfortune, and negative karma and giving to others one’s happiness, good fortune, and positive karma. Second, the Guide is listed as one of the “six treatises of Kadam,” which also include Śāntideva’s Compendium of Training.1 Third, most lojong texts, especially since the appearance of Chekawa’s “Seven-Point Mind Training” in the twelfth century, seem to contain disproportionately high numbers of citations from the Guide. Fourth, Atiśa’s explicit acknowledgment of Serlingpa (literally, “the one from the Island of Sumatra”) as the principal source for his instruction on generating bodhicitta, combined with the fact that Serlingpa’s approach is thought to emphasize the exchanging of self and others, suggest the Guide to be the direct source of lojong’s approach to cultivating bodhicitta.2 Finally, it cannot be a matter of pure coincidence that most Tibetan masters who have been Guide enthusiasts were also great advocates of lojong. This is true from the earliest Tibetan

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