B. Alan Wallace - The Art of Transforming the Mind: A Meditators Guide to the Tibetan Practice of Lojong

All of us have attitudes. Some of them accord with reality and serve us well throughout the course of our lives. Others are out of alignment with reality, and they cause us unnecessary problems. Tibetan Buddhist practice isnt just sitting in silent meditation; its developing fresh attitudes that align our minds with reality. Attitudes need adjusting, just like a spinal column that has been knocked out of alignment. Among the many types of practices in Tibetan Buddhism, in this book I will explain a type of mental training Tibetans call lojong, which is designed to shift our attitudes so that our minds become pure wellsprings of joy instead of murky pools of problems, anxieties, fleeting pleasures, frustrations, hopes, and fears. The Tibetan word lojong is made up of two parts: lo means attitude, mind, intelligence, and perspective; and jong means to train, purify, remedy, and clear away. So the word lojong could literally be translated as attitudinal training, but Ill stick with the more common translation of mind-training.

Over the past millennium, Tibetan lamas have devised many lojongs, but the most widely taught and practiced of all lojongs in the Tibetan language was one based on the teachings of an Indian Buddhist sage named Atisha (9821054), whose life spanned the end of the first millennium of the Common Era and the beginning of the second. Atisha brought to Tibet an oral tradition of lojong teachings that was based on instructions that had been passed down to him through the lineage of the Indian Buddhist teachers Maitriyogin, Dharmarakshita, and Serlingpa. This oral tradition may represent the earliest such practice that was explicitly called a lojong, and it is probably the most widely practiced in the whole of Tibetan Buddhism. This training was initially given only as an oral instruction for those students who were deemed sufficiently intelligent and highly enough motivated to make good use of it. Only about a century after Atishas death was this secret training written down and made more widely available in monasteries and hermitages, Tibets unique kinds of attitudinal correction facility. This delay probably accounts for the minor variations in the different versions of the text we have today.

For centuries we in the West have wondered whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. If there are highly advanced, intelligent beings out there, what might they have to teach us? What have they learned that we have not? Along similar lines we can ask: Is there intelligent life on our planet outside of our Euro-American civilization? Of course that sounds like a dumb question, but its still worth asking, since there still persists an attitude in our society that we know more about everything than any previous generation and more than any other, less developed society today. It takes quite an ethnocentric leap of faith to swallow that, but many people seem to manage it. Indian civilization a thousand years ago, during the time of Atisha, had evolved with very little influence from European civilization; and Tibetan civilization, tracing back more than two millennia, was hardly influenced by the West until the mid-twentieth century. Ironically, Tibetans first major encounter with Western thought occurred due to the invasion of their homeland by the Chinese Communists in 1949, who forced upon them the economic doctrine of Marxism and scientific materialism.