translated by Geshe Michael Roach with Seiji Arao Takahashi

“If a thing can help thousands of people, why keep it secret for 300 years?

This is the mystery of the lojong.

Well, first of all of course we have to explain what the Tibetan word lojong means. Lo (technically spelled blo) is one of the many Tibetan Buddhist words for mind, or heart—in the sense of the deepest and best part of mind.

And then jong (technically spelled, are you ready, sbyong) means to practice, or to develop. And so together, the two words can best be translated as developing a good heart. The combination has also been translated at times with phrases like “mental training,” but of course we can feel the difference: we can imagine “mental training” being applied to a prison camp where people are brainwashed, for example—or to some kind of pushy AI.

And lojong really is developing a good heart, in two very important ways. Everyone in the world around us—and we ourselves—are trapped in a diabolical jail called “my body.” We were stuffed into this jail on the day of our birth; we suffer terribly in this jail as it steadily and inevitably falls apart all around us[…]”

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