1

Cultures of Buddhist Meditation Panel, AAR 2018

Julia Stenzel, Assistant Professor at Kathmandu University
[email protected]

The Transformation of Compassion Meditation

Secular compassion training is a recent phenomenon in North America. It emerged during the
past decade, following in the footsteps of secular mindfulness programs such as MBSR. The
popularity of compassion training lies on two pillars: Firstly, a large range of research findings
from the field of neuroscience and neurobiology ascertain various health benefits of being
compassionate and acknowledge that compassion is an innate element of human nature.
Secondly, the Dalai Lama is acting as a trusted and influential spokesperson for compassion. He
placed it at the heart of his “secular ethics.” In sum, compassion has been drawn out of the realm
of religion and placed squarely in the field of science, psychology and secular life.

The secular programs on the market, most importantly CCT (Compassion Cultivation Training)
developed at Stanford University, and CBCT (Cognitive Based Compassion Training) developed
at Emory, have chosen the Buddhism-derived contemplative practice of tonglen as their formal
contemplative training, which they combine with other elements, such as interactive exercises,
group discussions, etc.

The Tibetan word tonglen literally means “giving and taking” and has come to be associated
with a visualization-aspiration practice of imaginatively sending happiness to recipients, and
voluntarily taking on their suffering. It is the core practice of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of
Lojong (Tibetan for Mind Training) which aims at generating bodhicitta. Secular programs, in
contrast, use tonglen for generating compassion.

What does it mean to secularize a contemplative practice, derived from a Mahāyāna Buddhist
context and employ it in contemporary North America? It seems to imply that meditation
techniques are universally applicable, across historical, geographical, and cultural divides. But is
that really so?
 2

In this paper, I give a brief survey of the trajectory of tonglen through history, from its Mahāyāna
origins to its arrival in the health-conscious self-help landscape of North America, thereby
demonstrating the malleability of a meditation that has been adapted to serve drastically different
purposes. My aim is not to critique the secularization project, as several other scholars have
already done,1 but to question the role of the context that surrounds a practice – that is, the role
of a “compassion culture” rather than the mere meditation technique.

Tracing the History of Tonglen

The contemplative practice tonglen was created by Buddhist adepts of the Mind Training
tradition that emerged in 11th century Tibet. However, the fundamental notion of exchanging
one’s own happiness with the suffering and misfortune of others can be traced back another
thousand years to the beginnings of the Mahāyāna.2

Among the earliest sources, we find Nagarjuna’s Ratnāvalī, which expresses the idea of
exchanging karmic maturation. Verse 484 reads: “May their unwholesome deeds ripen upon
me, and all my virtues ripen upon them.”

The most prominent source however is the 7th century Bodhicaryāvatāra by Śāntideva, with his
instructions on exchanging self and others.3 This meditation is presented in Chapter Eight on
Meditation as the supreme method for cultivating bodhicitta. Chapter Eight is an advanced
chapter, surpassed only by the teaching of the perfection of wisdom in Chapter Nine.

Śāntideva’s meditation instructions reveal a highly demanding and complex practice. Upon close
reading, Śāntideva presents three types of exchanging self and other: a conceptual, an evaluative,
and an objective exchange.

The first refers to the radical transformation of self-identification. Verse 115 reads:

1
Robert Sharf 2015, Anne Gleig 2018, Candy Gunther-Brown, Jane Compson 2017
2
Sangye Gompa, 14th century, see Mind Training The Great Collection, transl Thupten Jinpa.
3
(parātma-parivartanā).
 3

Just as in connection with this form, devoid of self (svabhāva)

My sense of “I” arose through strong habituation.
Why should the thought of “I”
Through habit, not arise related to another?”4

This contemplation aims at developing an understanding of the non-duality of self and other.
Self-identification is replaced by selflessness – with all its ethical implications.

The second is an evaluative exchange, that is, the reversal of emotional appraisal by means of
cognitive perspective taking. Self-cherishing is exchanged for cherishing others. Others should
be cherished in the same way, or even more, than oneself. Śāntideva justifies denigrating the self
by blaming it as the culprit for all misery in a human life.

The third type is an exchange of spiritual goods. This means the mere exchange of one’s
happiness with the suffering of others.

Although Tibetan masters of the Mind Training tradition credited Śāntideva’s instructions of
equalizing and exchange as their principle source of inspiration, they actually adopted only the
third type of exchange to create their own contemplative practice. Meditators start by recalling
their mother’s kindness as well as her suffering, with the aim of stimulating an emotional
experience in the mind, consisting of empathy, caring concern, gratitude and a sense of
responsibility. With this emotional stimulation, meditators practice tonglen by imaginatively
sending their own happiness to the mother in the form of white light, and in return accepting the
burden of her suffering, symbolized by black smoke. Based on the Buddhist belief that just like
the mother of this life, all beings have shown motherly care throughout infinite lifetimes,
meditators expand the scope of the exercise infinitely, toward all sentient beings. This meditation
is practiced with a dualistic mind set. In contrast to Śāntideva’s instructions, it does not imply
that meditators deconstruct dualistic thinking or their ontological viewpoint of a substantially
existing self.

4
Translation Padmakara “The Way of the Bodhisattva”, Ch 8, 115.
 4

Finally, another usage of tonglen should be mentioned: Tsongkhapa, the 14th century founder of
the influential Gelug School of Tibetan Buddhism, integrated the meditation of tonglen in his
Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lam-rim chen-mo). However, he
presents it as a mere preparation for generating bodhicitta, to be practiced even before taking the
bodhisattva vow. Unlike Śāntideva, who instructs the exchange of self and other as a practice for
advanced bodhisattvas, as a means to dissolve the dualistic dichotomy, Tsongkhapa re-interprets
it as a meditation that is accessible to the most novice of Mahāyāna practitioners. While
Śāntideva urges his followers to examine the ultimate nature of reality, both Lojong and Lamrim
dissociate the practice from the difficult subject of emptiness or ultimate reality.

With this survey I have given a brief insight into how the contemplative practice technique of
exchanging self and other has been re-interpreted and re-employed throughout Buddhist history
for very different purposes, depending on their respective contexts. In the course of these
progressive transformations, we can see an increasingly pragmatic character of the
contemplation, which has certainly helped to popularize the practice. In this view, the recent
secularization of tonglen in CBCT or CCT is not a drastic break from the tradition, but rather a
continuation of the trajectory towards a mass meditation that began in 11th century Tibet.

In secular training programs, tonglen is used as a contemplative technique for developing

compassion rather than bodhicitta, since all Buddhist ideas of liberation and awakening are
obviously eliminated in secular programs. And even the notion of compassion differs in scope
and quality from Buddhist understanding. While traditional Mahāyāna Buddhist practice aims at
generating so-called great compassion, secular training pursues a much more modest goal.
Mahāyāna great compassion (or mahā-karuṇā) is a universal type of compassion, impartially
directed at all beings in the universe, which in Buddhist thought includes animals and invisible
beings of the hell and hungry ghost realms. It also includes criminals and those who do not
appear to be in suffering at present, because they carry the seeds of future suffering. In addition,
a buddha’s great compassion is believed to be imbued with the power to actually help others.
 5

In contrast, secular compassion training is less ambitious. It promises to lead participants to re-
connect with their inborn, ordinary potential for compassion. It is advertised as a method for
benefitting first of all one’s own health, and one’s own relationships, thereby, of course, also
benefitting others.

Which conclusions can we draw from this brief historical survey of tonglen?

First of all, we see that the meditation technique can be adapted to drastically different contexts.
The technique in itself is “empty,” so to speak; it will reflect the values of the surrounding
culture.

“Culture,” as Tsai et al. (2017) define it, refers to “socially transmitted and historically derived
ideas that are instantiated in shared practices, products, and institutions.5 Cultural ideas provide
individuals with a framework for how to be a good person.”6Culture thus has an individual, and a
societal aspect.

The ideal compassion culture of a Mahāyānist is determined by the ethics of the bodhisattva
path, comprising notions of renunciation, revulsion toward samsara, the long-term aspiration for
liberation and Buddhahood, notions of buddha nature, karma, rebirth, interdependence and the
emptiness of a truly existing self, to name but the most important building blocks. It is this
philosophical foundation that provides the rationale for the extremely demanding practices of the
Bodhicaryāvatāra. Without it, it is impossible to justify the seemingly self-abnegating practices
that Śāntideva proposes. It is this compassion culture that gives the depth and strength to
Mahayana cultivation of compassion.

Many Tibetans self-identify as belonging to a compassion culture,7 as is expressed in their

national legends that trace the origins of the Tibetan people to the bodhisattva of compassion,

5
Citing Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952
6
Citing Shweder, 1991
7
Jinpa 2018
 6

Avalokiteśvara, or in the devotional belief in the Dalai Lama as being Avalokiteśvara’s

incarnation on earth. Many daily customs in Tibetan societies are related to compassion. For
instance, the utterance of the mantra of the bodhisattva of compassion, Om mani peme hung, or
the exclamation of nying-je, which literally means “compassion” are ubiquitous conventions. I
am citing these examples not for the purpose of glorifying or evaluating the actual quality of
compassion present (or not) in Tibetan societies, but simply to show that a practitioner of tonglen
in Tibetan Buddhist context has a broad range of philosophical, societal, educational, and
cultural reference points readily available for his or her training.

What then about secular compassion trainees in present day North America? They stand within a
culture that communicates a range of different and contradictory messages, from religious
inspired charity and altruism to capitalist consumerism and greedy competitiveness. The secular
program of CCT, for instance, deals with this challenge by introducing its own elements of a
compassion culture, which strongly resembles the Dalai Lama’s secular ethics.

This short paper does not allow me to explore the characteristics of compassion cultures in any
depth. However, I hope to have shown that our research of meditation techniques has to include a
wide range of factors that impact the effect of a particular meditation technique. The example of
tonglen shows that the results of a meditation cannot be derived from the bare technique, but to a
large degree from its specific meditation culture.