Lamrim Teachings: Volume IV

© Thubten Chodron. For free distribution and not to be sold (see below for additional use information).

About the book

In this volume, Venerable Chodron teaches the advanced scope of the lamrim – the path of a practitioner of advanced motivation. While such persons continue to practice the paths in common with the initial and middle level practitioners, they do not stop with attaining their goals of upper rebirth and liberation, respectively.

An advanced practitioner, seeing the suffering others, cultivates bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain full awakening as a buddha in order to be of greatest benefit to all sentient beings. To achieve this goal, they mediate on equanimity and practices to develop bodhicitta: the seven point cause and result instruction and equalizing and exchanging self and others. The six far-reaching practices, ripening the minds of others, and continuing the practices of the eight-fold noble path are the activities of the advanced scope practitioner.

These ebooks contain lightly-edited transcripts of teachings given by Venerable Thubten Chodron at Dharma Friendship Foundation, Seattle, from 1991-1994.

Chapters

• Training the Mind in the Stages of the Path for an Advanced Level Practitioner
• Seven Points of Cause and Effect
• Equalizing and Exchanging Self and Others
• The Bodhisatta Vows
• Introduction to the Six Far-Reaching Attitudes
• Generosity
• Ethics
• Patience
• Joyous Effort
• Meditative Stabilization and Special Insight
• Training in Calm Abiding
• Wisdom
• Ripening the Minds of Others
• The Eightfold Noble Path

Excerpt: The Advantages of the Altruistic Intention

This is the hard sell. Whenever they talk about the advantages of something, it’s really to sell you on it. Not just to sell you on it, but to get you to value what this thing is and have a mind that is full of appreciation and optimism so that you will want to engage in that practice. If you don’t see the benefits of it, then what’s the use of putting all the energy into it? Just as we now see the benefits of making a lot of money, we have much energy to go to work. You want to make money, so you get out of bed in the morning; your wish to make money gets you out of bed in the morning. It gets you in your car and going to work even if you are exhausted. Even if you are sick you still go to work. You spend extra hours working because you see the value of money. You are not lazy in it.

When we see the advantages of something, then the joyous effort comes very spontaneously. One reason why we don’t have much joyous effort in our meditation practice, is that we may not yet know the advantages of it. Understanding the advantages of something helps. If we know the advantages then we’ll get out of bed in the morning to meditate on bodhicitta, and we will work on bodhicitta all day long without fatigue, even overtime. [Laughter.] It won’t seem such a big strain because we will see the advantages of it.

People may be quite surprised, I don’t know if everybody knows that Lama Zopa doesn’t sleep. Nobody’s ever seen him lie down. Nobody, not even his attendants, have seen him lie down. So for about forty-five minutes between like 3:30 and a quarter past four, he’ll go into a very deep meditation and his head will go like this, and then forty-five minutes later he’ll lift his head up and continue doing his prayers. He just doesn’t sleep. You know how it is that this happens? It’s by the power of the bodhicitta—his bodhicitta doesn’t get him out of bed in the morning, it gets him not to go to bed at night! [Laughter.] This is the reason why he stays up into all hours of the day and night teaching. We’re all sitting there falling asleep but he’s completely ‘on’, one hundred percent. He comes back here and talks to people until all hours, again teaching them, and then he starts his prayers very early in the morning and has this whirlwind schedule.

Also, you look at His Holiness and how he lives— whirlwind schedule, very little privacy. This is made possible by the force of the altruistic intention. These things don’t become hardships, but rather become joys. If we contemplate the advantages of the bodhicitta, then engaging in the practice becomes a joy rather than a hardship.

---

Copyright © 2015-2016 by Venerable Thubten Chodron. For free distribution. All rights reserved. For personal, noncommercial use only. This book may be printed or downloaded electronically, in whole or in part, for personal use by individuals or Buddhist groups. Permission is required to publish and distribute this book on any information storage and retrieval system, such as, but not limited to, a blog or website. To request permission to use this book in ways that are not expressly granted here, please contact communication(dot)sravasti(at)gmail(dot)com.