Origin and structure
Lojong is a compound of lo (mind) and jong (training, refining). The curriculum traces to Atiśa Dīpaṃkara (982–1054), the Bengali master invited to Tibet to consolidate the second wave of Buddhist transmission, who carried instructions from his teacher Serlingpa on the cultivation of bodhicitta — the awakened heart-mind oriented toward the welfare of all beings. Two centuries later the Kadampa teacher Chekawa Yeshe Dorje organised those instructions into the Seven Points of Mind Training — a short text of seven headings under which dozens of pithy slogans are assembled. The structure is recognisably classical Tibetan: an oral curriculum, designed for memorisation, in which each slogan is a compressed instruction that opens out into a contemplation of weeks or months. Within the Vajrayāna view the practice is the practical curriculum by which the bodhisattva vow is cultivated rather than merely declared.
What the practice consists of
Two limbs run through the curriculum. The first is *tonglen* — sending and taking — the breath practice in which the practitioner deliberately takes in some specific quality of suffering on the in-breath and sends out the opposite quality on the out-breath, inverting the protective reflex. The second is the sequence of slogans themselves: short phrases — drive all blames into one, be grateful to everyone, don't expect applause, abandon any hope of fruit — designed to be carried into ordinary life and noticed when their territory arises. The slogans do not work by being agreed with. They work by surfacing the precise moments at which the habitual self-protection they describe is operating, and by giving the practitioner a small handle to interrupt it. Lojong is taught as a curriculum in which sitting practice and post-meditation life are the same investigation under two conditions, not two separate registers.
In the index
Pema Chödrön's *When Things Fall Apart* is the most widely read English-language treatment of the lojong orientation as it meets ordinary collapse — illness, grief, humiliation — without making them into either spiritual props or mere obstacles. Her course on awakening compassion is the more practical companion, walking through the wider curriculum, pairing tonglen with the slogans, and treating the two limbs as components of a single practice rather than as alternatives. The Plum Village teaching from Br. Troi Duc Niem and Thich Nhat Hanh on emptiness, signlessness and aimlessness cover adjacent Mahāyāna territory in the Vietnamese Thiền lineage, where lojong is not the technical name but the orientation toward suffering — one's own and others' — as the operative material of practice is recognisably the same. Ram Dass's late teaching, formally rooted in Hindu bhakti rather than Buddhism, articulates the same orientation in non-Buddhist vocabulary: the fierce grace of his late teaching is lojong delivered without the curriculum and without the Sanskrit-Tibetan technical scaffolding.
What it isn't
Lojong is not stoicism. The instruction is not to harden against difficulty so it stops registering, and not to suppress reactivity in favour of a composed exterior. The classical wording is the opposite: lean into the sharp points, welcome the wisdom of no-escape. The practice is also not a self-improvement curriculum dressed in Buddhist vocabulary. The most common failure mode is precisely this — taking the slogans as a programme for becoming a better person and discovering, after some years, that the ego the curriculum was meant to investigate has quietly absorbed the slogans into its own project. The classical literature is unsentimental about this risk and recommends a teacher and a sustained relationship to the seven points rather than a do-it-yourself reading of the slogan list. Lojong is also not magical thinking: the tonglen limb does not remove anyone else's suffering. What changes is the practitioner's relationship to suffering — their own and others' — and through that change, the quality of their action in the world.
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