Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 5-minute teaching, Ven Sangye Khadro addresses a common obstacle: the fear that taking on others’ suffering will overwhelm you when you can’t manage your own. She offers a graduated approach—start by transforming your attitude toward your own problems, using difficulty to dissolve ego and selfishness. Once grounded there, extend the practice gradually to people you love, then strangers, and finally enemies. She clarifies that Tonglen is imaginative training, not literal transference (though rare karmic exceptions exist), and that the real aim is cultivating love, compassion, and altruism as foundations for enlightenment and the capacity to help others. Suited for practitioners new to Tonglen or hesitant about its demands.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 4.03 Practicing Tonglen.mp3
UUID: 5b8046a8-c039-407c-8d86-557963b3585b
Teacher: Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald
Collection: Heart advice (Ven Sanghy Khandro aka Kathleen McDonald)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 5.4 minutes
Words: ~780
So that’s the full form of the practice. However, although some people, when they hear about this kind of practice, comfortable to do it right from the beginning, but there are some people who don’t feel so comfortable about the idea of taking on the suffering of others. They may feel, I can’t even handle my own problems. How can I take on everybody else’s? So for people like that, it’s recommended that they begin by taking on their own suffering.
Learning to transform our attitude towards our own problems and suffering instead of feeling aversion and wanting to reject them, wanting to get rid of them. But turning our mind around, turning our attitude around and becoming accepting of our problems. And so there’s a meditation where you imagine taking on your own suffering and your own problems and using that, using the problem in order to overcome selfishness and ego and other negative attitudes. And so by doing this practice, learning to take on our own problems, becoming more familiar with and more comfortable with that practice, then gradually we can move on to doing the practice with others. Starting with people we love, people we care about, like our family member, friends, people that we find easy to want to take the suffering from.
So we can start gradually to do the practice of taking on their suffering and giving them happiness. And then again with more familiarity with the practice, we’ll be able to move on to taking on the suffering of people we’re not so close to, strangers. And eventually we can get to the point where we will be willing to take on the suffering of even people we don’t like, like enemies, people who have harmed us and so on. That’s what’s recommended, that you do the practice in a gradual way, Starting with your own suffering and problems and then gradually moving on to taking on the suffering and problems of people you care about, and then strangers, and finally enemies. And the point of Tonglen when we do the practice is not to focus on the feeling of me, this big me or I taking on suffering and me giving away happiness.
Instead, we should focus on others. Focus on the other people and other beings whose suffering we’re taking. Imagining them becoming free of their suffering. And imagining them receiving all the good things, all the happiness that they need and wish for. And then feeling great joy and satisfaction that we have been able to do this.
And also, it’s important to understand that when we do this meditation, we’re we’re just imagining taking on the suffering of others and imagining giving them our happiness. So it actually isn’t the case that we can actually really take on anyone else’s suffering or give our happiness to them. Although it is said that there are some very rare instances where because of a very, strong karmic connection between two people, someone who does this practice in relation to that other person, they have a strong karmic connection with it could happen that that person’s suffering really does come over to them. That they might get the sickness, for example. If you’re imagining taking on the other person’s sickness, that they might actually get sick.
And the other person become free of their sickness. So there are some instances of that, but apparently that’s very rare. And so it’s not likely to happen when we do this practice. But still it’s important for us to generate strong courage and the willingness to take on the suffering of others and give our happiness to others with these feelings of love and compassion. And so the real purpose of the practice is to train our mind or make our mind more familiar with love, wishing others to have happiness, compassion, wishing others to be free of suffering and altruism.
The altruistic intention of wanting to help others as much as we can. So it’s making our mind familiar with generating those feelings more and more strongly in our mind. And also, through doing this practice we create the causes to become enlightened. It’s a very powerful method bringing us closer to enlightenment and it’s also a powerful purification practice freeing ourselves from our negative karma and our negative attitudes, especially selfishness and ego. So ultimately, the goal of the practice is to become enlightened, at which point we will be able to benefit others.
We will be able to help others be free of their suffering and causes and to help them have happiness and peace and bring them to enlightenment as well.