Background on the Text: Seven Point Mind Training
We’re going to start the seminar with a very important and essential text that is found in all the Tibetan traditions from India, called Seven Point Mind Training, which I received teachings on primarily from two of my main teachers: Serkong Rinpoche and Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey. I’ll follow primarily Serkong Rinpoche’s way of explaining, especially since he was absolutely an expert in this type of practice, in particular in tonglen (gtong-len), “taking and giving.” He was one of the teachers of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
The type of literature that this comes from is usually called “lojong” in Tibetan, and that is usually translated as “mind training,” but that’s a rather misleading translation, as Serkong Rinpoche pointed out. Especially when I explain the connotation, the reason for this will be clearer. “Training the mind” sounds as though we’re training the intellect, but that’s not really what’s it’s all about. The word “lo” (blo), which people usually translate as “mind,” actually means “attitudes.” And the word “jong” (sbyong) has two meanings. One is to cleanse, purify out; we are purifying out our negative attitudes. It also has the connotation of – once we have done that – training, learning, and developing more positive attitudes. That’s why I call it “cleansing of attitudes.”
If we ask where these teachings come from, particularly teachings on changing our attitudes toward self and others, which is really what these teachings are all about, they come from two chapters of the Avatamsaka Sutra, The Flower Garland Sutra. One is called the Gandavyuha Sutra, A Sutra Spread Out Like a Tree Trunk – a tree trunk of a huge tree that sends out branches everywhere. This describes the spiritual journey of Sudhana to 53 teachers and bodhisattvas in search of the ultimate truth and ends with the Aspiration Prayer of Samantabhadra. The other one is the Vajradhvaja Parinamana Sutra, Vajradhvaja's Transferences Sutra or, more fully, (The Bodhisattva) Vajradhvaja's (Ten) Transferences (of Positive Potential) Sutra. It describes the ten situations where beings were suffering greatly that the bodhisattva Vajradhvaja went to and transferred to the beings there the positive potential from his constructive deeds.
The two great Indian masters who spread the Mahayana teachings, who actually made them accessible to everyone, were Asanga and Nagarjuna. They also had the lineages and the teachings of these sutras, so those come through them. Eventually, these teachings came down, after some centuries, to the great Indian master Shantideva, who wrote Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior, which speaks even more about these teachings. These great Mahayana teachings, these lineages, were spread outside of India as well, and they went to Indonesia – the island of Sumatra, called the Golden Isle, “Serlingpa” in Tibetan.
A few centuries later, at the time of Atisha, there were some difficult times in India, and many of the more specific Mahayana teachings were no longer available there. Atisha heard that the lineages and the teachings were available from a great master in Sumatra, so he undertook a very long and difficult journey by sea from India to Sumatra. There, after many difficulties and not rushing to this teacher, but taking a lot of time to examine about him and ask other disciples there, he studied with the great master Dharmakirti or Dharmapala, more frequently referred to as “Serlingpa.”
Serlingpa held these lineages of Nagarjuna, Asanga and Shantideva, and Atisha brought them back to India, which really teaches us a very great lesson that the authentic teachings are really the most absolutely precious thing in the world. If they’re not available in our country or in our situation, we don’t just sit around and say, “Well, I’ll take whatever is available” – the second or the third best – but we really check to see who has the authentic teachings and who has the authentic realizations. No matter how difficult it is, no matter how much time it takes and effort to accumulate the money and get the resources and everything needed to go and get the authentic teachings, if we really are serious about our practice, we’ll go to the authentic sources.
Atisha didn’t just keep these teachings for himself; he also taught them. He was invited to come to Tibet, which was a very difficult journey in those days. The monks in his monastery in India weren’t terribly pleased that he was going, but he again undertook an incredibly difficult journey. There, in Tibet, he gave these teachings – primarily on bodhichitta – mostly to one of his main disciples, Dromtonpa, and Dromtonpa gave them to another one of his disciples, Geshe Potowa.
This is the Kadam tradition, and when we hear about these Kadampa Geshes, “Geshe” doesn’t mean what it came to mean later in the Gelug tradition, somebody who has gone through the full monastic training. It doesn’t mean that, but what it means, and is sometimes translated as, is “spiritual friend” – a friend or a relative, a brother, someone who is very close to us, with a very loving relationship, who then inspires and leads us, through their example, to be constructive and to act in constructive ways.
Always there is a huge emphasis, of course, in these teachings on voidness and other topics as well, but there is a super emphasis on bodhichitta. What we have to remember is that, historically at that time in Tibet, things were pretty chaotic and difficult, and the teachings on this attitude training or cleansing were really what people needed.
Geshe Potowa had two main disciples, called the sun-like and moon-like disciples. One of them was Langri Tangpa, the other was Geshe Sharawa. Langri Tangpa was always very serious. It’s quite interesting, the stories about him – I won’t go into details since we don’t have very much time – but he was the one (you might have heard stories) that only ever laughed three times. He was not serious as in stern, but most of the time he was always thinking of others and filled with sadness at their suffering and compassion to be able to help them. “I didn’t have time to joke around.” He wrote the Eight Verse Mind Training, a text of this genre that is very famous.
Geshe Chekawa came across a copy of Eight Verse Mind Training at some other great Geshe’s house and was especially drawn to one line in it. It is the line, “Give the victory to others and accept the defeat on oneself.” This really struck him very deeply; so much so, that the rest of his life was influenced by this line. He asked, “Who wrote it?” This Geshe, whose house he was at, said, “It was Geshe Langri Tangpa.” Then, Geshe Chekawa undertook a long journey to Lhasa to try to find him and get teachings on this, but when he got there, he found out that Geshe Langri Tangpa had already passed away.
Again, it’s a good example here, that he wasn’t just thinking, “Oh, this is interesting. I’d like to study it,” but then didn’t do anything. He had to try to find these teachings. He took a big, long journey, he got there, and the teacher was no longer alive, so he asked, “Who can I get these teachings from?” He was told Geshe Sharawa, another Kadampa Geshe, would be a source. Then, Geshe Chekawa went and found Geshe Sharawa, but Geshe Sharawa didn’t want to teach him at first – a long story that we don’t have time to go into – but eventually, Geshe Sharawa told him where the teachings came from, the lineage. Geshe Chekawa wanted to not just think, “Maybe somebody just made it up. But that doesn’t matter, it sounds nice,” but he wanted to know that it was authentic. So Geshe Sharawa showed him in a text by Nagarjuna, The Precious Garland, that that was where this teaching of “Give the victory to others and accept the defeat on oneself” came from.
Geshe Chekawa was then convinced that this was an authentic teaching going back to India and back to the Buddha. Again, this teaches us a very important lesson, that there may be teachings available that sound very attractive and somebody is advertising them as teachings of the Buddha, but unless we are really sure that they are authentic – the actual teachings of the Buddha and found in the great texts – we need to be careful. Don’t just go for something because it’s attractive.
This shows us the preciousness of the bodhichitta teachings and the teachings on changing our attitudes about self and others, and cleansing these attitudes, how these great masters considered it so incredibly precious that they underwent so many hardships to actually get these teachings. Nowadays, things are very easily available. Sometimes, because of that, we tend to trivialize the teachings, and that really causes us not to take them seriously, not to respect them and so not to really apply ourselves. It’s for this reason that the texts are often written in a style that is very cryptic, with only a few words, and really difficult to understand from just reading the texts. They’re filled with words like “this” and “that,” and most of us have no idea really what they are referring to.
I have trained and worked for nine years as a translator for my main teacher, Serkong Rinpoche. He saw my rather arrogant attitude that I was a bit critical of the style of these texts, that the authors did not write them clearly, and they wrote with so many this’s and that’s. He scolded me, saying, “Don’t be so arrogant to think that these great masters like Nagarjuna couldn’t write clearly and that they were stupid, bad writers, and so on. That’s really arrogant. If they wanted to write clearly, they would have. Obviously, they wrote this way on purpose.”
Serkong Rinpoche explained that the great masters wrote the texts like that so that, if we wanted to understand them and practice, we had to put in a tremendous amount of work and effort to get the explanation for them. Furthermore, it weeded out disciples who weren’t so serious, and even when we’re explaining it, he said, the first time we explain, we don’t explain very clearly. Because again, then many people will leave and say, “That’s enough!” However, those who are really serious will ask for more and go deeper and put in all the work and effort.
Of course, I’m a bad disciple; I don’t do that. I like to try to make things clearer for people, at least to make understanding them a little bit easier. Nevertheless, this is necessary – to put in the work in order to actually get the teachings and get clarity on the teachings; otherwise, we don’t develop our character. Dharma study is not just a matter of getting information.
We really do live in the age of degeneration. In many places, we have Dharma centers that need to get money from many people coming; otherwise, they can’t pay the rent and the expenses, and so on. They don’t want to scare away people. That really is a sign of an age of degeneration, isn’t it?
Anyway, Geshe Chekawa then spent six years, according to one account, studying with Geshe Sharawa and practicing and meditating to try to actually internalize and realize these very difficult advanced teachings on cleansing our attitudes. Now, Geshe Chekawa was no beginner and no dummy when he went there, and so it took him six years – another account says fourteen years – of working on bodhichitta. Then, he wrote this text that we will be studying, and he taught it to a number of his disciples, but particularly to one master Lhadingpa, who taught it to Togme Zangpo. Togme Zangpo is the author of Thirty-Seven Bodhisattva Practices, which is taught very extensively in the West. He also wrote a very wonderful commentary on Shantideva’s Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior.
From this master Lhadingpa, there were other lineages as well, and eventually this Seven Point Mind Training text went to all the different schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and eventually, came down to Tsongkhapa, then down in the Gelug tradition, and its contents became incorporated into many different texts. What is very confusing is that in all these different lam-rim texts and in the Lama Chopa (The Guru Puja) and so on, there are slightly different versions of the text – these seven points. Pabongka Rinpoche, who was a master in the early half of the 20th century, looking at all the versions, made what he considered a standard text, but only taken as standard in the Gelugpa tradition, of course. I mention this because from all these various versions, there are many texts, at least the ones translated into English, and so when we look at them, a lot of them are this Pabongka edition, but there are many others as well. So, don’t be confused. Most of these versions are not adding anything that seems inappropriate. Because often what happens is that somebody gives an oral commentary, and we get a little bit confused about what’s actually in the text and what the lama is explaining from an oral tradition. Things get added or changed around in their order and so on.
The version that I’ll follow is the one that Serkong Rinpoche always used to teach, which is one of the oldest versions of the text. It is the text that is from Togme Zangpo, actually going way, way back to – the dates of Togme Zangpo are not so terribly clear – but something like the 13th century. I’m mentioning this because I know you have the Spanish translation of the text, a Spanish translation of the Pabongka version. That is not the version that I’m going to teach, so there are slight differences. I’m sure Serkong Rinpoche had a very strong reason for why he always taught this version, but I never asked him, actually. I was never aware at that time that there were other versions. However, if he was good enough to be the teacher of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, that’s good enough, no question about that.
I am giving all this history and detail not just to tell you stories, but because I think that all of this helps us to approach this material, because this material is actually incredibly advanced and difficult. We should definitely not trivialize these teachings and also not get discouraged by them. Because, as we listen to the teachings on cleansing our attitudes, for many of us, we’re going to think, “Come on, this is impossible to really do!” However, there are certain aspects of these teachings that are more accessible than others, and so we try to put in practice what we are ready to practice, not pretending to take on more advanced practices that we are not emotionally ready for. We need to have really digested the basic teachings, and not just know them but really feel them on an emotional level. This is saying that if we really want to train and cleanse our attitudes, there are some very drastic ways of doing this, and if we are not emotionally prepared to do them, it can be damaging if we try to do some of them before we’re emotionally mature enough to do them.
Nevertheless, as I said, not all the points are so strong, but many of the points within this teaching are. When we receive the teachings, then what they can do, perhaps, is inspire us. This is real bodhisattva training. It’s really how we become a bodhisattva, how we develop ourselves on the bodhisattva path. If this is seriously what we really want to do, we seriously want to reach enlightenment and benefit all others, well this is what we can aspire toward, having some idea of what’s lying ahead and not being naive about it. We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that the path to enlightenment is so nice, and we’ll go on a nice Disneyland trip to enlightenment, thinking that “All the Buddha lands are so pretty, and everybody is so loving and kind” – like that. Let’s not be children about it. It requires great courage to follow the bodhisattva path; we will see that a little bit here.