The Thirty-Seven Practices Of A Bodhisattva: Verse One

In preparation for the upcoming Summer session (starts June 7th, 2023) of our Group Mentoring Membership program, I would like to share some thoughts on the seminal Tibetan Buddhist text, the Thirty-Seven practices of a Bodhisattva. This text, written by a 14th-century Tibetan monk and scholar named Tokme Zangpo, is a mind-training or Lojong text. It has been taught and commented on by Tibetan Buddhist Masters for centuries.

The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva belongs to the category of Lojong, or mind-training texts. These texts and teachings tend to focus on training the mind through adversity. When we face challenges or difficult experiences in our life or meditation practice, we can use these Lojong teachings to cultivate more compassion and wisdom, and to work with obstacles more skillfully.

These teachings are famous in Tibetan Buddhism because they are very pragmatic - they focus on the everyday and how we act, reflect, and think in our daily Dharma life. We can apply these teachings to our relationships, daily life, and anything that comes up because all of us experience adversity in our life. Some of us may experience it more than others, but in general, we could all use more tips, strategies, and kinder, more compassionate, and wiser approaches to working with our own adversity, struggles, and challenges in our daily life.

The first verse of the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva goes like this: “Right now you have a good boat, fully equipped and available — hard to find. To free yourself and others from the sea of samsara, Day and night, constantly, study, reflect and meditate — this is the practice of a Bodhisattva.”

In this verse, Tokme Zangpo refers to the idea in Mahayana Buddhism that this human life is incredibly precious. Sometimes we call it a perfect or precious human rebirth, but what it's really referring to is this vessel we have - a physical body and a mind that can think, work through problems, meditate, reflect, and be skillful in what might bring more happiness for ourselves and others, and what can remove suffering for ourselves and others.

As he describes here, using the analogy of a good boat that's well-built and can carry us from one shore to the other, this precious life can not only bring joy if we use our body, speech, and mind skillfully, but ultimately, we can attain Awakening, which in Buddhism is our own natural state free from suffering, struggles, and the contractions we stagnate in within our mind.

That's what the second part of the verse is pointing to - “to free yourself and others from the sea of samsara - constantly study, reflect, and meditate.” It refers to the Bodhichitta aspiration - the motivation or intention to benefit others based on having personally travelled the path and freed our own mind.

By remedying confusion, aversion, and clinging, a Bodhisattva encounters others from a more awakened, free, compassionate space, and becomes a person who beams liberation for others - an example for all of us to see what's possible with this precious human life.

So, in Buddhism, Bodhichitta directly translates from Sanskrit to mean the mind of awakening. It's this idea of a mind or heart that has access to this awakened space that we all have the potential to encounter. However, it's not always immediately obvious, which is why Buddhism has structured paths and practices to help us bring about this awakened nature.

But, before we can start down this path, we first have to understand what Bodhichitta is. Essentially, it's a wish to be free from the bondage of what our own minds artificially create and cling to. Now, I always caution people new to Buddhism not to blindly accept these teachings on faith, but rather to approach them with curiosity and questioning. For example, the first question we might ask ourselves is whether our happiness and suffering really are dependent upon our minds?

According to Buddhism, the answer is yes. And that's a really important realization, because it means we actually have agency in our lives. We can work with our minds to cultivate more happiness and reduce our suffering. Of course, we don't have agency over everything in life – we can't control what other people do, for example. But we can take care of our own minds, and that's where Bodhichitta comes in.

Our own perception influences our internal happiness or pain, even mild dissatisfaction. How we think of ourselves and others, our own thoughts and behaviors all play a role in our mental state. Therefore, developing Bodhichitta is a powerful way to improve our own lives and those around us.

So, in essence, Bodhichitta is about cultivating the mind of awakening, which is the heart of our awakened nature. It's not immediately obvious to us, which is why Buddhism provides structured paths for us to study, reflect, and meditate on to bring about this nature more and more.

One important aspect of Bodhichitta is the wish to be free from the bondage of what our own mind artificially creates. This is the foundation of the Buddhist path, but it's not something that we should accept blindly. Instead, we should approach it with curiosity and reflection to discover its truth for ourselves.

Once we have established that our happiness and suffering come from our own mind, we have agency over it. We can cultivate the wish for freedom and work with our mind to become that light more and more for others. This doesn't mean that we have to rescue anybody, but rather that we can become naturally compassionate, kind, and awake in our actions.

So, cultivating Bodhichitta is about working with our own mind to achieve freedom from aversion, clinging, and confusion. It's a process that requires reflection, study, and practice, but it's a path that anyone can undertake with the right mindset and approach. A Bodhisattva is a product of Bodhichitta, which is the state of mind that embodies its own natural awakened state infused with unconditional love and compassion.

The premise here is based on freeing oneself and others from the sea of samsara. Samsara is a Sanskrit word that can be interpreted in many ways in Buddhism. One interpretation is through the six realms of existence, while another is through the concept that consciousness is infinite and doesn't have a beginning or end necessarily. However, there's also another way to think of samsara. Samsara can also be seen as the mind projecting an outer or objective reality in each and every moment.

The first step is to reflect on whether our own thoughts and emotions are responsible for our happiness and suffering. This reflection is recommended as a starting point. Then, we can begin to reflect on whether there is an objective reality or not.

The question of whether there is anything outside of our perception that exists in the way it appears is a big question in Buddhism as well as modern science and physics. Is there anything that we experience that is not influenced by our own perceptions and or thoughts? This is how we can think of samsara at a more subtle level.

Samsara is the mind that binds itself in each moment through clinging to duality. Duality here would be the split into subject and object. When there's a distinct "me," "mine," and "I," it experiences an objective reality, and this then forms samsara.

From the duality of subject-object confusion, clinging, and aversion happen, which disturb our mind. Just think of the last time you were really angry. How did you feel? Once you calmed down, how did you feel? The purpose of the Buddhist path is to recognize that our disturbing emotions arise based on misperceptions, and these happen based on fixating to an objective reality. Usually, we get angry because we're angry with something that we're perceiving or thinking about outside of ourselves, temporarily blind to our relationship to it.

Samsara's bind happens when we're not fully in relationship with everything, including our thoughts, emotions, the outer world, and others. When we stop acknowledging or are unable to acknowledge our relationship to everything on a deeply experiential level, then the bind of samsara occurs.

So then at the end of this verse, it gives the remedy - “Day and night constantly study, reflect, and meditate. This is the practice of a Bodhisattva.” So, these are called the three wisdoms in Buddhism - the wisdom of learning, the wisdom of reflecting, and the wisdom of meditating. This is the 'how' of the Buddhist path, or at least the Mahayana Buddhist path.

This is how we actually transform, because moving from that split subject-object duality or that disconnected, not-in-relationship experience is a deeply ingrained habit for most of us, myself included. And so, we need a structured path to be able to shift that, to be able to erode or shake up how we're working with that.

And so, the wisdom of learning would be the first step, where we actually learn the Dharma. Right now, that's more or less what we're doing. I'm sharing some ideas here, and you are reading, and learning a bit. That would be the first type of wisdom. We take that learning, and then we engage the second type of wisdom, which is the wisdom of reflection, which again I acknowledged at the beginning of this recording where I recommended that we reflect based on curiosity, not based on blind belief.

So, reflection has to be open. Reflection also includes healthy skepticism. Here we are being both skeptical of a new idea or philosophy we are learning, while simultaneously applying skepticism to our current and closely held personal beliefs. So, in essence, when we reflect, we're questioning belief itself because another way to talk about the bondage of samsara or the sea of samsara, is to talk about the bondage of belief. So, reflection helps to shake that up.

Then, once we've shaken up our fixed beliefs a bit, and opened up some new insights into the nature of reality and self, we bring that into meditation. We invite awareness, and try to cut through any misperceptions on an experiential level. Reflection can help to shake things up, and to cultivate more insightful convictions, but our habits of aversion, clinging, and confusion are strong. So, we need something more powerful, which is the mind abiding in awareness. And so, we typically engage in meditation through the two paths of Shamatha or Calm-abiding Meditation, and Vipashana or Insight Meditation.

So, this is just an introduction into this verse, just to share some ideas on how we might start to relate with it. In the upcoming Summer session (starts June 7th, 2023) of my Group Mentoring Membership Community we're going to dive deep into not only this verse, but all of the verses of this text and more. You are most welcome to join us. For more information please visit scotttusa.com/group-mentoring.