Carry love and compassion into the superior intention
Complete the sevenfold chain: from love and compassion, take personal responsibility for others’ welfare, and from that the wish to awaken arises.
Why it works
Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo continues the chain. Wishing beings happiness is love; wishing them free of suffering is compassion; accepting responsibility for actually bringing this about is the noble or superior intention. Seeing that full awakening is what would make that responsibility possible to fulfil is the seventh link, bodhicitta itself. The step that marks this method off from loving-kindness or compassion practice is the sixth. It turns a wish into “I will see to it,” and then recognises that carrying that out requires awakening. The aspiration arises as the effect of the attitudes before it, which is why the instruction is called cause and effect.
How to do it
- Begin from the gratitude and the wish to repay that the first three steps brought up.
- Let it ripen into love, wishing that person happiness, and into compassion, wishing them free from suffering. Each of these has its own page if you want to train them in depth.
- Then ask honestly: am I willing to take responsibility for this, not only to wish it? Notice what in you agrees and what resists.
- Consider how limited your present ability to help actually is, and let the wish arise to become someone fully able to help.
- Rest in that wish, the seventh step, for a few breaths, and close by dedicating the session.
Evidence
The four later steps are named in Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo’s commentary on The Essence of Nectar. Geshe Sopa’s commentary on the Lamrim Chenmo is described in FPMT’s listing as treating this sevenfold method and the exchange of self and other as the two ways to develop bodhicitta. Jazaieri and colleagues’ randomised trial of Compassion Cultivation Training, a secular nine-week programme with Thupten Jinpa among its authors, found significant self-reported gains in compassion for others, receiving compassion and self-compassion against a waitlist (60 trained, 40 waitlisted). More formal meditation was associated with more compassion for others. The trial tested that programme, not the sevenfold chain. (anecdotal)
The trial used self-report measures and a waitlist control, so it cannot separate the training from expectation. Whether a secular programme’s effects carry over to a practice framed around buddhahood is not known.
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.
- Jazaieri, H., Jinpa, G. T., McGonigal, K., Rosenberg, E. L., Finkelstein, J., Simon-Thomas, E., Cullen, M., Doty, J. R., Gross, J. J., & Goldin, P. R. (2013). Enhancing compassion: A randomized controlled trial of a compassion cultivation training program. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14(4), 1113–1126.
Common mistake
Skipping from compassion straight to “may I become a buddha for all beings” without the superior intention. The aspiration then floats free of any felt responsibility. In the text, the willingness to take the burden on is what gives the final wish its weight.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Bodhicitta: The Awakening Mind and How It Is Cultivated
- Tell the wish to go from setting out on the journey
Notice whether your bodhicitta is still a wish (aspiring) or has become a way of acting (engaging), and let one grow into the other.
- Hold relative and ultimate bodhicitta together
Pair the heartfelt wish to benefit beings with the recognition that nothing, including that wish, is as solid as it seems.
- 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.
- Equalise yourself and others
See plainly that everyone, like you, wants happiness and does not want suffering, so there is no principled reason to put yourself first.
- 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.
- Recite the refuge and bodhicitta aspiration
Begin practice, and your day, by voicing the aspiration in a short traditional verse, so the intention is renewed rather than assumed.
- Dedicate whatever good came of it
Close each session, or each day, by turning whatever was good in it toward the awakening and welfare of all beings.
- Work with “who am I to aspire to this?”
When the aspiration feels absurdly too big for someone like you, treat that feeling itself as part of the practice rather than a verdict.
Related concepts
- Tonglen: The Tibetan Practice of Taking and Sending
Moving toward suffering on the breath — Tibetan Buddhism’s radical compassion practice
- Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training
The 59 slogans and their practical application to everyday adversity and compassion
- Metta Bhavana: The Practice of Loving-Kindness
Systematic cultivation of goodwill toward self, others, and all beings
- Karuṇā: Compassion Meditation in the Theravāda Tradition
The second divine abiding, practised the way the Theravāda commentaries lay it out
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