Always abide by the three principles

Maintain your vow, don’t show off, and practise impartially with everyone — not just the people you like.

Why it works

Lojong’s three principles of practice — maintaining commitment, abandoning public virtue-signalling, and applying practice impartially — target the social distortions that corrupt transformative practice. Showing off disrupts the non-egoic orientation; selective practice (only with people you like) preserves the very attachments that produce suffering. Impartial practice trains the neurological equalising of all people’s worth in attention and care.

How to do it

1. Keep your practice mostly private; don’t use it to display virtue to others.
2. Deliberately apply compassion practice with someone you find difficult, not just someone you love.
3. Regularly review your commitments and re-affirm them — not to others but to yourself.
4. When you catch yourself showing off your practice, treat it as more material to work with.

Evidence

Research on prosocial motivation shows that extrinsic motivation (performing virtue for others) undermines intrinsic motivation and authentic prosocial behaviour. Lojong’s instruction to practise privately targets this precisely. (mechanistic)

This is a mechanistic connection between traditional teaching and motivation research; the specific impartiality instruction is contemplative wisdom not derived from experiments.

Common mistake

Applying the practice only with easy or neutral people and calling that training — the real test is impartial application, especially with difficult people.