The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa Collected Works: Volume Two (27 page)

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-mâché deity.
²
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 of that.

8

Three objects, three poisons, and three seeds of virtue
.

This slogan is connected with the postmeditation experience, which comes after the main practice. Relating to passion, aggression, and ignorance in the main practice of tonglen is very intense, but the postmeditation practice is somewhat lighter.

The three objects are friends, enemies, and neutrals. The three poisons are passion, aggression, and ignorance or delusion. And the three seeds of virtue are the absence of passion, aggression, and ignorance.

The practice of this slogan is to take the passion, aggression, and delusion of others upon ourselves so that they may be free and undefiled. Passion is wanting to magnetize or possess; aggression is wanting to reject, attack, cast out; and ignorance or indifference is that you couldn’t be bothered, you are not interested, a kind of anti-prajna energy. We take upon ourselves the aggression of our enemies, the passion of our friends, and the indifference of the neutrals.

When we reflect on our enemy, that inspires aggression. Whatever aggression our enemy has provided for us—let that aggression be ours and let the enemy thereby be free from any kind of aggression. Whatever passion has been created by our friends, let us take that neurosis into ourselves and let our friends be freed from passion. And the indifference of those who are in the middle or unconcerned—those who are ignorant, deluded, or uncaring—let us bring that neurosis into ourselves and let those people be free from ignorance.

Whenever any of the three poisons happens in your life, you should do the sending and taking practice. You just look at your passion, your aggression, and your delusion—you do not regard them as a problem or as a promise. Instead, when you are in a state of aggression, you say, “May this aggression be a working base for me. May I learn to hold my aggression to myself, and may all sentient beings thereby attain freedom from aggression.” Or “May this passion be mine. Because it belongs to me by virtue of my holding on to it, therefore may others be free of such passion.” For indifference, you do the same thing.

The purpose of doing that is that when you begin to hold the three poisons as yours, when you possess them fully and completely, when you take charge of them fully, you will find, interestingly enough, that the logic is reversed. If you have no object of aggression, you cannot hold your own aggression purely by yourself. If you have no object of passion, you cannot hold your passion yourself. And in the same way, you cannot hold on to your ignorance either.

By holding your poison, you let go of the object, or the intent, of your poison. You see, what usually happens is that you have objects of the three poisons. When you have an object of aggression, for example, you feel angry toward it—right? But if your anger is not directed
toward
something, the object of aggression falls apart. It is impossible to have an object of anger, because the anger belongs to you rather than to its object. You give your compassion to the object so that it doesn’t provoke your anger—then what are you angry with? You find yourself just hanging out there with no one to project onto. Therefore, you can cut the root of the three poisons by dealing with others rather than by dealing with yourself. So an interesting twist takes place.

9

In all activities, train with slogans
.

This slogan, which is connected with postmeditation practice, is very interesting and important. We have been using this technique all the time, throughout our practice. Particularly in dharmic environments, we post the slogans wherever we have a wall in order to remind ourselves of them. The point is to catch the first thought. It is not all that simple-minded. The idea is that in catching the first thought, that first thought should have some words.

In this case, whenever you feel that quality of me-ness, whenever you feel “I”—and maybe “am” as well—then you should think of these two sayings: [1] May I receive all evils; may my virtues go to others. [2] Profit and victory to others; loss and defeat to myself.
³
It doesn’t have to be verbalized, but it is a thought process: whenever you have a sense of yuckiness, you make it your property; whenever you have a sense of vision or upliftedness, you give it to others. So there is that sort of black and white contrast: black and white, nausea and relaxation, feeling ugly and feeling pretty. [
Vidyadhara flips his hand back and forth
.] That flip takes place very simply. When there is “I,” you take it—when there is “am,” you give it. It takes quite a lot of effort because it is a big job. That is why it is called the mahayana [big vehicle]; it is a big deal. You cannot fall asleep at the wheel when you are driving on this big highway. It takes quite a lot of effort! It is no joke. You can’t go wrong with such heavy-handedness. It is the best kind of heavy-handedness that has ever occurred. It’s no joke.

10

Begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself
.

The way we often express this idea is “first thought, best thought.” Usually we have the feeling that
this
happens first, before other or
that
. So whenever anything happens, the first thing to do is to take on the pain yourself. Afterward, you give away anything which is left beyond that, anything pleasurable. We are not necessarily talking about pleasurable in the sense of feeling extraordinarily good—but anything other than pain is given away. So you do not hold on to any possible way of entertaining yourself or giving yourself good treatment.

This slogan is connected with giving up passion, as it is passion which makes you demand pleasure for yourself. Therefore, this slogan is also connected very vividly and closely with the paramita of discipline. We are not talking about masochism or about killing or destroying yourself. But you begin to realize that anything connected with the demands of wanting and not wanting is constantly involved with the desire to possess and not to give out. So the whole approach here is to open your territory completely, to let go of everything. If you suddenly discover that a hundred hippies want to camp in your living room, let them do so! But then those hippies also have to practice.