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Supplementary Material

Website: FPMT Online Learning Center
Kurs: Transforming Kaka into Gold
Buch: Supplementary Material
Gedruckt von: Invitado
Datum: Donnerstag, 27. August 2026, 15:17

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Supplementary Material

The supplementary material includes:

  • step-by-step instructions on how to do the practice of tonglen (taking-and-giving)
  • the video of the entire lojong teaching contained in this module

How to Do Tonglen

As Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, tonglen is the best solution to any problem, whether it be cancer or another illness, a relationship problem, or even your own death:

I suggest to do tonglen for cancer or whatever problem you have. Even if it doesn’t go away right away, you collect the highest merit and purify the heaviest negative karma. So even if the disease doesn’t go away right now, it makes your life so worthwhile and rich, due to the merits and purification. Each time you do tonglen you become closer to enlightenment. I hope that you can remember this, if I say it very strongly, so that it stays in your heart or brain: for any disease, any obstacle, any depression, for anything, tonglen is the best! It is the best!

Tonglen can be done either with all sentient beings together or one by one with the beings of the different realms and those in the intermediate state, depending on how much time you have for your meditation session: 

  • the numberless hell beings
  • the numberless hungry ghosts
  • the numberless animals
  • the numberless human beings,
  • numberless asuras (also called demigods)
  • numberless suras (also called devas or gods)
  • the numberless intermediate state beings (those beings who have died and are in the intermediate state, or bardo, prior to taking a new body)

Step 1: Take the Suffering of Others upon Yourself (len)

  • Generate compassion for sentient beings by contemplating how they have been suffering from beginningless rebirths in samsara due to being under the control of karma and delusions.
  • Take their oceans of samsaric sufferings upon yourself.
  • Take the causes of their suffering, karma and delusions, upon yourself.

Visualize taking the suffering, and then the causes of the suffering, into your heart in the form of black smoke or pollution. Think that the smoke hits your self-cherishing thought and totally destroys it.[1] It also eliminates your ignorance, the root of samsara—holding the I as truly existent—as well as the object of that ignorance—the truly existent I or the real I. You see that the real I is nonexistent as it is nonexistent, right there. Meditate a little bit on emptiness only (tongpanyi).

Step 2: Give Your Body, Enjoyments, and Merits to Others (tong)

Generate loving kindness for all sentient beings by thinking about how they want to be happy but lack happiness.

Then respectively:

A) Offer them your body: Visualize your body as a wish-granting jewel. It becomes numberless wish-granting jewels filling the whole sky. Offer these to all sentient beings. Each one receives skies of wish-granting jewels. They get whatever they want, such as temporary happiness, and whatever they need, including Dharma, a virtuous friend (a guru), and the realizations up to enlightenment. They all become enlightened.

B) Offer them your wealth and enjoyments: Visualize offering your money and possessions to all sentient beings. Think that these become wish-granting. They receive whatever they want and whatever they need from them. They all become enlightened.

C) Offer them your merits collected in numberless samsaric rebirths in the past, those you are collecting now, and those you will collect in the future: They get whatever they want and whatever they need from them—this life’s happiness, next life’s happiness, ultimate happiness (freedom from samsara), and peerless happiness (the cessation of obscurations and completion of realizations). They all become enlightened.

Rejoice that you have brought all sentient beings to enlightenment.

When you don’t have much time, the giving can be done in a shorter way by offering your body, wealth and enjoyments, and merits at the same time to all sentient beings together or one by one to the numberless hell beings and so forth.

Each time you do the practice of tonglen, you become closer to enlightenment. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche says:

This is the best puja you can do in your life. It’s the best puja; you collect the highest merit and it is the greatest and most powerful purification. Each time you do tonglen, you become closer and closer to enlightenment. It’s like that. It’s amazing, amazing, amazing.

[1] The instructions on tonglen given in lamrim texts say to visualize the suffering of sentient beings in the form of black smoke filling their bodies. As you breath in, visualize that the black smoke leaves them through their right nostril and enters into you through your left nostril (alternatively, it leaves them through both their nostrils and enters you through both your nostrils). The smoke descends to your heart, where you have visualized your self-cherishing thought in the form of a black stone or a heap of black dust. When the smoke touches it, your self-cherishing thought completely disappears.

Note
For more detailed instructions on the practice of tonglen (often called “taking and giving”), see How to Meditate by Kathleen McDonald.
Colophon
Compiled by Ven. Joan Nicell, FPMT Education Services, August 2017, from lojong teachings given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche at Root Institute, Bodhgaya, February 5th, 2017, and from “Tonglen According to the Instructions of Kyabje Zopa Rinpoche,” compiled by Ven. Sarah Thresher, Rajpur, 2012.

Video and Transcript of the Entire Lojong Teaching

View the entire lojong teaching given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche at Root Institute, February 5th, 2017:

(duration: 3 hours, 31 minutes)
Click here to view or download the unedited word-for-word transcript of the entire original teaching.