Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 9.9-minute introduction to Tonglen, Ven Sangye Khadro explains this Lojong (thought transformation) practice as a way to shift how we work with difficulty. Rather than resisting suffering, Tonglen teaches us to take it on and give happiness in return — a capacity she illustrates through parents willing to absorb their child’s pain or rescue workers risking themselves for others. Using a traffic jam as an example, she shows how the same situation can become either torturous or spiritually transformative depending on our attitude. The meditation pairs with breath: inhale the suffering of all beings (visualized as dark smoke dissolving our self-centeredness at the heart), exhale our good qualities and happiness transformed into whatever others need.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 4.02 Introducing Tonglen.mp3
UUID: c823a210-fe9c-4676-b818-dc1982344460
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 9.9 minutes
Words: ~1,277
So in the previous session, when I was talking about various ways in which we can practice or live our life so that we are more prepared for death when it happens. One of the practices mentioned was Tonglen. So I am going to start this session by talking about Tonglen, explaining it, and then we’ll do a meditation on Tonglen. So Tonglen is a Tibetan term and it means giving and taking. So, it’s a meditation that is part of a series of teachings and practices known as Lojong, which can translate as thought transformation or mind training.
And the idea behind the Lojong teachings is that we can transform our thoughts, our mental attitudes from being self centred and deluded, egotistic, destructive to being more loving, compassionate and beneficial to others. And if we can do this, if we can make this transformation in our mind, it is naturally good for others, but it is also good for ourselves. We ourselves will feel more peaceful, happy, satisfied and positive about ourselves. But the ultimate goal of the practice is to become enlightened. To become a Buddha, a fully enlightened being.
At which point we can make our existence as beneficial to others as possible. Being able to benefit all beings throughout space. So there are different aspects of thought transformation teachings and practices. And one of these is learning how to transform problems and difficulties into the spiritual path. So when we experience problems or difficulties, usually we feel aversion.
We don’t like them and we do whatever we can to get rid of them as quickly as possible. But problems are not really problematic from their own side. It all depends on how we view them and how we deal with them. If we can have the right understanding and methods, then we can make problems useful in the same way that we recycle garbage or turn it into fertilizer for our garden. Let’s just look at an example of that.
When we’re stuck in a traffic jam, that experience could be a problem if we let ourselves become impatient, thinking about all the things we’d rather be doing, blaming other people for the situation and so forth. So it can turn into a really painful, unpleasant, difficult situation. On the other hand, if we can recognize that such thoughts and attitudes, ways of reacting are really quite useless and just make things worse, and instead we can use the time to contemplate positive things, generate positive thoughts in our mind, or do something like reciting mantras or prayers, or listen to a spiritual teaching on our CD player. So if we do these things, then the situation becomes bearable and maybe even enjoyable. And it also becomes spiritual practice, helping us progress along the path to enlightenment.
So Tonglen is one kind of skillful method we can use for transforming problems. For making problems into situations that are bearable or even enjoyable and even part of our spiritual practice, our spiritual path. So, the basic idea behind Tonglen is that we first of all meditate on love and compassion, which means we generate the wish for others to be happy and the wish for them to be free of suffering. And then, on top of that, we imagine taking on the suffering of others and giving them our happiness. So that might sound strange, but if you think about it, sometimes people have that kind of feeling just naturally.
For example, parents. When they see their child in pain or sick or unhappy, they feel so much love and compassion for their child that they might feel the wish that they could take that suffering onto themselves and experience it themselves and relieve their child of that suffering. They just can’t bear to see their child suffer and they’d rather experience that suffering themselves. Another example might be rescue workers who are willing to put themselves into situations where they might be injured or even killed in order to help somebody else or to help others who are in this difficult situation. So sometimes people have that kind of feeling naturally spontaneously of being willing to take on suffering or problems or difficulties in order to help someone else.
And in fact we all have the ability to generate this kind of attitude and and these kind of courageous feelings. And we can do this by making ourselves more familiar with the meditations on love and compassion and generating the wish to help others. So the more we do these meditations, the more we generate these feelings of love and compassion and wanting to help others, the more easy it will become for our mind to have this wish to take on their suffering and give them our happiness. There are different ways to practice Tonglen. In the full form of the meditation, you imagine taking on the suffering and the causes of suffering, which are delusions, negative attitudes, disturbing states of mind, and karma, negative actions we do motivated by delusions.
So we take on the suffering and causes of suffering of all living beings without exception, every living being. We take on all their suffering. Then we imagine giving them our own happiness, our good qualities, good energy, wealth, whatever good things we have. We imagine giving those to others in the form of whatever they need to be comfortable, to have their needs fulfilled, to be happy and to progress along the path all the way up to enlightenment. And this practice is normally done together with our breathing.
While we breathe in, we imagine taking in the suffering and causes of suffering of others. We imagine them coming into ourselves and annihilating or destroying our ego and self-cherishing, our selfish attitude. This attitude of feeling I am more important than others. My happiness, my needs, my wishes are more important than those of anybody else. So these attitudes which are actually causes of problems ourselves and obstacles to our attainment of enlightenment.
So imagine these attitudes at our heart in some kind of form of like a black rock or some kind of black spot. We imagine the suffering of others in the form of dark energy like smoke or fog coming in, absorbing into or crashing down on this negative energy at our heart and then completely destroying it, making it non existent. And then after doing that, with the inhalation of breath, you do that for some time. Then you meditate on love, wishing others to have happiness and whatever they need to be happy. And then you imagine all the good energy that you have, your good karma, your good qualities, your intelligence and knowledge and happiness and wealth, possessions, material things.
You imagine all that good energy that you have in the form of something like a wish fulfilling jewel, very beautiful and radiant at your heart. And then you imagine rays of light going out from that to others while you while you exhale. So as you breathe out, you breathe out this energy to others and it transforms into whatever they need. Starting with the most basic things like food and clothes and shelter and money and education and jobs and friends. And and then progressively giving them more and more of the real causes of happiness such as good qualities, positive qualities, and realizations of the path all the way up to enlightenment.
So imagine them getting everything they need in order to be happy, both in an ordinary temporary sense, up to the highest happiness of enlightenment.