Tibetan Buddhist Lamrim: Taking (aka Tonglen)
Tonglen meditation involves visualizing the suffering of others as dark smoke absorbed into the heart, where it is purified and transformed into light, then radiated outward.
In Buddhist psychology, there are three fundamental reactions to the experience of any phenomenon.
- Whenever we encounter something pleasant, we tend to want more of it, which leads to the suffering of attachment.
- Whenever we encounter something neutral, we often fail to notice it or consider it unimportant, which leads to the suffering of ignorance or indifference.
- And Whenever we encounter something unpleasant, we tend to want less of it, push it away, and develop an aversion, which leads to the suffering of anger.
If one were to examine their day to day experiences of objects, they would find a small percentage is pleasant, far more are neutral, and the largest share is actually unpleasant. It isn’t necessarily that every encounter is unpleasant, but even those experiences that are pleasant or neutral can become unpleasant due to attachment and ignorance which often accompanies them.
