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dharma talks by Nomon Tim Burnett - Lojong Teachings - talk 1

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Lojong Teachings - talk 1:Mind Training Teachings from Tibetan Buddhism

given by Nomon Tim Burnett
Red Cedar Dharma Hall
March 19, 2009

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[see also Zoketu Norman Fischer's more extentive teachings at EverydayZen.org]

These teachings know as Lojong, or Mind Training, originate in a set of slogans attributed to the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha. Atisha lived in what is now Bangledesh from 980 to 1054 CE. He's an important teacher to several of the Tibetan lineages. Along with Marpa whom you may have heard of and someone named Konchog Gyalpo he's credited as the founder of the Sarma lineage. The Sarma lineage in turn split off and became the Kagyu, Sakya and Kadam (or Geluk) schools. So everyone besides the Nyingma guys see Atisha as an ancestor. As we know from our studies of Zen lineage in China and Japan ancestry and schools are always a little more fluid and mixed together and at times invented for purposes of legitimacy but it's good to have a sense of them as a kind of taxonomy of Buddhist practice. It was common in Atisha's day and I'm sure at many times and placed in Tibet to have monks and nuns in putatively different lineages practicing side by side.

Similar to Shakyamuni, Atisha was a prince and various miracles are said to have occurred on his birth. Although in the Buddha's case it wasn't until his mid 20's that he figured out he was meant to be a spiritual seeker. Atisha they say was taken to a public gathering at 18 months and figure it out then. So he got a head start on old Shakyamuni. By the age of 10 he has mastered all of the teachings of Buddhism of the day. At 11 his parents tried to marry him off and surround him with luxury, but you can guess what happened next.

Yes you guessed it: on his wedding night he had a vision. Tara, a forms of Avaolokitesvara in the Vajrayana tradition, appeared to him and told him that being a rich married royal was really going to distract him from his studies. She said, 'as an elephant sinks deeply into the swamp, [he], a hero, [would] sink in the mire of lust' if he went that way. So accordingly he slipped out, found a local wise man (there is always a local wise man in these stories), and then ran off to the great Buddhist University of Nalanda to study Buddhism and be a monk. Nalanda by the way is where Shantideva taught a hundred years or so earlier.

And yes these Buddhist hagiographies are written by men. There was no mention in the summary I looked at about what happened with his fiance. Not to mention his family. I did by the way recently read a 6th century account of what happened when the Buddha returned to see his family for the first time after his enlightenment. But we'll save that for another day. Suffice to say it's entitled Bimba's Lament. Bimba being one of the names for his wife.

And kidding aside this is a difficult aspect of these stories for us. It does seem clear that renunciation is an essential part of the practice. We have to let go of something, we can't keep clinging to all of this, on the other hand does that require us to renounce our families? We are not practicing that way here of course, but are we somehow watering down the practice? Or were these guys just confused by the socio-cultural environment such that they thought the only way forward was to abandon their families? The technology of the times is I suppose one factor. If I did convince my family that they should stay here while I went off to Nalanda we would be talking on the phone, emailing, writing letters, we would stay connected at a distance which was not so available to even the princes of 10th century India. I don't want to excuse this behaviour either but maybe that was part of it. If you wanted to study, you left, that's how they understood it. And once you left you were gone. Travel and communication were a whole different situation than they are for us.

The next part of Atisha's story actually feels a little better to us than the Buddha's story. He sneaks off to practice for a while, a year maybe and makes great progress. The story goes he had completed his training on the meditations on emptiness and he's advise to go with a Black Mountain Yogi. I love the sound of that, now please study with the Black Mountain Yogi. The Yogi checked out his understanding with various magical tests gave him some teachings but then insisted that before he could train with him further Atisha had to go home and receive his parent's permission to be a monk. And the interesting thing is the argument he makes with his parents is that renouncing luxury and practising the way is the best way to repay them for their kindness. That exploring his heart so that he could offer teachings and enlightenment is more valuable to the world.

So Atisha ended up making a huge journey to Sumatra to study there for twelve years , taught at another great Northern Indian monastic university called Vikramasila and then was invited to the Land of Snows, Tibet, by an emmissary of a Tibetan king. Buddhism was already established in Tibet but the story goes that it was in decline. It's even a little racy: tantra practicioners there it says had gotten the idea that 'ethical self-discipline and tantra were mutually exclusive and that enlightenment could be achieved through intoxication and various forms of sexual misconduct.' So Atisha helped straighten that all out.

One last story of Atisha is that when he heard that the inhabitants of Tibet were very pleasant and easy to get along with, instead of being delighted, he was concerned he would not have enough negative emotion to work with in his Lojong practice. So he brought along his ill-tempered Bengali servant-boy, whom would criticize him incessantly and was awful to spend time with. Tibetan teachers then like to joke that when he arrived in Tibet he realized there was no need after all.

The tradition is that Atisha learned and reformulated these Lojong phrases from Dharmaraksita, his teacher in Sumatra and they are described in his master work 'Lamp on the Path to Enlightenment' which I think still exists. But these teachings come to us via a 12th century Tibetan teacher named Geshe Chekhawa who reformulated them again and wrote an important book about them, and in some accounts he'd credited himself for creating them. Then they were introduced to the west by Chogyam Trungpa who translated Geshe Checkhawa's book into English and also I think a little bit later by Kelsang Gyatso who founded the New Kadampa order which is a kind of revival of the order which credits Atisha as one of their founders. And the New Kadampa order by the way is the group which has the Dharmakirti, the little center on Bay Street which has a young resident monk named Norbu. So presumably he's been studying these lojong teachings for a while. I have a message in with him to get together again for tea, it'll be interesting to ask him about that practice. Two important American translators and teachers of these teachings are B. Alan Wallace and Ken McLeod. I've been appreciating Alan Wallace's comments on them as I've started to study them.

If you're online a great resource for learning about these phrases and comparing the translations and commentaries by all of these teachers is a wonderful Buddhist geek website www.lonjongmindtraining.com - Lojong is spelled with two o's.

I'm really happy Norman introduced us to these teachings. It feels very congruent with our Zen practice because Zen does include the contemplation of phrases. Not all of us have practiced with this very much but it is an important part of the tradition. One of the ways to work with kōans is to take a central phrase and work with that in zazen, extending that phrase out into your daily life until essentially you are nothing but breathing that phrase, or that phrase is breathing you. The most famous of these is Zhaozhou's Mu. The Three Treasures tradition in which Robert Aitken is a founder and locally Jack Duffey and also Peter and Terry's teacher Nelson Foster teach in usually people start kōan practice by breathing this phrase 'mu' which just means no in Japanese but somehow as you practice with it means a lot more than that. I've practiced with phrases like 'just this' - breathing those phrases on every exhalation.

One can take up practice of a phrase if you're curious and it's a good thing to talk with a teacher about. Not because the teacher will perfectly know what phrase you should work with, maybe she will or maybe not, but if you receive the assignment from a teacher you trust you will have more confidence in working with the phrase. This is important because you really have to stick with it for quite a while with a lot of steady commitment. Sometimes I suggest people practice with a phrase especially if it seems like they are well established on mindfulness of breathing and stable in zazen. Phrase work can enliven the practice and also help us investigate emptiness. But this doesn't mean that breath counting is beginner practice and phrase practice is advanced and we should all try to advance. We practice in response to conditions and do what's most helpful. There are no levels in Zen which is on the whole a very wonderful and freeing thing.

So we do have practice with phrases but our phrases, and all of Zen practice really, is strongly pointed towards a direct experience of the empty, open, interconnected and fluid nature of reality. And this is what I love about Zen but it's also a challenge, this direct pointing to reality doesn't give us anything to hold onto. And sometimes we need something to hold onto, we need tools. So these lojong phrases are more like tools.

In her introduction to Chogyam Trunpa's book 'Training the Mind' Judith Lief talks about how to work with these lojong phrases:

The [daily-life] practice [with lojong] is based upon the spontaneous recall of appropriate slogans in the thick of daily life. Rather than making a heavy-handed or deliberate effort to guide your actions in accordance with the slogans, a quality of spontaneous reminder is evoked through the study of these traditional aphorisms. If you study these seven points of mind training and memorize the slogans, you will find that they arise effortlessly in your mind at the oddest times. Thye have a haunting quality, and in th eir recurrence they can lead you gradually to a more and more subtle understanding of the nature of kindness and compassion.

…The approach to moral action [through the practice of these slogans] is one of removing obstacles of limited vision, fear and self-clinging, so that one's actions are not burdened by the weight of self-concern, projections, and expactions. The slogans are meant to be practiced. That is they need to studies and memorized. At the same time they need to be 'let go.' They are merely conceptual tools pointing to non-conceptual realization.

And she says that in the service of this practice Trunpa Rinpoche had the slogans written, in nice calligraphy, scattered about his centers. That one day you'd find 'Be grateful to everyone' posted in the kitchen, or 'Drive all blames into one' handing from a tree. That these reminders which just pop up sometimes and Chogyam Trungpa was very famous for somehow popping just what you needed up at just the right time, he had a knack for that, so I am sure many of his students have stories about these little lonjong signs popping up for them in powerful and important ways. I get together with Paul Warwick sometimes who was as student of Trungpa's back in the day, I'll try to remember to ask him about this and report back.

So the 59 Lojong mind training slogans are divided into 7 points. The 7 points are:

1) Preliminaries

2) Formal practice

3) Using adversity

4) Life and death

5) Yardsticks

6) Commitments

7) Guidelines

I want to talk on a selection of the slogans from the first 3 points tonight and next week to get into the last four.

The first point, preliminaries, has only one slogan in it. 'First, train in the preliminaries', meaning establish and stablize and continue your spiritual practice. And in Zen especially our school with our emphasis on Beginner's Mind we say that this is not preliminary practice. This is how we practice always - at the beginning we practice this way, in the middle we practice this way, in the end we practice this way. Without touching the ground of our mind through steady meditation practice there is no really possibility for the rest of these slogans to be truly transformational and help us to feel the ultimate depths of our human life. Without a grounding steady practice over time the rest of the slogans are diminished. They become just another well meaning list of affirmations and intentions instead of walking sticks into emptiness.

So in our school in the zendo this is zazen, kinhin, service, working with a teacher, working with the sangha, studying the teachings. And beyond the zendo training in the preliminaries is continous awareness of breath and body and the immediacy of experience. It's waking up to the life we are actually in over and over. We fall asleep a little, we get distracted, we suffer, and the suffering helps us to return more fully to this present moment.

The problem for us as Zen students I think is that sometimes we think that's the whole of the practice. We can get sort of stuck in what the Tibetan's consider just the preliminary practice. We eventually get a little dull and a sort of stolid. And we have plenty of techniques and teachings to help us rise up out of our spiritual stupor with the Zen tradition surely, and it's also the case that sometimes you need to just stay with what is even if it feels a little dull, our emphasis on steadiness and the emptiness of technique is a powerful thing too. That said these Lojong slogans seem pretty great for enliving our practice, so let's continue. But please remember that in Zen we are not so sure about a step-wise progression, it doesn't quite seem like that's how it goes, so the preliminary practice here is prelimary and it's also continuous and endless. We never get past it and we realize how silly such an ambition would be. That would be like saying, 'I'm really tired of being a person, I want to get past that as soon as possible.' Where do we think we're going?

The second mind training point is Formal Practice or the Main Practice. And Trungpa makes the point right in his reading of this point's title that it's all about bodhichitta. 'The Main Practice, Which is Training in Bodhichitta,' is how he renders it. And he makes a distinction between relative bodhichitta and ultimate bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is the mind of awakening and the Indo-Tibetan teachings on the development of our hearts as bodhisattvas, as beings devoted to the enlightening of others, say that being a bodhisattva totally depends on bodhichitta. Bodhichitta this thought of enlightenment or the mind of awakening is absolutely the key ingredient. If you've studied Shantideva with Chris or Norman or on your own you heard a lot about bodhichitta. What's interesting in the slogans I want to talk about in this point are the radical implications of bodhichitta practice if we really carry it through.

One of the essential differences between our usual way of looking at the world and the way of the bodhisattva is that conventional suffering beings are quite concerned with being right. Think about that for a moment, do you like to be right? Beings typically are strong attracted to being in the right, in the know, with being safe and protected and taking care of ourself in a sort of walled off self-focussed way.

The bodhisttva on the other hand is totally uninterested in being right. The actions that arise from the bodhichitta, from the mind of practicing bodhisattvas, are completely concerned with suffering and the end of suffering and this is very true to the direct and simple teachings of the Buddha. Maybe you remember in the famous Kalama Sutra when the Buddha is passing through the town of the Kalama people they ask him about how to validate spiritual teachings? How do we know what to do they ask him? And he tells them don't go by dogmas and doctrines and what you think you're supposed to do, instead pay careful attention to what causes suffering and dis-ease and avoid that, pay careful attention to what causes wholesomeness and deep contentment and do that. So the work of the bodhisattva is true to this. He does what reduces suffering and increases joy always regardless of what she thinks is supposed to happen or what's fair or what's right. And very importantly she is always most interested in decreasing all suffering, to helping the whole situation not herself.

And as an antidote to our self-centeredness these slogans on bodhichitta strongly encourage us to put others first…always. And to practice in a way that helps us understand that this is not hurting us, that this helps us and that there is radically no us anyway, no me and you. ????

The first slogan I want to talk about is 'Regard all dharmas as dreams.' Dharmas herevare units of perceived reality. They are the smallest units of experience that we can perceive in Buddhist psychology. To regard this real-seeming experience in a different way. See it as a dream. Dreams do happen, they are real in their way but we know full well they aren't really real. So what if we trained the mind to see our so-called regular reality in that way?

We are so hung up on the solid and prickly reality of things. We know that we are this way and that we are pretty much fixed, that the situation is that way and it's pretty much fixed and live is nothing but big rocks and very hard places. But once in a while, seemingly by accident sometimes, we notice how much more fluid and dynamic and unfixed it all is. How totally conditioned and impermanent and swirling all around reality really is. So this slogan encourages us to turn towards that feeling directly.

Like for me I've been pretty public lately about my struggles with my daily routine and my job and a strong feeling of being trapped in a sort of cage of my own making. The problems at work seem very real and very overwhelming and the people involved seem confused and unskillful and fixed in their confusion. Much of the time I feel this way. But this week I've somehow been able to practice this slogan of regarding these work dharmas in a little more of a dream-like way. To holding them more lightly. To seeing the situation in a softer light and what do you know, I suffer much less, and I am much more free to actually help the situation. If I am an actor in a dream, just floating around doing the best I can there is no problem. Sometimes dreams end badly for sure, but they are just dreams it's not a big disaster. Sometimes dreams are quite pleasant but there's nothing to get too excited about there either. And it's not like I'm real and the job is a dream either that would be a kind of perversion of this slogan. For example, it's not good for me to think 'ah ha! I'm getting it down, I'm learning how to deal with my difficult job, it's all figured out.' because the minute I think that way I am making the dream solid again and next thing I know it's not all figured out and I'm trapped in the cage and needing to quit my job. And I'm not exagerating I was ready to quit my job in a very serious and total way just last week. So these shifting of perspective in how we view reality is very important and drives a lot. How we perceive reality is a huge factor in suffering and the end of suffering. 'Regard all dharmas as dreams.'

The next slogan in the Formal Practice point, in the bodhichitta training point of Lojong, I want to talk about is 'Sending and taking should be practiced alternately. These two should ride the breath.' This point is very specifically talking about a practice we can do and that lojong practicioners have done for a thousand years give or take. This is tonglen - which means sending and taking, or giving and receiving. It's the Indo-Tibetan verison of the Theravadin practice of metta more or less.

After hearing about tonglen for ages but never really being so interested in it myself I've been trying to practice it and it's really great, very powerful practice. What you do is you breathe in all the suffering and evil and bad in the world, you're sort of sucking this poison right out of the world as a service to all beings. Usually they say to visualize this as breathing in horrible sticky smelly black smoke. You breathe that in, somewhere I saw it said you breathe that in with your right nostril but that's getting a little picky, and you allow yourself to be the sort of dumping ground for all of this poison. You are really willing to absorb and hold this so no one else has to. Then you breathe out love. You breathe out kindness and everything that's warm and beneficial and helpful to beings. You can do this is a sort of general way: breathing in a feeling of badness and suffering, breathing out joy; you can do this in a visualizing sort of way breathing in this black evil smoke and breathing out light and love and warmth; or you can even do this in very specific ways that relate to the actual details of your life. You can breathe in the dislike and impatience of someone in your family whom have issues with or maybe breathe in the suffering caused by something that person did, and then breathe out joy and contentment right back to that person. It's kind of like sucking the poison from a snakebite, you do that for your loved one or you enemy, so that they won't have to suffer from it and then you give them everything good that you can. You offer them a respite from suffering so they have room to wake up. Give them your entire hearts, just breathe that right out to them. Give yourself away breath after breath.

And true to the way of the Bodhisattva you notice if you are holding back or sort of reserving a little judgement, 'well I'll take some of that suffering but you really deserve some, I mean there should be consquences right?' That kind of ungenerous impulse-thought is seen in the tonglen practice as just another manifestation of ego and suffering, just another little black nugget of evil and so you breathe that right in too. There might be enough distrust and judgement and scorn and impatience leaking out right through your own skin so you will have no lack of supply for the breathing in of evil without even thinking about this vast confused suffering world.

I think it's okay to start with something more conceptual like this, we do need to work directly with our story, but after a while as the mind settles you can let the feeling become more and more subtle and universal. Breathing in just the feeling of darkness, the feeling of tightness and pain, breathing out just the feleing of light and openness and joy. It sounds sort of awful at first - what? I have to be the human filter for all the pollution in the world? - and well yes that is the idea. The way the bodhisattva thinks is, well of course I should do that if I didn't someone else would suffer! But then the good news is that turning towards what is in this way, even turning towards something that we are usually quite averse to, turns out to be quite beautiful and transformational. So tonglen practice I'm learning is very beautiful and the more you open to suffering the more you can breathe joy. There's a kind of balance that happens.

The next slogan I want to talk about is in the third point of mind training which his 'Using Adversity.' These slogans are all about turning towards trouble instead of away from it. Seeing our problems as teachings and opportunity for practice. This way of approaching life is I think something that Buddhism can really help the world out with. Trouble is not something to be born, or fixed, or manipulated, trouble as something to be studies, investigated and learned form. And when we're working on this grand project of freeing ourselves from ourselves trouble is just so direct as a teacher.

The first slogan under 'Using Adversity' is very important and very up for me right now also: 'drive all blames into one' - another way to say this which Norman has been saying lately is 'eat the blame.' This is kind of tonglen in action in the interpersonal world. When something goes wrong our practice as bodhisattvas is to always be willing to take the fall, to accept the blame, to take full responsibiilties and to do this without hestiation. To do this for other beings so that they are not mired in blame and confusion. Not taking just some of the responsibility for what went wrong but walling off our hearts in other ways and trying to find a volunteer to take the rest of the blame, either. To really take the blame and hold it. This goes very much against the grain of our conditioning about what's fair and right. That small me inside really doesn't want to do this. And of course again it's not about what's fair and right it's about what's helpful and skillful.

Trunpa Rinpoche has a lot to say about 'drive all blames into one.' Here's a bit from his book:

You can actually say, 'I take the blame. It's my fault that such and sucha thing happened and that such and such things took place as a result.' You can actually communicate with somebody who is not in a defensive mood [if you do this] , since you already took all the blame. It is much better and easier to talk to somebody when you have accepted the blame already. Then you can clarify the situation, and quite possibly the person you are talking to, who might be the cause of the particular roblem, would realize that he has done something terrible himself. He might recognize his own wrongdoing. But it helps that the blame, which is just a paper tiger at this point, has already been taken on by you. This helps.

This kind of approach becomes powerfully important. I've actually done this thousands of times. I've take a lot of blame personally. A person may actually do a terrible thing based on his or her understanding of my recommendation. But that's okay, I can take it on wholeheartedly as my problem. In that way there is some chance of working with such a person, and the person begins to go along and fulfill his actions properly, and everything is fine.

That's a tip for bureaucrats, too. If individuals can take the blame themselves and let their friends off to continue their work or duty, that will make the whole organization work better and allow it to be much more funcitonal. When you say, 'You're full of shit! I didn't do such a thing. It wasn't me, it's you who did it. There's no blame on me,' the whole thing gets very complicated. You begin to find this little plop of a dirty thing bouncing around in the bureaucracy, something like a football bouncing back and forth. And if you fight over it too much you have tremendous difficulty dissolving or resolving that particular block, plop, slug. So the earlier you take the blame, the better. And although it is not really, fundamentally your fault at all, you should take it as if it's yours.

…If you do not allow a least a little bit of blame and injustice to come to you, nothing is going to work. This is so because everybody is looking for someone to blame, and they would like to blame you - not because you have done anything, but because they think you have a soft spot in your heart. They think that if they put hteir jam or honey or glue on you, then you actually might buy it and say, 'okay the blame is mine.'

Once you being to do that, it is the highest and most powerful logic, the most powerful incantation you can make. You can actually make the whole thing functional. You can absorb the poison-then the rest of the situation becomes medicine.

Now we may resist this teaching on taking the blame. It is not the way we were brought up. It sounds like self-deprication and low self-esteem and being meek. So I encourage us to study this in daily life. What's intended here is not meek at all though, it's very strong and very courageous. It's being willing to take something yucky that someone else probably can't handle right now. If someone else is upset and blaming you and angry probably they're caught somehow and we all know that pushing back and trying to straighten them out and explain why they're wrong doesn't work. It just doesn't work. But being the first one to soften the situation by accepting the blame, by taking responsibility creates space and make a shift possible.

But as I say this is pretty new to me too, so let's see how it goes. 'Drive all blames into one'. What is the 'one'? One blame? One breath? Just oneness. Can we just see blame as blame, see blame as energy instead of letting it trigger a catalog of story and justification and explanation. This seems worthy of exploration.

The last slogan I want to explore with you tonight is the next slogan in this 'Using Adversity' point. And it's pretty simple conceptually: 'Be grateful to everyone.' Just be grateful. And like any practice we can start where it's relatively easy. It's pretty easy for me to bring up gratitude with you folks here at the zendo. I can really feel so grateful to you. For being here tonight, for your ongoing practice and for support and activating me as a priest and a teacher. For so many little things and not for doing anything at all, just for being here. And I can do that at home. And I can do it walking down the street, how wonderful all these beings are here to interact with and share the planet with. They are beautiful in their various encasings of body and mind. And then I can practice feeling grateful where I have more difficulty, at work right now for me. I can be grateful for the people I'm interacting with. They provide me with such rich practice. It's easy to want to avoid that but I know I would be missing out on a lot so I can practice being grateful for what they are offering me just by going about their business.

Another paragraph from Trungpa is worth quoting:

The slogan, 'Be grateful to everyone' follows automatically once we drive all blames into one. WE have a feeling that if others didn't exist to hassle us, we couldn't drive all blames into ourselves at all. All sentient beings, all the people in the world, or most of them, have a problem in dealing with 'myself.' Without others, we would have no chance at all to develop beyond ego. So the idea here is to feel grateful that others are presenting us with tremendous obstacles-even threats or challenges. The point is to appreciate that. Without them, we could ot follow the path at all.

Without them we could not follow the path at all, that's the take home there. We can't do this alone we need support and we need trouble and the two are pretty much always mixed together anyway.

So I got so much positive feedback for singing that Bruce Cockburn song the other idea I thought I'd better close with a song. This is a West African lullaby I used to sing to Walker when he was little. It means something like. According to the liner notes it's a in the Kisa dialect of the Luya language from Kenya. It's a lullaby sleep, come take the baby. And a whole bit about giving potatoes to different relatives. I don’t know why potatoes.

NYANDOLO (Kenya)

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Omwesi papa…papa wasenje

Omwesi mama…mama wasenje

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Omwesi dunia…dunia wasenje

Omwesi dada…dada wasenje

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Omwesi nkosi…nkosi wasenje

Omwesi mwana…mwana wasenje

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Nyandolo obembere mwana

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Lipo ni kalle kamsenje

Omwesi papa…papa wasenje

Omwesi mama…mama wasenje.

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