The Practice of Lojong: Cultivating Compassion through Training of the Mind

by Traleg Kyabgon

Shambala (2007)

The word lojong is Tibetan for “mind training.” Lojong is training the mind to be intelligent in a very fundamental way, developing basic intelligence and making intelligent use of our emotional nature which leads to seeing and thinking more clearly.

We do not have the power to stop other people from doing certain things, but we do have the power to resist becoming adversely affected by the wrongs done to us by others, whether real or imagined.

This very practical book offers teachings and advice on how to cultivate compassion in our daily routines and workday: With lessons on how to maintain practice through the duration of our lives, we can keep the commitment to mindfulness by transforming adversity into awareness

Lojong is another serious and helpful book which I found through reading an excerpt in Best Buddhist Writings of 2008. I cannot emphasize enough on how one book leads to another which then leads to another and so on. It is truly the power of the reading path.

Lojong is a fine book to study for those who enjoy Salzberg’s Loving Kindness and the fine books by Pema Chodron.

This isn’t a new book, of course, but Nilgiri Press has just reissued Eknath Easwaran’s Dialogue With Death: The Spiritual Psychology of the Katha Upanishad in a revised edition called Essence of the Upanishads.  This attractive edition includes a previously unpublished introduction and some minor revisions that were suggested by the author before his death in 1999.

Easwaran’s translations of the classics of Indian spirituality (the Dhammapada, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Upanishads) are critically acclaimed, and in this new edition, he expounds upon the Katha Upanishad, the story of the boy who asked Death himself what happens after man leaves this world.

Easwaran’s meditations on the Katha Upanishad are incredibly readable and insightful.  He uses humor and anecdote to show the importance of translating the scriptures to daily living through meditation.  The journey he relates is personal, but the lessons to be learned are universal.

Easwaran developed a method for meditation called “Passage Meditation,” the repetition of a memorized prayer or scripture from the world’s great religions.  In one of my favorite books, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Franny becomes dismantled during a weekend with her ivy league boyfriend when, unhappy with the insincerity she perceives in everyone around her, she begins chanting a prayer and suffers a spiritual and existential breakdown.  The book has been recognized as a depiction of the journey one takes to enlightenment, but the path Franny takes is, admittedly, somewhat brutal.  Ever since I read it, though, I’ve been curious about the practice of passage meditation, and the phenomenon that happens, Franny says, when a person prays without ceasing.  She says:

“But the thing is, the marvellous thing is, when you first start doing it, you don’t even have to have faith in what you’re doing.  I mean even if you’re terribly embarrassed about the whole thing, it’s perfectly all right.  I mean you’re not insulting anybody or anything.  In other words, nobody asks you to believe a single thing when you first start out.  You don’t even have to think about what you’re saying, the starets said.  All you have to have in the beginning is quantity.  Then, later on, it becomes quality by itself.  On its own power or something.  He says that any name of God–any name at all–has this peculiar, self-active power of its own, and it starts working after you’ve sort of started it up . . . You get to see God.  Something happens in some absolutely nonphysical part of the heart–where the Hindus say that Atman resides, if you ever took any Religion–and you see God, that’s all.”

We’ve been working hard in the fiction room. We’re cleaning our shelves and getting ready for the new fiction coming this Fall. Our space will be better utilized and you can have more fun browsing and whiling away the hours at Lemuria.

Some more or less well-known authors with new books this Fall (some of these are coming out this month):

Larry McMurtry also has a new book coming out next month called Rhino Ranch. I am certain that I am missing some upcoming titles . . . if you think of one that you’re looking forward to, please comment!

A week from tomorrow (August 11 at 5 p.m.) Mary Ward Brown is coming to Lemuria! (See previous blog.) We are so honored to have her here. Her memoir has just been published and many of you may have also picked up her two collections of short stories.

Summer’s days are numbered. I’ve had enough of 100-degree temperatures and 100% humidity! I’m getting the quilts fluffed and hoping that the firewood will soon be properly cured for some feisty little fires in the stove.

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean explores the memories and deteriorating mind of Marina, a Russian, who in her old age developed Alzheimer’s and must be cared for by her life long friend and husband Dmitri.  Though Marina can’t always remember where she is or her family, she draws connections to her discombobulated present with her crystal clear past as a docent with the Hermitage Museum during the Siege of Leningrad.  As the novel progresses, the flashbacks to her life during the Siege and experiences at the Museum piece together her present day life and family.

As a young girl, Marina’s parents were arrested and she was left in the hands of her Uncle Viktor, an archaeologist, and his wife. Together they lived with fellow Russians in a cellar taking cover from bombs, while sharing the small ration of bread they received.  Though barely surviving off the limited food supply, Marina worked in the Museum each day packing up the art to keep it protected from the destruction of the bombs. She and another older woman, Anya, removed the paintings but left the empty frames on the wall.  To keep from forgetting the information about the paintings they memorized their “Memory Palace.”  Though the frames remained empty, they would quiz each other on the details of the paintings that once hung there.  Who was the artist? What was the date of the painting? Who was depicted? What color was Madonna’s dress?

This memory palace was something that Marina held onto her entire life.  Even while struggling to remember if she had already had breakfast, Marina was remembering the vivid details of a Diego Velazquez painting, and while she couldn’t remember which blue dress her husband wanted her to wear, she knew the details of the same colored dress that the Madonna wore in another painting.

The vivid details of the paintings  held in the museum have  that she had memorized remained with her, though her present mind is slowly slipping away.  This novel contrasts the present struggle of Marina’s mind and the clear flashbacks of how she remembered her experiences of the Siege.  Dean touches on how her struggles and family were connected by her love and memory of art during World War II.

-Sarah Clinton