Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Jampa Ignyen presents two complementary methods for developing bodhicitta, the awakened mind of compassion, showing how each completes the other. The first (from Maitreya’s instruction) unfolds through recognizing all beings as our mothers, remembering their kindness, cultivating great love and compassion, and universal responsibility. The second, exchanging self for others, has five points: equalizing ourselves with others, examining self-cherishing’s faults, benefits of cherishing others, exchanging those attitudes, and tonglen—the giving-and-taking practice. Throughout, his emphasis is relentlessly practical: these are not intellectual ideas but core practices to internalize until they become beloved, emerging naturally in daily life. For practitioners seriously engaged in bodhicitta development.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 2001 08 30 LR.mp3
UUID: 8a8199be-8c9c-4399-9514-573f523394f9
Teacher: Ven Jampa Ignyen
Collection: y Lam Rim 2001 Month 07-09 (Ven Jampa Ignyen)
Date: 2001-08-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.5 minutes
Words: ~4,877
So, we’re continuing with the instructions on how to develop the mind of enlightenment or bodhicitta. And so far, we’ve done a little bit of discussion on the nature of bodhicitta itself, what bodhicitta is. bodhicitta is a main mind we can develop. And that reflects that the mind of bodhicitta is fundamental to us. And its root is great compassion.
So bodhicitta arises out of its root cause, which is like its seed of great compassion. Great compassion is also conditioned by great love and so on. And so far, we’ve dealt with the six the instruction on the six causes and one result, which gives the the milestones in this process of generating bodhicitta. Does anyone remember the six causes and one result? First, there’s a preliminary stage, immeasurable equanimity.
We have to be careful with that because there’s three types of equanimity. There’s the feeling of equanimity, which is this neutral sort of feeling that we have quite often. But this type of equanimity is not a feeling. It’s immeasurable equanimity, the fourth of the four immeasurables, which is contemplating all sentient beings without exception. What is this immeasurable equanimity doing?
What’s the purpose of this immeasurable equanimity? No? It’s To see them as equal. Yeah. Not being close to some and distant from others fundamentally.
At present, we tend to be dividing other beings up into those who deserve to be close to us and those that deserve to be distant from us and so on. This immeasurable equanimity is focusing on the immeasurable field of sentient beings and developing an even attitude towards those beings so that none are they’re all equally close, in fact. There’s not some that are at a vast distance and few others who are closer. So, immeasurable equanimity is the preliminary meditation. Then the first cause.
Right, then all beings have been our mother. That’s not easy, of course, because then that depends on firstly accepting reincarnation, And then that really that our minds are beginningless. That’s not easy to see. And then even that in the stretch in this from beginning this time until now, even though all sentient beings are uncountable and immeasurable, still there’s probably less than the full extent of an infinite number of sentient beings because each being has been our mother at least once. And in fact, many times over.
So there’s a number of issues involved with contemplating this issue that all beings have been our mother, or our sister, our father, our cousin, our neighbor, our friend, our child, and so on. And in fact, we can contemplate these issues from that point of view as well, that all beings have been our next door neighbor. If we have a special regard for our next door neighbor, then maybe that’s a good idea. Or if we are very close to our sister, we can visualize all sentient beings as having been our sister in the past. Or our father, if we have a closer relationship to our father than our mother, then that might also be useful.
But mother is generally used because one’s mother is one often has a special relationship with one’s mother. Then the second cause. That’s right. Remembering the kindness of sentient beings, really through remembering the kindness of one’s mother. So that also requires some investigation.
Then the third one, repaying that kindness. And the fourth one? That’s right. Great love. And the next one?
Great compassion. That great compassion is the root of bodhicitta. And then the sixth one: altruistic intention or the superior intention, universal responsibility. And that gives rise to the seventh, the result, which is bodhicitta, yes. So they’re the six causes and one result, and in fact, we need to remember those seven, eight, including immeasurable equanimity.
And it’s good to contemplate them when we have a chance, when we have a spare moment. Now, particular lineage is that? Who’s that instruction? Who initially gave that instruction? Atisha gave, yes?
This is said to actually come from Maitreya. So it’s also useful for us to study, very useful for us to study those particular seven because Maitreya will be the future Buddha. And that also creates a cause for meeting Maitreya. So they’re reasonably straightforward, aren’t they? Six causes and one result.
And they generally are generated in that order. They’re like a each is a key opening, the lock to the next, to the next. And so we do need to generate the earlier ones, And on that basis, then the latter are established. But even contemplating them through from one till seven, it gives us confidence that there is a causal relationship between them, that it is possible in the end to develop bodhicitta through this method. Now, there’s also a second method which we talked about last week, which is the method of exchanging self for others.
Now, in the method of exchanging self for others, there’s really a five point. There are five points which are mentioned. Right. Now, it’s good if we can actually keep in mind the seven of the six causes and one result instruction and the five points of exchanging self for others. Because ultimately we’ll put these two methods together, and they enhance each other.
They go together. Right. So the first point of the five is meditating on how the self and others are equal, which sounds a lot like equanimity. But here it’s really contemplating how oneself and others are equal. Where as with equanimity it’s really focusing on other beings and seeing how they are equal, how we should treat them equally.
Here in meditating on equalizing self for others, seeing how we are the same as all these other beings ourselves. And as it’s said in the Guru Puja, there is no difference. There is no difference between myself and others. We do not want the smallest suffering, yet happiness never satisfies. Bless me to be glad at others’ joy.
So that line from the Guru Puja sums up this, the first point of the five points of exchanging self for others, that in fact there isn’t the least difference between ourselves and other beings. Is that true? Is there any difference between ourselves and others? Are those words to be accepted? Aren’t differences differences?
Is it true that there are differences between ourselves and others, or no differences? Yeah, that’s really getting this verse really expresses that, doesn’t it? There is no difference between myself and others. We do not want the smallest suffering. So from that point of view, nobody wants the smallest suffering.
So there’s no difference between self and others. Actually, of course there’s differences between self and others. We have different names. We look differently. We have different likes and dislikes and so on.
We are different. But in this respect, there’s no difference. We’re very, very similar in that. Generally, we look more at the differences between ourselves and others, and we overlook what’s really fundamentally very similar. But here, this instruction is recommending that when we look at others in future, we don’t dwell on the differences.
Because when we dwell on the differences, we tend to either develop jealousy or pride and so on, which is not much use to us. There’s not much we can do about the differences. But if we contemplate what’s similar, then that has a great benefit. And here in contemplating what is similar, how we’re equal, then it’s possible to generate great compassion. But without that type of that sense of equality, we can’t develop great compassion.
So here we are really equal in seeking to be free of even the smallest suffering. Similar to that also, we all have an I, or we all are attached to this sense of I, and so on. We all have a sense of I. So there’s not much difference in that regard. And really we need to concentrate on this ground in which we are absolutely equal with other beings.
Because if we not only have immeasurable equanimity, we really need to see how we are equal with those other beings that we generate an even attitude toward. That in fact, no matter who the other being is, whether they’re a divine being, in a sense we’re equal. We’re equal to that being in a sense that there’s little difference between the I that’s imputed upon the basis of designation. The basis of designation, which is our current physical body and our feelings and discrimination and so on, these differ. But the I imputed to that, the mere I, is very similar.
Also, other human beings, actually we share this point of equality. And then with animals as well. Animals are equal to us. Animals, the birds, the insects, they’re equal. We need to be able to see our equality to those beings.
And then ghosts as well, hungry ghosts. And then hell beings, all the hell beings that exist, we share this common status. We are completely equal. The only thing that stops us being in hell at present is the fact that we’ve managed through one set of circumstances or another to wake in karma to be a human being at present. Whereas all the hell beings in hell have simply awakened karma to be reborn in hell.
The karmic predispositions of a hell being and ourselves are similar. There’s no real difference. It’s merely that circumstances have led to hell beings manifesting a hell rebirth in this lifetime. So we need to generate a sense of equality with all other beings. So this is the first point of exchanging self for others.
At present, it’s difficult for us to exchange because initially we don’t have a strong sense of the equality of of self and others. And then the second point there is contemplating the many faults resulting from self-cherishing. And also we need to contemplate this as much as possible, just what self-cherishing is. And then that this type of attitude does have various faults. And as the Guru Puja again says, this text which was composed by the first Pänchen Lama, which states, I see this chronic disease of self-cherishing is the cause to produce unwanted suffering.
And as the Bodhicaryāvatāra states, all worldly sufferings have occurred, that have occurred, stemmed from wanting happiness for myself. Anything that benefits the worldly, any fear and suffering, all stem from self-cherishing. Why should I have this great devil? And then again, our root text, the text on mind training, seven point mind training, says, Put the blame on this one thing alone. The blame for everything everything should squarely be placed on self-cherishing.
So the one thing that really is at fault is this attitude of self-cherishing. So everything that’s faulty has error, doesn’t come up to scratch, not as we want it, and so forth. All of this is coming from self-cherishing. So, if we suspect this, then we need to reinforce this by regularly reflecting on the faults of self-cherishing. Otherwise we very quickly forget.
We affirm them in the first moment and then the second moment our self-cherishing is saying, okay, I’ve understood that. Let’s move on to something more interesting. So we need to draw our mind again and again to the faults of self-cherishing so that we sober up a little bit. And as Pabongka Rinpoche says, all our unwanted sufferings come from self-cherishing. Coming to grief through weapons, poison, gods and nagas, being reborn in hell as hungry ghost animals.
These are due to having killed other beings in the hope of some gain for our own happiness or from being miserly and treating others with contempt, etcetera. Likewise, succumbing to the diseases of the humors of wind, bile and phlegm, fearing enemies, getting into quarrels and so forth, all of this comes from self-cherishing. So this we need to remind ourselves as much as possible and contemplate all the faults of self-cherishing. That does help to sober us up a little bit because otherwise our self-cherishing is so strong that very quickly we tend to get bored with things, bored with practicing something that’s good for us. And we want something more lively, more entertaining.
We’d go and have a pizza, go to a movie, and so on. Just like to lie down. I’ve done a bit of yeah. I’ve done something positive. Okay.
Now let me look for something else that, I really like to do and so on. This is associated with our self-cherishing. We need to keep in mind the faults of self-cherishing, because it’s something we’ve had from beginning this time and it’s not going to be easy for us to oppose it. But this we need to do. Understanding the need for opposing self-cherishing comes through thinking about the faults of self-cherishing.
And conversely, think about the good qualities of cherishing others. So again, we need to go through all the positive qualities of cherishing other beings. So this, of course, is the basic practice that we are engaged in. Contemplating equality, then thinking about what self-cherishing is, and the faults of self-cherishing. What is self-cherishing?
Rang zhen zin in Tibetan. It’s often useful to write that down. Rang zhen zin. Rang means self, zhen means to cherish, to long for, to hold dear. And zin meaning to hold.
Literally self-cherishing hold. Rang chen zin. So what is self-cherishing? How would we recognize it if it arose in our mental continuum? If in fact it was there at present, does it exist at present?
It’s not easy to see it. Actually, when we start looking for it, it seems to disappear. But what is self-cherishing? It’s close to that. Yeah.
It’s really holding oneself to be more important than others. And by doing that, excluding others, And that’s what we tend to do. We tend to think of our own situation first. And that seems very obvious to us that we should, in fact, work in that way. In fact, we are more important than others.
So self-cherishing, it really undermines the sense of equality with others, of course. And often this sense of ourselves being important seems quite valid and correct. And it’s not easy for us to see the fault in this attitude. If we saw the fault in it, we’d get rid of it straight away. If we’d seen it in any lifetime up until the present, we would have eliminated it.
If in fact it’s as bad as what we’re told here, it’s the cause of all our unhappiness. If we’d seen it to be that, we would have thrown it out eons ago. We wouldn’t live with it. If we saw it to be the root cause of all our unhappiness, we would not like the story of a snake falling into a person’s lap. One doesn’t sit around and wait for it to crawl off.
One clicks it off as quickly as possible. That’s what we do with self-cherishing. If we saw it to be like I mean, snake can only do us a certain amount of harm. It could bite us. His self-cherishing destroys our happiness, has destroyed our happiness from beginningless time.
It’s just unheard of. An enemy like that. Even the enemies in this life can’t destroy our happiness in every lifetime. But our self-cherishing has done that. And at present, it’s almost as if we’re holding our self-cherishing attitude itself to be dear to us, because we haven’t understood the faults of it.
So, as much as possible, we need to bring to mind what the faults of self-cherishing are. And then conversely, what the benefits of cherishing others are. And in brief, as Śāntideva says, all worldly happiness to be found comes from wishing others happiness. This also is a pith instruction from Śāntideva. All our happiness comes from wishing other beings to be happy, cherishing other beings.
And the Guru Puja says, I see that cherishing these, my mothers, is a thought that leads to happiness. It is a door leading to infinite qualities. So this we need to think about. If this really is the case, then we need to begin to act on it. And acting on it really means a little perseverance every day, thinking.
We need to know these five equalizing self with others. Faults of self-cherishing. Even if we just list the five every day, the faults of self-cherishing, that’s a start. But then what are the faults of self-cherishing? And then the qualities of cherishing others.
This we also need to think about. Because, of course, developing bodhicitta is not an automatic process. It’s not like turning on a computer and it just starts off by itself and boots up and so on. Here in generating bodhicitta, every step we need to put effort into generate. But this we do over a long period.
This we need to peace ourselves and put energy into these practices. We need effort in these practices. And again, effort arises. What is effort? Effort is, of course, liking virtue.
So effort comes in these practices, through enjoying the practice. So we really need to get it to a point where we like practicing, exchanging self for others. We like practicing equality. We really like that. And we like contemplating the faults of self-cherishing.
If we like it, then we’ll do it. If we don’t like it, we do it only when we have to. And then for as shorter time period as possible, two minutes, one minute, thirty seconds. But if we like doing it, then people won’t be able to stop us from doing it. So this we need.
With all of these practices, to bring them to a point where we develop a liking for doing them is important. So therefore, these are the first three of the five points of exchanging self for others. These we covered last week. I’m just going over them a little bit again because they are so important. We should remember the seven and the five.
So we have them at all time. We’re sitting on a bus, we’re driving along, we can think, oh, there are two ways of generating bodhicitta. Equanimity, immeasurable equanimity comes first, then we can go through. Okay. That’s the system for Maitreya and the other system Okay.
Exchanging self for others. Equalizing self for others. What does that mean? You know, because we’re with beings, you know, we’re walking down Rundle Mall and we’re surrounded by all these people. Okay.
There’s the field of all sentient beings. Okay. Now I’ve been practicing immeasurable equanimity to these beings. Now I can equalizing myself with these beings and so forth. But we need with these pith instructions, if we have them, the bones of the practice at hand, then it’s easy for us to contemplate them.
We don’t need to carry a book around with us. So have in mind the seven and the five are very important. So then, we contemplate extensively the benefits of cherishing others, and this comes in the text itself. And so we can read through that. So and then any other verses that help us to contemplate these issues, we can write down and even memorize those.
They’re good. We can anything that just sticks in our mind or when we read it, it’s of some benefit. It’s often good to write them down and just, because there is a reason why we remember those particular words. It might not be clear to us at present. But those words that we like, we should take note of because they’re the easier ones for us.
Sometimes it might be a line of a poem that’s good. We can put that in. Okay. That’s useful for thinking about the faults of self-cherishing. And that line there, okay, that’s good for thinking about the benefits of cherishing others.
Something we like, and then that makes it easier for us. Anything we like doing is easy. We don’t need anyone to inspire us to or prompt us to do something. We like doing it. We do it ourselves.
Right. And now the fourth one is contemplating actually contemplating exchange of self for others. So here, we have already covered the contemplating of the faults of self-cherishing and the qualities of cherishing others. So then after seeing what these faults and good qualities are, we should exchange the self for others. That is, the thoughts of self-cherishing should change places with the thoughts of ignoring the needs of others.
But this does not mean that we should think the self is now others. Exchanging self for others doesn’t mean to say that we think other beings are now ourselves and they’re us. That would be I’m not sure. Maybe even in some situations that would be useful. We could go around thinking, I’m that person, they’re me.
But we’d probably take with us our self-cherishing anyway. It might not be that useful. So as Pabongka Rinpoche says, exchanging self for others doesn’t mean we’re actually thinking that they’re me and I am them. In the past, we have ignored others because we have cherished ourselves. Now these two attitudes should be exchanged.
So the thought of cherishing ourselves should be exchanged for the thought of cherishing others. So this is the meaning of exchanging self for others. So we really train the mind by thinking, I used to ignore others, but from now on, I shall ignore my own needs. I’ve been cherishing myself, but from now on I shall cherish others. So this isn’t easy.
Now we’re going to ignore our own needs. Some resistance, even the thought, some resistance comes up. We begin to think, but what am I going to get out of this? Of course. That’s an indication that we have self-cherishing there at that moment.
If there’s a thought, what am I getting out of this? Then it’s an indication that self-cherishing is becoming manifest. But through making the mind familiar in this way with cherishing others and showing disdain to myself, then the practice becomes easier over a period. And as Pabongka Rinpoche says, we can think in terms of this analogy. When you stay up a while on the far side of a mountain, you think of that side as being the near side.
So, really, if we think about others others cherishing others, then really after a while, we’re able to cherish others as we cherish ourselves. In a way, becomes cherishing ourselves, which would be fine. So then the fourth point here with the exchanging self for others is simply then cherishing exchanging this thought of cherishing from at present, it’s very much centered on self, but then taking that and focusing on other beings and developing, the thought of others. Then the fifth one here is, the ways to meditate on giving and taking. And as the root text on mind training here, the seven point mind training then says, train alternatively in giving and taking.
So again, this is the fifth point. We’ve already had four points of exchanging self for others. Can anyone keep the four we’ve done? One that came before that? Yep.
Yep. That one’s important in the beginning. It’s a little bit like this six causes and one result, isn’t it? Which starts off with equanimity. This one also starts off with a similar type meditation, contemplating the equality of self and others.
And then the second one, faults of self-cherishing. And the third one, Qualities of cherishing others. The fourth one? Yeah. Contemplating exchanging self for others.
That one is exchanging the thought of cherishing oneself for the thought of cherishing others. They really come in a causal sequence in a way, isn’t it? Equalizing self for others, with others, faults of self-cherishing, benefits of cherishing others, and then really exchanging those two attitudes. And then the fifth one here is giving and taking or taking and giving. So as the root text says, train alternatively in giving and taking.
So at this point here, the fifth point is to increase the effect of the preceding contemplations. In many written teachings on giving and taking, the former is treated first. However, in the practice, in practice, it is the latter which is carried out first. So giving and taking, in Tibetan it’s Tonglen, len means to send out or to give, tong means to receive, Sending out and receiving, or giving and taking. In general, it’s explained in that order, but in practice, one starts with the second one, taking.
So in fact, as he says, as Pabongka Rinpoche says, it may be appropriate to do only the taking and omit the giving. It would not be of benefit to give away happiness before having taken away suffering. So practice as follows in order to build up your compassion. So in fact, here he’s suggesting, although we call it giving and taking, we’re actually taking first in the practice. Taking, of course, is corresponds to the practice of compassion where where we’re taking on the sufferings of others.
And giving is, giving our happiness to other beings, which corresponds to the practice of love. So therefore we think, I shall remove all suffering from all sentient beings, my mothers, and generate compassion. Then we visualize all their sufferings being shed like hair shaved off with a razor and taking the form of black rays that dissolve into the self-cherishing attitude attitude at one’s heart. And we can do this in more detail. Think that the suffering due to the heat of the hot hells and cold of the cold hells dissolves and all into your heart, and that it dissolves into your nucleus of self-cherishing.
Contemplate that you take on the suffering, sins, and obscurations from the beings in the cold hells, hungry ghosts, animals, demigods, humans, gods, and so forth, right up to the tenth level Bodhisattvas. Now visualize that they are without suffering and have been purified of negativities and obscurations, And we then can pray that these things may ripen instead on ourselves. And when we do this, we do this practice of taking, we also note that we’re not actually taking anything from the Buddhas nor from our teachers nor from our gurus, but from other all other sentient beings. And then as Pabongka Rinpoche mentions that there are many types of people with different degrees of ability, some beginners find that they are not capable of meditating on giving and taking in the beginning. So if we have some resistance to practicing giving and taking, taking on the sufferings of other beings, then the root text says we should first build up our taking by starting with ourselves.
In other words, we meditate in the morning that we are going to take on the sufferings that we will experience in the evening, then move on to taking on the next day’s suffering, then the suffering for the rest of the month, then the rest of the year, then the rest of our present rebirth, then our next rebirth, and then our future rebirths, and so on. So if we have difficulty or some resistance to taking on the sufferings of others, then we can practice by taking on our own sufferings. Start with a small amount and then increase. So that then is a way that we can approach taking on the sufferings of others. And then from there, we move on to having taken on our own sufferings, then we can contemplate those who are near to us such as our parents, mother and father, friends, and so on.
And then from friends, we can go to strangers, from strangers to enemies, and in that way we include all sentient beings. So we can do it in a a graduated way so that it is easier for us. So in this way, we move steadily from one level to another to another in a graduated way. And we ought to follow these steps because at first, we don’t easily think of taking on the sufferings of from such people as our enemies. So so then starting by contemplating our own sufferings first and then moving outwards in that way, from friend, enemy, stranger, and then the beings in the hells all the way up to the tenth level Bodhisattvas, by gradually progressing through all beings in that way, our meditation will be steady and comprehensive.
We can do it in all manner of ways too. We can start, for instance, from the hells to the beings of high realization. Or others, we can start with men and women in the upper part of our men and women who live near to us and then progress, or the beings that are like everyone in the room, and then everyone in the house, everyone in the street, everyone in the suburb, and so on. And then maybe we can do all human beings and expand that to all human beings, and then start with animals, and so on, and progress, and then ghosts, and then