I've reopened my Lojong practice for lent. I started four years ago during the pandemic and made my own slogan cards. The idea was that I then even would add comments and explanations but that never happened. This year I decided to go back to Lojong. To look at a new slogan every day and collect various interpretations in order to understand them. That is how I stumbled upon your blog. So thank you for your thoughts and explanations. I appreciate them.
When I read about "offering to the döns", I came to think of Milarepa's demons and a quote from Pema Chödrön that has been important to me for many years: Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. We shouldn't ignore or suppress our hangups. We should ask them what they have to teach us.
Aaaah! I had the line "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know" engraved on my old tablet (which I was mostly using to listen to Dharma talks at the time). It's a good one, for sure.
I mention the books I referenced often in my own Lojong commentaries, but to make it easier, my key resources over the years I took to write these were:
'The Places that Scare You' by Ani Pema
'Training in Compassion' by Norman Fischer
'Universal Compassion' by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (which has a slightly different order to what we often encounter)
'Enlightened Courage' by Dilgo Khyentse
'The Practice of Lojong' by Traleg Kyabgon
And Judy Leif's commentary published online by Tricycle.
I found Traleg Kyabgon's the most accessible and relatable.
Would love to know what other resources you have found!
Thank you. Pema Chödrön's and Judy Lief's commentaries are known to me. I also have an article by Norman Fischer (Life is Tough. Here Are Six Ways to Deal With It - Lion's Roar), where he takes up six slogans, but with different wordings. For instance, number 14 ("Seeing confusion as the four kayas is unsurpassable shunyata protection") is called "See Confusion as Buddha and Practice Emptiness".
I don't know the titles by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Dilgo Khyentse and Traleg Kyabgon you mention, so thank you for that information.
I really think it helps to have different explanations and commentaries, because translation is such a tricky field, be it when it comes to translate certain words and concepts or whole passages. You mention in one of your comments "Emptiness". That word alone must have caused a lot of confusion. Or take "Suffering", which most often doesn't describe what we would call suffering. "Suffering" covers just as much disappointment and boredom as reaction to physical or mental pain. So it has been suggested to just say dukkha instead of suffering. That would be easier, of course.
Still, I am not quite sure whether keeping the original word would be of help. There is a risk of having to deal with impenetrable sentences, like the slogan about the kayas and the shunyata protection. I think, trying to come to some sort of equivalent to the original term is actually a good reason to really dive into the texts and grapple with them.
So, every interpretation of the slogans (and of course other important texts) is welcome.
Yes, exactly! Translator's prerogative can have such an influence. 'Emptiness', for example, is a term I avoid now, instead opting for 'fullness' or 'boundlessness' or 'Interconnected & interrelated', or Thich Naht Hanh's very clever 'Interbeing'.
I have noticed that more teachers are using the term dukkha instead of suffering in recent years, and unpacking how much more dukkha encompasses than 'suffering'. Like, dukkha as the combination of knowing that illness, old age and death are inevitable on top of the way we cling to ideas about how things should feel on top of how we tend to beat ourselves up if we feel not okay on top of the chaos of not knowing what the next moment will bring. Dukkha is so MUCH. The only thing that makes me wary there, is when a Pali or Sanskrit word becomes a Buddhist buzzword and doesn't get unpacked, so new folks to a space are left behind, like, "You don't know what dukkha is?!" *laughs*
The different translations are fascinating because obviously every teacher brings their own interpretation and world view and none of the translations are exactly the same. Both Geshe Kelsang Gyatso and Dilgo Khyentse's commentaries are very obviously rooted in monastic practice, while all the others apply more to lay practitioners, presumably white and relatively comfortably off and almost always assumed American too. This awareness helped me to work with the slogans on a deeply personal level, rather than getting too in my head about "right answers." As a friend of mine in a Zen tradition said, Lojong slogans are probably the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of Koan practice. You can visit them again and again and will always find something new and different because you are changed every time you come back to them.
I am not on a very advanced level in my studies of Buddhism. I have read some texts but not all of the core texts. For me it more or less started with Pema Chödrön and shenpa (and yes, I don't have a pithy translation for that concept 😉). I love her hands-on approach and her humor. I have read her books and listened to her talks and for me she is the right teacher. What I am looking for in my studies is advice on how to live my life. The older I get, and I am getting older, the more convinced I am that we have to constantly prepare ourselves for death.
When I read something or listen to a talk I always checking whether it resonates with me. Does it make sense for me? And the lojong slogans make sense even though they are counter-intuitive. After having spent some years trying to follow the advice contained in the slogans, I have realized a shift in myself. I am changing.
I am also fascinated by quantum physics, although of course I don't understand how the quantum world is supposed to work. One of the leading scientists behind the theory (I forgot who) once said something like: "Those who talk about quantum theory haven't understood it". That is a very Buddhist statement. What fascinates me is of course the wave-particle duality. It is not either-or, it is both. And that, I think, fits into the Heart Sutra "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form". If you use "Boundlessness" instead of "Emptiness", you get a wave. "Form" would then be "The bounded". And of course, we are both.
These are the kinds of thoughts I ponder. And every time I read a new translation or interpretation of a Buddhist term, it gets me thinking.
At the Upaya Zen Centre they use the translation of the Heart Sutra by Kazuaki Tanahashi, which replaces 'emptiness' with boundlessness. It was where I first encountered a shift from emptiness and yeah, it gets at the both/and.
If you are open to recommendations, 'The Way of Tenderness' by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is one of the most powerful and transformative texts I've ever read on the both/and of the relative and the ultimate. She was the first teacher I encountered who didn't lift up the ultimate as superior to the relative, but rather, in relationship to it and necessary to understand it.
And yes, Ani Pema's teachings are so accessible in so many ways. If you haven't gotten to it yet, her commentary on Shantideva's Bodhicharyavatara is very good - 'No Time To Lose' is the book, but there are many collected talks on the text too. I found it powerfully complimentary to the Lojong practice.
I've reopened my Lojong practice for lent. I started four years ago during the pandemic and made my own slogan cards. The idea was that I then even would add comments and explanations but that never happened. This year I decided to go back to Lojong. To look at a new slogan every day and collect various interpretations in order to understand them. That is how I stumbled upon your blog. So thank you for your thoughts and explanations. I appreciate them.
When I read about "offering to the döns", I came to think of Milarepa's demons and a quote from Pema Chödrön that has been important to me for many years: Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. We shouldn't ignore or suppress our hangups. We should ask them what they have to teach us.
Aaaah! I had the line "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know" engraved on my old tablet (which I was mostly using to listen to Dharma talks at the time). It's a good one, for sure.
I mention the books I referenced often in my own Lojong commentaries, but to make it easier, my key resources over the years I took to write these were:
'The Places that Scare You' by Ani Pema
'Training in Compassion' by Norman Fischer
'Universal Compassion' by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (which has a slightly different order to what we often encounter)
'Enlightened Courage' by Dilgo Khyentse
'The Practice of Lojong' by Traleg Kyabgon
And Judy Leif's commentary published online by Tricycle.
I found Traleg Kyabgon's the most accessible and relatable.
Would love to know what other resources you have found!
Thank you. Pema Chödrön's and Judy Lief's commentaries are known to me. I also have an article by Norman Fischer (Life is Tough. Here Are Six Ways to Deal With It - Lion's Roar), where he takes up six slogans, but with different wordings. For instance, number 14 ("Seeing confusion as the four kayas is unsurpassable shunyata protection") is called "See Confusion as Buddha and Practice Emptiness".
I don't know the titles by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Dilgo Khyentse and Traleg Kyabgon you mention, so thank you for that information.
I really think it helps to have different explanations and commentaries, because translation is such a tricky field, be it when it comes to translate certain words and concepts or whole passages. You mention in one of your comments "Emptiness". That word alone must have caused a lot of confusion. Or take "Suffering", which most often doesn't describe what we would call suffering. "Suffering" covers just as much disappointment and boredom as reaction to physical or mental pain. So it has been suggested to just say dukkha instead of suffering. That would be easier, of course.
Still, I am not quite sure whether keeping the original word would be of help. There is a risk of having to deal with impenetrable sentences, like the slogan about the kayas and the shunyata protection. I think, trying to come to some sort of equivalent to the original term is actually a good reason to really dive into the texts and grapple with them.
So, every interpretation of the slogans (and of course other important texts) is welcome.
Yes, exactly! Translator's prerogative can have such an influence. 'Emptiness', for example, is a term I avoid now, instead opting for 'fullness' or 'boundlessness' or 'Interconnected & interrelated', or Thich Naht Hanh's very clever 'Interbeing'.
I have noticed that more teachers are using the term dukkha instead of suffering in recent years, and unpacking how much more dukkha encompasses than 'suffering'. Like, dukkha as the combination of knowing that illness, old age and death are inevitable on top of the way we cling to ideas about how things should feel on top of how we tend to beat ourselves up if we feel not okay on top of the chaos of not knowing what the next moment will bring. Dukkha is so MUCH. The only thing that makes me wary there, is when a Pali or Sanskrit word becomes a Buddhist buzzword and doesn't get unpacked, so new folks to a space are left behind, like, "You don't know what dukkha is?!" *laughs*
The different translations are fascinating because obviously every teacher brings their own interpretation and world view and none of the translations are exactly the same. Both Geshe Kelsang Gyatso and Dilgo Khyentse's commentaries are very obviously rooted in monastic practice, while all the others apply more to lay practitioners, presumably white and relatively comfortably off and almost always assumed American too. This awareness helped me to work with the slogans on a deeply personal level, rather than getting too in my head about "right answers." As a friend of mine in a Zen tradition said, Lojong slogans are probably the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of Koan practice. You can visit them again and again and will always find something new and different because you are changed every time you come back to them.
I am not on a very advanced level in my studies of Buddhism. I have read some texts but not all of the core texts. For me it more or less started with Pema Chödrön and shenpa (and yes, I don't have a pithy translation for that concept 😉). I love her hands-on approach and her humor. I have read her books and listened to her talks and for me she is the right teacher. What I am looking for in my studies is advice on how to live my life. The older I get, and I am getting older, the more convinced I am that we have to constantly prepare ourselves for death.
When I read something or listen to a talk I always checking whether it resonates with me. Does it make sense for me? And the lojong slogans make sense even though they are counter-intuitive. After having spent some years trying to follow the advice contained in the slogans, I have realized a shift in myself. I am changing.
I am also fascinated by quantum physics, although of course I don't understand how the quantum world is supposed to work. One of the leading scientists behind the theory (I forgot who) once said something like: "Those who talk about quantum theory haven't understood it". That is a very Buddhist statement. What fascinates me is of course the wave-particle duality. It is not either-or, it is both. And that, I think, fits into the Heart Sutra "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form". If you use "Boundlessness" instead of "Emptiness", you get a wave. "Form" would then be "The bounded". And of course, we are both.
These are the kinds of thoughts I ponder. And every time I read a new translation or interpretation of a Buddhist term, it gets me thinking.
At the Upaya Zen Centre they use the translation of the Heart Sutra by Kazuaki Tanahashi, which replaces 'emptiness' with boundlessness. It was where I first encountered a shift from emptiness and yeah, it gets at the both/and.
If you are open to recommendations, 'The Way of Tenderness' by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel is one of the most powerful and transformative texts I've ever read on the both/and of the relative and the ultimate. She was the first teacher I encountered who didn't lift up the ultimate as superior to the relative, but rather, in relationship to it and necessary to understand it.
And yes, Ani Pema's teachings are so accessible in so many ways. If you haven't gotten to it yet, her commentary on Shantideva's Bodhicharyavatara is very good - 'No Time To Lose' is the book, but there are many collected talks on the text too. I found it powerfully complimentary to the Lojong practice.