Recognise beings as your mother, remember their kindness, wish to repay it

Lay the first three links of the sevenfold instruction: see others as having once cared for you, recall that care, and let the wish to repay it arise.

Pourquoi ça marche

The sevenfold cause-and-effect instruction, which Geshe Lhundub Sopa’s commentary on Tsongkhapa traces to Atiśa and the Kadampa lineage, builds bodhicitta as a chain in which each attitude grows out of the one before. Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo states its first three links directly: recognise beings as your past mothers, recall their kindness, and develop the wish to repay it. Within the tradition’s belief in beginningless rebirth, every being has at some point been one’s mother. The emotional lever is familiar: gratitude for care received tends to produce a wish to give back. The practice uses that lever to turn strangers and rivals into people one owes something to.

Comment faire

1. Bring to mind a specific person who cared for you when you could not care for yourself, whether your mother or anyone who played that role, and recall concrete acts of care.
2. Let the gratitude be felt, and notice the natural wish to repay it.
3. Then bring to mind a neutral stranger and consider, in the tradition’s terms, that they too have at some time been that caring one to you; or, in your own terms, that someone once cared for them in this way.
4. Let the same three movements arise toward them: recognition, remembering kindness, wishing to repay.
5. Extend gradually to someone you find difficult, going only as far as the feeling stays genuine.

Données probantes

Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo’s commentary on The Essence of Nectar gives the steps in a single sentence. Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö’s Sweet Nectar of the Supreme Vehicle and Trulshik Rinpoche’s Advice for Tenzin Jamchen also include recognising beings as one’s mother. The FPMT description of Geshe Sopa’s commentary on the Lamrim Chenmo describes the method as the “sevenfold cause and effect personal instructions,” based on Atiśa and the Kadampa lineage. It has not been studied as a sequence. (anecdotal)

The step rests on belief in rebirth, which not every reader shares. It can also land painfully for someone whose own mother’s care was absent or harmful. Starting from whoever did care for you is our adaptation, not the text’s. A note to Pearcey’s translation of Patrul Rinpoche records Alak Zenkar Rinpoche’s warning about this step: reasoned the wrong way, the thought that all beings have been one’s parents can turn into the conclusion that all beings have harmed one, and so are enemies.

Sources

• Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo. A Few Words of Commentary to Clarify The Essence of Nectar: Graduated Stages of the Path — Advice for Renunciant Meditators, trans. Sean Price, revised by Adam Pearcey (Shechen Translations, 2021). 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.)
• Tsong-kha-pa. The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo), Vol. 2, trans. the Lamrim Chenmo Translation Committee; ed. Joshua W. C. Cutler and Guy Newland. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.
• Trulshik Rinpoche. Advice for Tenzin Jamchen (a short instruction on relative and absolute bodhicitta), trans. Adam Pearcey (2018). Lotsawa House.

Erreur fréquente

Forcing the “mother” image when it does not carry warmth for you, and then concluding the whole method is closed to you. The step works through remembered care, not through the word “mother.”