The Practice of Kindness

written by Chogyam Trungpa

In the Ancient Traditions we experience a sense of gentleness toward ourselves, and a sense of friendliness to others begins to arise. That friendliness or compassion is known and literally means "noble heart." We are willing to commit ourselves to working with all sentient beings. But before we actually launch into that project, we first need a lot of training.

The obstacle to becoming a kind and a good person is not having enough sympathy for others and for oneself--that is the basic point. And that problem can be dealt with by practical training, which is known as training of the mind. That training gives us a path, a way to work with our crude, literal, raw and rugged styles, a way to become kind.

Ignorant students sometimes think that they have to glorify themselves; they want to become leaders or guides. There is a technique or practice for overcoming that problem. That practice is the development of humility, which is connected with the training of the mind.

The basic vision is to work for the benefit of others and create a situation that will benefit others. Therefore, you take the attitude that you are willing to dedicate yourself to others. When you take that attitude, you begin to realize that others are more important than yourself. Because of that vision, because you adopt that attitude, and because you actually find that others are more important with all three of those together, you develop the practice of training the mind.

By working with the various forms of unmindfulness, we begin to become thorough and precise, and our discipline becomes good. When we are thoroughly tamed by the practice of kindness discipline, or mindfulness practice, as well as trained by awareness, in how to hear the teachings, we begin to develop a complete understanding of kindness and goodness. After that, we also begin to develop a complete understanding of how, in our particular state of being tamed, and how we can relate to others.

In the training of mind practice we talk more in terms of training the mind. That is the next step. The mind is already tamed, therefore it can be trained. In other words, we have been able to domesticate our mind by practicing kind, loving and uplifting discipline.

Having domesticated our mind, then we can use it further. It's like the story of capturing a wild cow in the old days. Having captured the cow, having domesticated it, you find that the cow becomes completely willing to relate with its tamers. In fact, the cow likes being domesticated. So at this point the cow is part of our household. Once upon a time it wasn't that way I 'm sure cows were wild and ferocious before we domesticated them.

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