Exchange yourself and others through envy, rivalry and pride

Imaginatively take another person’s position and look back at yourself from there, until self-cherishing loosens its grip.

Pourquoi ça marche

Śāntideva writes that without giving one’s own happiness in exchange for others’ suffering, neither awakening nor real joy is possible (8.131). His method (8.140) is to take the standpoint of someone below, equal to or above oneself and, from there, feel envy, rivalry or pride toward one’s own self. Patrul Rinpoche describes the result. Coming out of the meditation, one feels how painful it is to be on the receiving end of those attitudes, and one’s own envy, rivalry or arrogance subsides. The philosopher Nicolas Bommarito reads the exercise as a way to change one’s basic orientation to self and others by forcing one to take other people’s experience seriously.

Comment faire

1. Choose someone of lower status or fewer advantages than you. Imagine being them, looking at your actual self, and let their envy of you be felt from the inside.
2. Come out of the role and notice what you now feel about your own envy of others.
3. Choose someone of roughly equal standing. Imagine being them and regarding your actual self as a rival, from every angle, then come out and notice.
4. Choose someone above you. Imagine being them looking down on your actual self with pride, then come out and notice how arrogance lands on its receiver.
5. If the full exercise is too much, recite a short exchange verse instead, such as the one Patrul quotes from Bodhicaryāvatāra 10.56, and reflect on its meaning.

Données probantes

The verses (Bodhicaryāvatāra 8.131, 8.140, 10.56) and the three-part envy, rivalry and pride meditation are given in Patrul Rinpoche’s Brightly Shining Sun. FPMT’s description of Geshe Sopa’s Lamrim Chenmo commentary names the “training to exchange self and other,” based on Śāntideva, as the second of the two bodhicitta methods. Bommarito’s chapter describes it as imagining the self from different points of view and cultivating responses from those perspectives. It works through perspective-taking, and no outcome study of this meditation was found. (mechanistic)

This is distinct from tonglen, the breath-based giving and taking of the lojong tradition, which has its own page. Patrul offers the verse recitation as a brief alternative, so the full exercise is not the only form.

Sources

• Patrul Rinpoche. The Brightly Shining Sun: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditating on the Bodhicaryāvatāra, trans. Adam Pearcey (2004; revised 2007 and 2019). Lotsawa House.
• Sopa, G. L., with Newman, B. (2008). Steps on the Path to Enlightenment, Vol. 3: The Way of the Bodhisattva — A Commentary on Tsongkhapa’s Lamrim Chenmo. Boston: Wisdom Publications. (Publisher description, FPMT Foundation Store.)
• Bommarito, N. (2020). Exchanging self and other. In Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Erreur fréquente

Using the imagined envy or contempt as more fuel for self-criticism (“see, they’re right to look down on me”). The exercise is meant to show how these attitudes hurt their target, so that you stop aiming them at others, not to confirm a low view of yourself.