Self-Cherishing

Cherishing Difficult People (4) Whenever I see beings instinctively cruel, overpowered by negativities and serious problems, may I cherish them as difficult to find as discovering a treasure of gems. This verse deals with how to transform negative circumstances into positive...

Transforming Our Behavior through Our Thoughts We’ve covered the first two points – the preliminaries and the actual training in bodhichitta. Now we’re ready for the third of the seven points, which is transforming difficult circumstances into the path to enlightenment. This...

We have been going through one of the methods for generating bodhichitta, which is an expansion of the meditations on equalizing and exchanging our attitudes about self and others. It derives from the teachings of Shantideva in Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior (Skt....

Next is the renunciation of clinging to our own aims – in other words self-cherishing – and having our main interest instead being in cherishing others and fulfilling their aims. What are we determining to be free of? We need to identify that, and this is having our main...

Review Let us set the proper motivation for listening to these teachings, namely a heart of bodhichitta, dedicated to helping others and to achieving enlightenment in order to be able to do so. These teachings have been presented in terms of the three levels of motivation. On...

5 Decisions There are five decisions that come from thinking about the nine points for equalizing our attitude toward ourselves: 1. I Shall Stop Being Fickle, But Rather Develop a Kind Attitude toward Myself Equally All the Time The first decision is: No matter how well or...

Accepting Loss and Offering Victory to Others (5) When others, out of envy, treat me wrongly with scolding, insults, and more, may I accept the loss upon myself and offer the victory to others. Here’s that famous line that Geshe Chekawa was so moved by: May I accept the loss...

Concluding Verses of the Third Section of the Text Having pointed out the trouble that our self-grasping and self-cherishing causes, and identifying that self-cherishing and self-grasping lie underneath the various problems and suffering that we have, Dharmarakshita finishes...

The Decision That We Definitely Will Rid Ourselves of Self-Cherishing  The second decision that we make is that we definitely shall rid ourselves of self-cherishing. This we do by thinking of the faults of having the self-cherishing attitude. The main emphasis here is that...

Brief Review The Eight Verses of Mind Training comes from a long tradition, beginning with Shantideva’s text Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior, then with Atisha, who heard of these teachings from Dharmarakshita, who wrote Wheel of Sharp Weapons, and then traveled to Sumatra to...