Chapter 5. Practice Lojong with Tonglen

Please let me tell you about tonglen. I already explained that the purpose of lojong is not to stop the problem but to use the problem, to make it useful, like making kaka into gold or making poisonous food into medicinal food for a healthy body, a healthy mind, and a long life, but you also need to understand [the practice of tonglen]. Tong means to dedicate your happiness and virtue to other sentient beings and len means to take other sentient beings’ suffering and its causes on yourself; that is tonglen.^[1]

A long time ago, in Amitabha Buddhist Centre in Singapore, there was a kind of young man, whose name I don’t remember now. When he went to Dharamsala for the first time and stayed there for a little while, he met a very high lama, Rato Rinpoche, who was my root guru’s sort of heart disciple. Rato Rinpoche was a very good lama whose way of speaking and manners were like those of my root guru, Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche. The man from Singapore met his guru, Rato Rinpoche, there and then went back to Singapore where he got AIDS. He asked his guru what to do and Rato Rinpoche advised him to do tonglen, the practice of taking other sentient beings’ suffering upon oneself and of giving one’s happiness and merit to other sentient beings. Rato Rinpoche explained how to do tonglen meditation through his translator, an English lady, who translated his letter. So he did tonglen, as Rato Rinpoche had explained, due to which he recovered from AIDS. I thought he must have done the practice very strongly for many hours over many weeks but he told me that he only did it for a short time, not for weeks, not even for days. I think he did it four times, but even that took just a minute or something like that.

Please listen and understand this. When he did tonglen, even though he did it for only four minutes or something short, he did it with unbelievable compassion arising for sentient beings. Each time he did it for only a minute, but with so much compassion arising, wow, and so many tears coming out that it made him recover from his AIDS. It is the same thing that I told you happened to Getsul Tsembulwa; out of unbelievable compassion he sacrificed himself for an ordinary lady who was so filthy dirty that there was no way to touch her. Similarly the man from Singapore generated so much compassion for others that tears came to his eyes and, even though he did the meditation for such a short time, his AIDS recovered. That happened and he survived for quite a few more years but then he died quite a long time ago now.

So please understand that [recovering from an illness] is one of the benefits of tonglen. This story also shows how powerful tonglen meditation is; it is the best and most powerful bodhichitta practice. Like a hero running to fight an enemy, tonglen runs toward your enemy, the self-cherishing thought, to destroy it. [Tonglen practice] is the real hero.

Another thing is that maybe two years ago, a student from Lama Yeshe’s time, Ueli, who is from Switzerland but lives in Mongolia, had very high blood pressure when he was in Nepal. I did a divination and it came out good for him to do tonglen, so he did tonglen. Every time he did tonglen his blood pressure came down. You understand? That is how powerful it is. It was just his mind, the way of using his mind, for bodhichitta practice and it just took him a half hour each time, but his blood pressure came down without any medicine, just meditation.

I haven’t noticed yet that mindfulness—making the mind not busy, just controlling the mind, the mind watching the breath, or the mind watching the mind—brings the blood pressure down. Mindfulness should bring the blood pressure down because it doesn’t keep your mind active and busy, nor is your mind negative since it doesn’t have any kind of poison, such as anger or attachment, present, and instead you are keeping your mind calm on the breath or watching the mind, but I haven’t heard any proof yet that somebody recovered from high blood pressure by doing it. That could be an experiment as there is quite a bit of advertisement for mindfulness done on TV.

Also after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where there was so much fighting and killing, when the soldiers who survived came back to America, because they had seen all kinds of violence, their minds were kind of like lost, they could not see any purpose in life, and many of them became very disturbed and even suicidal. So the American government introduced mindfulness meditation to the army. In this meditation one stops thinking about the past and stops thinking about the future, and only thinks about now. That’s kind of the nature of the meditation. It helps them. It makes them better. Their minds are not as crazy and sick. So now they use mindfulness meditation in the American army after soldiers come back from Iraq, for example.

But it has been proven that tonglen is beneficial for high blood pressure. And sorry but just to take the example of myself, when I had a pain in my stomach, I thought maybe it was cancer, and when I had pain in my eye, even though I didn’t actually begin to do tonglen but just thought about doing it, the pain went away. Even though I didn’t do tonglen strictly, just kind of loosely, or I just thought about doing it, the pain went away. The thought of good heart, the power of bodhichitta, is like that. It’s not that I have a realization of bodhichitta. No way. It takes many eons to collect the merit. But even just thinking to do tonglen, the pain went away.

So 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 is also the best meditation to do when you are dying. When you die, if you do that meditation, wow, it is the best way of dying. You make your death beneficial for all sentient beings, the numberless hell beings, numberless hungry ghosts, numberless animals, numberless human beings, numberless sura beings, and numberless asura beings. Your death is made beneficial for every sentient being to achieve enlightenment. You understand? So keep that in mind [instead of wondering,] “I’m dying, what should I do? Should I go to hospital?”

So write down in your diary book [that tonglen is the best meditation to do when you are dying] so that you will remember that. In Singapore, I told people to write down in a book what they want to do and what they want to meditate on when they are dying. Besides your will, write down the meditations that you are going to do and how you are going to think when you die. You must write it down. In Singapore I told the students there to write this down now to prepare their minds. It is very important!^[2]

If you are a Dharma practitioner, you have to prepare like that so you have no worry or fear about being born in the lower realms and all those other things, such as separating from your family and friends, your girlfriend or boyfriend, from your possessions, and even from the body that you have cherished most among the sentient beings. Even leaving this body, you will have no worry. Your mind will very happily leave it and your consciousness will transfer from this body to a pure land and so forth. Although Kadampa Geshe Chekawa always prayed, sincerely from his heart, not politically, to be born in hell for sentient beings, the day he was going to die a vision of a pure land happened around him. So he told his attendant, “I didn’t succeed at what I wanted” because he was going to be born in a pure land but what he had always prayed for was to be born in hell.

Even if you die alone in a cave somewhere and nobody knows where you are, do tonglen. You have that incredible freedom. I’m not sure if you can do that in hospital because there are so many machines moving your heart. But alone in a cave, you can do meditation, you can do refuge practice, and you can do tonglen. Wah! Amazing. You have total freedom. You can do meditation on bodhichitta, so that when you die, you die with bodhichitta. That is the best death. To die with bodhichitta is the best death. It is the best quality death. It is the most beneficial, as I said before. So if a doctor says you have cancer, do that! It’s the best. You understand?