The Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind

People often ask how to deepen their motivation for meditation, and for looking into the mind, through Buddhist wisdom. The answer I keep coming back to is bodhicitta: the wish to awaken for the benefit of all beings. That wish can give a session a direction. It can sit at the start of practice as a simple intention.

Even that wish needs something under it. If we do not yet feel why awakening would matter, bodhicitta stays a beautiful sentence. In the Tibetan lineages, the ground under it is often called the four thoughts that turn the mind towards the dharma.

Why we meditate

I think of motivation like setting the rudder of a ship. If we want a certain direction, the rudder has to face that way. If we do not know the direction, we can wander for a long time on the sea of meditation without purpose. Sitting can still happen. The mind can still settle a little. We can keep showing up and still feel slightly lost inside the session.

That is why it matters a lot why we meditate. Sometimes I say it matters as much as the meditation itself, if not a little more.

Bodhicitta is the larger Mahayana motivation. Alongside it there is another wish, closer to the bone: to understand our own suffering and to seek some resolution of it. That usually goes under what is called renunciation mind. Bodhicitta is built on it. In the Tibetan lineages we practice both, because the larger wish to help others awaken has more to stand on when we have already looked, honestly, at the bind we are in ourselves.

What the four thoughts are

The preliminary work of renunciation mind shows up as the four thoughts that turn the mind. In the Gelug tradition they are found in the small and medium scopes of the lam rim, the graduated stages of the path. In the Nyingma and Kagyu lineages they appear in many commentaries and texts, usually as the four thoughts that turn the mind towards the dharma. The names shift a little. The work is shared.

They are a distillation of reflection and analytical meditation. Their aim is larger than a change in how we think. They are meant to change how we relate to ourselves and the world, and then how we actually conduct ourselves with others and with our own mind. Thought, relationship, and conduct are not separate jobs. When one of them starts to move, the others follow.

They are usually laid out in this order: perfect human rebirth, or precious human birth. Then impermanence and death. Then karma, cause and effect. Then the defects of samsara. Translations differ. Sometimes the last two are reversed. Normally they run this way, and they can be treated as linear. You start with the preciousness of this life because that is the ground you are standing on. Then you move on to impermanence. Then the rest. Each thought prepares the next, so you are not asked to face death, or karma, or the defects of samsara as a pile of ideas with no floor under them.

Not beliefs to adopt

These are not philosophical positions we have to believe first. We learn them, contemplate them, and gradually gain conviction in them. They can begin as ideas. Practice needs some confidence that there is truth here, and some benefit to looking. Conviction does not have to arrive in advance. It can grow gradually.

What they become is a way of transforming the mind, and conduct, and how we use a day, a week, a month. Out of that comes renunciation mind, which becomes fuel for why we practice the dharma at all. I often think of the four thoughts as fuel for our car of liberation. On the Mahayana path we add bodhicitta. What I have found is that if we take up bodhicitta by itself, without some preliminary work in these four, the bodhicitta is often weak. There is not enough understanding of why we would want to awaken in the first place, and so not enough to apply that wish toward helping others awaken. The larger motivation stays words. It does not yet have weight.

The fourth thought makes this plain. The defects of samsara are a major reflection on dukkha. There is not a single English word for it. Dissatisfaction, stress, suffering, confusion: many layers, not one thing. The fourth thought is mostly how we are caught in that, and how that catching projects us into different experiences and forms. Once that is even a little visible, the wish to get free, and to help others get free, stops being abstract.

Someone might ask why we would dwell on something that appears negative. I understand the hesitation. The work is understanding a predicament. If an illness shows up and a doctor names it, we need enough of that diagnosis to decide what to do with the medicine. In the same way, the four thoughts grow a kind of exhaustion with the status quo: how we use the mind, how we work with emotion and thought, and how that shows up in conduct every day. That exhaustion has a purpose. It is not a mood we are trying to stay in. It is what starts to turn the mind away from what keeps producing the same trouble.

They are not easy. Some of the images are intense. Sometimes the reflections ask us to consider other realms, and some of those are not pleasant. We do not have to start there. It is more useful to have a reason for looking at all. The general idea is exhaustion with what keeps producing confusion and suffering. Then each of the four has its own result inside it, its own way of changing how we hold a day.

A different use of the thinking mind

These four are also something we actually meditate on. That means analytical meditation, also called investigative or reflective meditation. It is not a common style outside Himalayan Buddhist lineages. It is also not what most people come to meditation for. A lot of us are hoping the mind will quiet. We are not looking to be asked to reason.

Analytical meditation is not technically thinking more. It uses reasoning to produce an insight we could not see before, or to let go of a false conclusion that has been causing trouble. We already think plenty. Most of that thinking is rumination, or a hunt for a conclusion that will let us get on with the day. This is slower than that. The point is a certain kind of result: we start to value liberation more, and more of our time goes there.

You can see the need for that if you take stock of an average week. We spend a lot of time on things that will not give long-lasting genuine happiness. That noticing is already a small turning. Renunciation mind begins there, in ordinary hours, not only on the cushion.

Renunciation mind is not a new personality we force on ourselves, and it is not a set of religious behaviors we adopt because we think we should. Through analytical meditation we start to discover more about ourselves, about the world, and, in Buddhist language, about samsara. Then physical, verbal, and mental action can move in a more wholesome direction, something that actually helps us and other people. The conduct changes because the seeing has changed.

I wish someone had put the why first for me. When I first met the four thoughts in the small and medium scopes of the lam rim, the content was just given. That is nobody's fault. Study is the first step. We learn what the list is. I did not yet understand why it mattered. Lately I find it works better to name the purpose, then the meaning, then the steps. People need a reason to stay with something this demanding.

The same method is used in meditating on emptiness, especially in the Prajnaparamita and Middle Way teachings. Skill with it helps across the path. The work is learning to relax, to merge meditative awareness with reasoning, and to reason slowly. I was not good at that initially. I do not know if I would say I am good at it now. I am better than I was twenty years ago, mainly because I can use it without drowning in thinking. Reason slowly. When insight comes, rest. That rest is part of the meditation, not a break from it.

How this lives in practice

For practitioners in these lineages who want some progress in this life, the four thoughts sit under daily practice. They become an underpinning. Some people do a stretch of retreat on them. The advice I have received from my teachers is simpler: a little every day, brought into ordinary practice, so the reflections do not live only in a book.

There is a formal way to work with them, and an informal way of bringing them into ordinary life. Study still matters, because there are reasonings to understand before the meditation has much to stand on. Even without a lot of study, you can keep notes in front of you. Take one piece. Reflect. Investigate. Rest the mind there. Then the next piece. You do not have to hold the whole structure in your head.

I have used this as a main practice (taking the majority of a session). I have also used it as a preliminary at the beginning of a session, before moving on to other practices. I am a fan of both, and of bringing it into daily practice the way we would any other meditation. If we are serious about Buddhist practice, I do not think these are things to neglect. 

If you are new, or you came through mindfulness and you are Buddhist-curious, this may not be the first place to stand. Some of the views will feel philosophical. Some people will call them religious. There can be friction, and that friction is understandable. None of this is here to be believed dogmatically. It is here to be investigated. When we study something, it helps to bring it into reflection and meditation right away, so it does not sit as an idea we either admire or push aside. Investigation keeps it in the room.

A short look at change

The method is easier to see in a small example than in an explanation.

Settle into a posture with a relaxed, alert spine. Let the gaze rest a few feet in front of you, eyes half open or open. You can also close them if you wish. If sleepiness comes, open them.

If you already have a shamatha (calm abiding), or attention to breath practice, start there. The sensation of the breath entering the nose and body. On the out-breath, the sensation leaving. An object anchors attention and gives the ruminating mind somewhere to land. Stay with that until there is a little more space.

Then a little of what in Tibetan is called che-gom and jok-gom. Che-gom is to churn something, to pull it apart in meditation. That is the investigation. Jok-gom is to rest, the same rest we just used, except now we rest on what the churning revealed. Something gets pulled apart. Something new shows. The mind is placed there.

Take impermanence. Bring to mind something from today you can look at. A physical object is easier at first. Weather works. Today there was thunder. Rain was coming. That morning had been sunny. You can use that, or food, or a mood that already shifted. Something close is better than something grand.

Ask the reasoning mind a plain question. Did this stay the same or not?

A quick no is fine. Sit with it. A quick yes is fine too. We are not grabbing a conclusion. Analytical meditation is not conclusion-based. It is digging. If the first answer arrives fast, that is usually a thought we already had. The practice is to stay with the object long enough for the thought to open.

If the first answer is that nothing changed, look again. Maybe the sky stayed blue, or the rain kept on. Did cloud cover move through that blue? Did the light change? Time was passing either way. If it rained, the fact of rain may have stayed. Was all of that rain the same rain? Different clouds were moving through. The question is small on purpose. We are training the mind to see change where it already is.

Move slowly. When there is an insight, or a felt sense that change actually happened, rest there. Drop the reasoning. Stay with what showed up. A conviction based on thought can deepen into something closer to experience. That is the turn from che-gom to jok-gom. The rest is what lets the insight stabilize, instead of staying as a good idea.

If it is hard to tell whether anything shifted, give a few minutes to reasoning, then a few minutes to rest. Shamatha is part of this. It is not endless thinking in order to solve a problem at work. Ordinary thought is usually rumination, or a hunt for a conclusion. This is a different use of the same faculty. We reason, and then we let the reasoning go.

Each of the four thoughts can be worked this way. The content does not have to be complicated. Churn. When something opens, rest.

The four thoughts are how the mind starts to turn. Without that turn, the larger wish to awaken does not have much to stand on. Meditation can still happen. It just has less of a why, and less fuel, than it needs.