Mind training

Lojong (Tibetan blo sbyong, "mind training") is a Tibetan Buddhist system of short, memorable slogans designed to gradually retrain the heart away from self-centeredness and toward compassion. Buddhism is the path the Buddha ("the awakened one") taught for ending the suffering rooted in greed, hatred, and confusion. Lojong belongs to the Mahāyāna stream — the broad movement that makes the ideal of the bodhisattva, a person who seeks awakening in order to help all beings, the center of the path. Its special genius is taking that lofty ideal and packaging it into bite-sized phrases a practitioner can carry around all day.

The slogans are blunt and practical, meant to be applied especially when life goes wrong. Examples include "Drive all blames into one" (when things sour, look honestly at your own grasping rather than blaming others) and "Be grateful to everyone" (treat even difficult people as teachers of patience). The most famous practice embedded in lojong is tonglen, "giving and taking," in which one breathes in the suffering of others and breathes out one's own well-being to them — a deliberate reversal of the instinct to grab the good for oneself and push the bad away.

The heart of the whole system is cultivating bodhicitta — the "awakening mind," the compassionate wish to become awakened for the benefit of everyone. Lojong came from the Kadam tradition that grew in Tibet around the eleventh and twelfth centuries, drawing on earlier Indian teachings, and it remains widely practiced because its slogans turn ordinary irritations into raw material for kindness. It is a Tibetan development rather than a teaching of the earliest Buddhist texts.