It’s Better Working Together

Our small Sangha, yesterday evening, explored ‘Sending and Receiving’, the bodhisattva practice of Tonglen, in which we receive the pain and suffering of others and send out healing and wellbeing. As expected our reactions were quite varied. Some gaining a real insight from finding it unpleasant, annoying or challenging while others experienced its deep kindness for a world full of people who suffer in just the same way as we ourselves do.

I also had a further insight. When writing the last blog I had drawn attention to the issue of whether we do the practice in such a way that it’s us personally who is drawing in the suffering of others and sending out something good from ourselves, or whether we are a conduit - some sort of short pipe - through which, with each in and out breath, darkness and light pass. Though these two ways of practicing certainly do legitimately exist, it later occured to me that the separation was actually false and was based on a misunderstanding. I’ll explain.

Taking a step back there is the mechanics of the practice - what we do - and then we - that’s me - who does it. So obvious. When doing some reading before writing the last blog I discovered to my surprise that the point of it was not primarily to take away the suffering of another person when breathing in and out but to develop bodhichitta and diminish our ‘self cherishing’. Two things that necessarily must go together. Looked at this way it is the development of bodhichitta that is the thing that really helps others rather than imagining that we can take away suffering by breathing it in. So the practice is - as all practices are - about the transformation of ‘me’ and the benefit that may have for others generally.

Now who is this ‘me’. My writing about this in such a way as to suggest that I could do it from my sense of a personal self or alternatively take myself out of the way and have ‘buddha-nature’ or ‘awakened mind’ be the thing that does the job of receiving darkness and sending out light was nonsense. On one hand the whole Buddhist thing is about the non-existence of a separate and solid self and on the other, talking about the awakened mind as if it’s separate from myself, a kind of special thing that exists within or beyond me, is also not true. Who we really are - practice reveals - is something really hard to put our finger on. Remember that peculiar moment when we look to find who is meditating and only find nothing, a kind of space but a space in which there is also knowing? Or when we focus on awareness rather that the contents of awareness and it goes on forever, there being no edge to it nor anything beyond or outside of it? Well that, whatever it is, is what ideally is doing this practice. It’s not personal and it’s not something other. It’s a field of mirror like pristine awareness, present right here and now, that contains everything - not only the the ‘mere I’ - to take a Tsoknyi Rinpoche term - doing the practice but also the appearance of  everyone else we are ‘doing it for’ as well. Or put more radically - there is no separate place outside of awakened mind that pain can be drawn from simply because no such place exists.

NW. With thanks to everyone for giving me this insight. 15 January 2026