Q: As a lay practitioner of meditation, shall I begin Tonglen practice?
A: Yes, you can do all the Tonglen practice and you should not worry about “Oh, if I get sick” or “If I will be unwell because I do tonglen practice”, don’t. So just try to do Tonglen practice.
If you can really take other people’s sickness, I am sure there will be different investors who will invest on you right away, due to all the physical health issues going on in this world, for the centuries and centuries. So it doesn’t work. So therefore don’t worry in that direction. Just try to, in Tonglen practice, it’s more to do with our self. Visualization, it is meant for all the sentient beings. But in the reality, it helps ourselves to minimize the illusion of our own pride and our own ignorance, and that is the purpose of Tonglen practice.
Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezig, he said, he appeared in the clear vision of one of the Shangpa lineage master and that Shangpa master was, his name is Kyergangpa. So in his vision that Avalokiteshvara appeared, he said “Continue to practice compassion, and then all the negativities of the self-righteousness will dissolve by itself overtime”.
So what is happening in this world, and our self, in this very moment, is that we try to say “Oh I am very selfish person, I’m very negative, and I want to dissolve my selfishness, selfishness, selfishness…” And we never try to practice it. We always say “I want to dissolve my selfishness”, but we have to understand what is the opposite of the selfishness. The opposite of selfishness is Tonglen practice, compassion practice.
So Tonglen practice, compassion practice, in the visualization it may seem to all the sentient beings, but in a reality, is to do, is to improve ourselves and is for personal development, to improve ourself. By the result of the Tonglen practice, there’s less “dak zin“, there’s less self-attachment. And due to the less attachment, and then there’s a less illusion. And due to the less illusion, and there’s less strength influencing into our mind.
Kalu Rinpoche
FB Livestream – 17 January 2020
To be continued…
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