Staying receptive to the extraordinary depth of suffering in the world is an extremely demanding process – especially in an age as dangerous and tormented as ours – and one that menaces the false self's passion for denial and hunger for comfort at every turn.
Terror of feeling and the primitive desire to wall ourselves off from our own pain and that of others are two of the strongest sources of all the cruelty, confusion, and injustice of the world; working to eliminate them in ourselves is crucial to our own liberation and to that of others.
Tonglen – the practice of giving and receiving – is one of Tibetan Buddhism's most precious gifts to the world. It is a very holy and very powerful practice that can help anyone who does it stay open to, and expand, his or her innate tendency to be compassionate.
Compassion in action
The great mystics of all traditions remind us that at the core of all of our natures is a divine capacity for love; Tonglen helps us discover, sustain, expand, and develop this capacity until it becomes the ruling force of our whole being. Learning how strong your own inner power of love and compassion really is and then how transformative and healing it can be both for you and others brings great spiritual joy and determination.
The informing principle to Tonglen is simple; in the course of the practice you 'take on' the pain, terror, and sadness of others and then 'give out' all peace, all love, all help, all possible forms of healing. As you breathe in, you breathe in all suffering; as you breathe out, you breathe out all peace.
There is nothing to fear; the pain, terror, and sadness you take on in this practice will not destroy you. On the contrary, by determining calmly and consciously to take on the sufferings of others, you will wear away your attachment to your false self, the false self that is the source of all our aggression, illusion, and ignorance and that protects itself by self-absorbed hardheartedness and denial. By constantly intending to open up to and embrace and transmute the pain of others, you will be constantly wearing away everything in you that considers yourself 'alone', 'separate', 'un-involved', and so will be uncovering ever more clearly your true divine nature and developing at ever greater depth and passion its sacred heart-force. Every time you do this practice, then, with a sincere intention to help another person or group of people who are in pain, you will also be offering up your own separate false self for transformation and so taking a step forward toward your own liberation from illusion. The greatest mystics of all traditions remind us that progress along the Path is best gauged by growth in selflessness and humility. As a Tibetan mystic, Shantideva, wrote:
The childish work for their own benefit The Buddhas work for the benefit of others Just look at the difference between them!
You will find, as I have, that if you make the practice of Tonglen your own, you will experience more and more clearly the depths of your own compassion and innate generosity, the compassion and generosity that are normal to your divine nature. You will come to realise that far from being too fragile to bear the pain of the world – one of the most effective fictions of the false self – you are in fact far more able than you ever imagined to confront without fear or illusion what is really happening to yourself and others and the natural world, and far more powerful an agent of healing than you ever suspected.
How to begin
Before you begin to do the practice of Tonglen itself, I advise you to follow the Tibetan mystics' advice and sit for five or ten minutes in calm silence. The calmer and more inwardly peaceful you are, the stronger you will feel when it comes to confronting your own or others' suffering.
I find it very powerful at the beginning of Tonglen practice to imagine that I am staring out across a still and sunlit ocean or up into the boundless blue depths of a spring sky; doing this, I find, immediately expands my mind and makes it more spacious. I find it helpful also to pray to all those awakened beings, such as Jesus, Rumi, and the Buddha, who have made the practice of compassion the core of their message: I pray to them all to come and help me claim, live, and enact the truth of the divine compassion within me, and within all beings.
Now, with mind and heart composed, begin the practice of giving and taking by doing Tonglen on yourself. One highly effective way of doing this is to practise seated before a large mirror in which you can see yourself clearly. Let the person in the mirror – let's call him or her A – be your karmic biographical self, with all its sadnesses, doubts, fears, and difficulties; the person gazing into the mirror – B – is your eternal self already free, already liberated, whose essence is spacious and all-embracing love.
Gaze now with the eyes of your eternal free self at what I call 'the wreck in the mirror': gaze without fear or shame and see clearly in A's face all of A's loneliness, worry, panic and grief. Note everything calmly, compassionately, without judgment. Allow the symbolic atmosphere of what you are doing to instruct and awaken you; remind yourself that the biographical self is the reflection in the 'mirror of life' of a far more powerful and spacious eternal self who cannot be destroyed or broken. Allow the full beauty of this knowledge to infuse your whole being with joy and faith.
Now imagine that all the fears and desolations your biographical self is harbouring within itself issues from the stomach of your image in the mirror in the form of a ball of hot, black, grimy smoke. Visualize this ball of thickly swirling black smoke clearly. Then, as you breathe in, breathe in the black ball into the fully open heart-centre of your eternal self and imagine it dissolving away completely there, as smoke would in a cloudless shining blue sky. Then, on the out-breath, breathe back at your biographical self in the mirror all the peace, bliss, strength and healing power of your eternal self.
Make sure that your in-breaths and out-breaths are equally deep and long. Breathe in the black ball of smoke from the stomach of your biographical self; pause and imagine it dissolving in the boundless blue sky of your eternal heart-mind; then breathe out as deeply and fully as you breathed in, consciously and with great focus sending out to your biographical self as you do so all you know of the faith and radiance of your own divine truth.
If you do this whole process nine times calmly and confidently, you will be amazed at how much better and more grounded you will feel. You will now be ready to turn to the second part of the practice.
Taking in pain, giving out healing
In this second part of giving and taking, you will be doing Tonglen for someone else. Select a person who you know is in psychological or physical pain. Imagine him or her clearly in your heart's eye and meditate as richly and sensitively as you can on all the difficulties he or she must be experiencing and all the grief and fear that is being undergone. If the person you have chosen is someone for whom you have sometimes conflicted or ambiguous feelings, don't be surprised if these surface and try to block your compassion toward him; offer these feelings when they arise for transformation. You can even, as I often do, perform a kind of mini-Tonglen on them; accept and own and then breathe the difficult feelings in, and then breathe out to yourself the compassion of your innate nature.
Now imagine that all the psychological or physical anguish of the person you have chosen issues out of her stomach in the concentrated form of a hot, black, grimy ball of smoke. As you breathe in, breathe in that black ball of hot smoke, and as you breathe out, breathe out to the person all the peace, strength, happiness, and bliss of your innate love nature.
Something a young Tibetan practitioner once told me has helped me immensely in this stage of the practice. He said: 'Never be afraid that if you breathe in someone's pain that it will somehow 'get stuck' in you. Remember that there is nowhere in you for it to get stuck; in your essence, you are the boundless space of Buddha-consciousness'. Reminding myself of what he told me has prevented me time and time again from involuntarily closing down to the being I have chosen to practice for. He also told me to imagine that as I breathed out, the blessing my out-breath sends the person I have chosen doesn't 'end' with him or her but travels on and on throughout the universe. 'All acts of true compassion,' he said, 'are infinite both in their origin and in their effect. Imagine that your out-breath cleanses, purifies, and blesses not only the person you have chosen, but the whole cosmos.'
As you breathe out, then, imagine with great faith that the person you have chosen is completely irradiated with grace and healed of everything that afflicts her. It helps here to see in your heart's eye the person you have chosen smiling or laughing or dancing with joy and health. Imagine that the blessing of her joy and health is contagious and spreads invisibly through all things everywhere, illumining them all with divine light.
Embracing the whole planet
Now, in the third part of the practice, turn in your heart to confront the suffering of the whole planet. Try with all the force of the Divine within you to face without illusion or false consolation all the aspects of the agony that the entire planet is now going through – an agony that is demanding from each of us a passionate commitment to transform ourselves to be of real help.
Imagine now that the entire earth gives off a ball of hot, black, grimy smoke in which all these horrors are concentrated. Imagine, too, that the divine self you are now is as vast as the universe. Take that vast black ball of agony into your heart and dissolve it in its sky-pure transparency. Breathe in the earth's black smoke; pause as it dissolves utterly in your skylike heart; breathe out the divine light and bliss and strength of your divine self and imagine the whole earth bathed in its all-healing glory. Do this nine times slowly with total concentration.
Your intention to transmute all the suffering of all sentient beings and of the whole earth has transformed you now into a diamond being whose body, heart, mind and spirit are transparent and on fire with brilliant white divine light. Send this light with its all-transforming powers in all the four directions, and know with faith and joy that it will do wonders and effect great secret healings.
A practical vow
As you keep sending out the brilliant white light from your diamond body, make a vow to do something specific for the world. Don't vow to do something grandiose and impossible; vow to do something you really can do. Mother Teresa once said: 'We cannot do great things, but we can do small things with great love.' Vow to do something small with great love. A woman I know who did this practice once vowed to clean up the bus stop down the road from her apartment once a week. Another man told me that after doing Tonglen the first time, he vowed to cook one meal a week for the homeless shelter in his town, and stuck to his decision for over a decade. A teenager I taught this practice to in San Francisco vowed to dedicate three hours a week to feeding the abandoned cats and dogs who lived in a park near his school: Four years later, he has found homes for many of them.
A vow is a sacred responsibility, so don't make it lightly. And when you make it, stand by it. Even the 'smallest' vow, you will find, can be transforming if you honour it.
One vow I have often made at the end of Tonglen practice is to go on doing Tonglen at odd moments throughout the day for anyone I see who looks miserable or in need. This is simple and very moving and nourishing to do. If you are on a bus and see someone looking lonely or desperate, just take a minute and breathe in their pain and breathe out to him or her your joy and inner peace. If you see on the evening news a person who moves you by his distress, just breathe it in and breathe out to him love and strength. Once you start practising like this, you will find you will derive great joy from feeling so connected to others; your heart will go on opening until that marvellous moment when it has opened so continually and completely and with such faith and abandon that it can never close again, and then, as the Tibetans say, 'Your whole life will be Tonglen'.
From The Direct Path, copyright 2000 by Andrew Harvey, published by Rider.
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