Lojong: Commitments of Mind Training | Satsang with Ahjan Samvara

Welcome to our continued exploration of Bodhicitta and the Yoga of Compassion through Mind Training. Today we’ll dive deep into lesson number six of the Lojong teachings: The Commitments of Mind Training.

Full Satsang with Ajahn Samvara is available on YouTube

Understanding Spiritual Commitment

The commitments of mind training are agreements that we make with ourselves — a sacred pact where we say, “This thing about compassion, this cultivation of dharma, is good, and I’m going to honor it. I’m going to commit myself to these practices.”

By maintaining these commitments and developing deep respect for commitment itself, we create a very strong capability within ourselves. This faculty allows us to bring forth greater light, greater dharma, and enables us to assist the people around in positive ways while relieving others from suffering. In this process of selfless service, we find our own enlightenment through committed practice.

Why People Fear Commitment

For many people, the word “commitment” evokes a sense of dread or unease. It seems like something that ties you down, defines you, confines you, or creates a sense of heaviness. There’s a humorous story that illustrates this perfectly: A man complained that for four years at weekly satsang, his guru had been telling him he had a fear of commitment. When his friend asked who his guru was, he replied, “Oh, Guru Swami Ananda… but he’s not really my guru. He’s just some guy I see every week who tells me things.”

This resistance stems from fear — fear that if the guru is right, then our ego must be wrong.

Commitment vs. Attachment vs. Obligation

Attachment is what we should fear. Attachment involves ideas, concepts, and feelings that get us wound up in something, limiting our awareness and holding us down.

Obligation feels like a tax — something heavy that we must pay, like rent or utilities. It becomes taxing rather than liberating.

Commitment, however, is neither attachment nor obligation. Spiritual commitment is always empowering. It always lifts you up and brings you to a stronger, brighter place.

The Tale of Three Merchants: A Story of True Commitment

A few hundred years ago in Tibet, three lay practitioners who were family men and merchants came to their teacher, a rinpoche. He taught them about commitment, saying, “You have to be committed.” They would agree enthusiastically, then return home and get caught up in business or family matters, forgetting their dharma practice.

The teacher gave them a special quest: to find a hidden teaching (terma) in a scroll that Padma Sambhava had left at the foot of three holy mountains. This scroll would reveal itself only to those truly committed to the quest.

The three merchants embarked on their journey together. When they couldn’t find the teaching at the first set of mountains, they learned of another location much farther east. One merchant, attached to his family, returned home, saying he missed his wife and children.

At the second location, they again found nothing but learned of the true “Three Holy Mountains,” which were months of travel away in China. The second merchant, bound by obligations to his business, worried about his son managing affairs and returned home.

Only the third merchant remained committed to the practice and quest itself. He traveled across Tibet into China, found the scroll at the foot of the mountain, gained illumination from the teaching, and then watched as the scroll magically disappeared.

This story illustrates how attachment (to family) and obligation (to business) prevented the first two practitioners from achieving their goal, while pure commitment led the third to enlightenment.

The Challenge of Maintaining Good Commitments

Even when we know that something is a beneficial habit to keep up, like exercise, a healthy diet, meditation, or developing career skills, we often struggle to maintain these commitments. For example, there was once a student who found a website that would send daily Lojong reflections but didn’t sign up, thinking “That’s such a big commitment”, even though he knew it was beneficial.

Two Barriers to Empowering Commitments

1. Idealistic Expectations

We often approach spiritual practice with grandiose ideas about how it should unfold. Like Milarepa, who went to a monastery expecting enlightenment to simply “sprout” from him without effort, we create impossible standards when we approach practice in this way.

When someone asked a teacher how long enlightenment would take, the teacher said, “10 years.” When the student boasted about being really smart and able to learn quickly, the teacher replied, “20 years.” This illustrates how ideas of self-grandeur actually create fog that overlays truth.

The famous Tibetan saying reminds us: this is a marathon, not a sprint. You must train consistently over time. You can’t fake enlightenment; you have to do the work, step by step, for real.

The Art of “Chi-ku” (Eating Bitter)

In kung fu, there’s a term “chi-ku”, meaning “eat bitter” or to endure difficulty with a positive mind, realizing that by enduring hardship, you’re achieving your empowering goal. This applies to all disciplines: martial arts, meditation, learning technology, and dharma cultivation.

Tyler Perry’s career arc exemplifies this perfectly. He wrote a play that bombed on opening night for six consecutive years, working odd jobs to finance each attempt. In the seventh year, something clicked: the play succeeded, launching his career and eventually making him the highest-paid man in entertainment. But it goes to show that he had to go through what he had to go through.

2. Conflicting Concepts

Many people are attracted to something but simultaneously upset by it. They’re not straight in their mind and heart about what they’re engaging with. If you have conflicting ideas like “I want this, but I also don’t want this”, you can never commit successfully.

A student learned computer programming but constantly had conflicts with bosses because his father had instilled the belief “You’ve gotta run your own business.” Only when he realized his father (despite this advice) had been stressed, angry, and suffered a heart attack in his own life experience, did the student resolve the conflict and find peace in his work.

The Hallmark Card Vision Problem

We often develop simple, greeting-card-like visions of what enlightenment should look like. When reality conflicts with these visions, we may then become confused.

Master Fang’s story shows us how a skillful teacher uses conflicting concepts to break us free from conceptual prisons.

When a learned monk came along sharing beautiful dharma teachings, Master Fang called Buddha “a bullheaded jail keeper” and “a horse-faced old maid.” The monk became increasingly agitated by this, until he realized that Master Fang was showing him that his concepts of Buddhist teaching had imprisoned him. This mental conflict dissolution led to his enlightened realization.

We are all just like oysters — when a grain of sand (difficulty) gets into our shell and bothers us, we have the opportunity to transform it into a pearl of wisdom.

The Power of Consistency

Consistency proves something to yourself and paves the way for you to gain personal power. The story of business start-up Stitch Fix illustrates this perfectly. After being rejected by 63 venture capital firms, the founders still consistently executed the business plan that they said they would carry out, quarter after quarter. When they returned months later, having achieved what they promised, investors took notice and eventually funded them with $6 million.

Michael Jordan and Lawrence Armstrong both tried out for varsity basketball, and both were rejected. They decided to train together every morning, but after 10 days, Armstrong quit while Jordan continued. Jordan became legendary; Armstrong remained unknown.

Consistency is drawing a line in the sand and saying “I am committed to this,” with conviction. Greatness comes from making that decision — not being “sort of committed,” because sort of committed is not commitment.

The Secret: Change Your Attitude, But Be Natural

This Lojong slogan holds the key to overcoming both idealistic expectations and conflicting concepts, while preventing ego inflation as you develop:

Change your attitude. Instead of doing things to serve yourself, do things for others. When you align spiritual disciplines with selfless motivation, the snags of ego that would create expectations and conflicts simply dissolve.

But be natural. Don’t attention-seek or promote yourself. Stay focused on serving and empowering others rather than building personal recognition.

Ella Baker exemplified this perfectly. Born to a grandmother who was a former slave, she committed to fighting injustice, not for personal gain, but to help African Americans. This selfless motivation carried her through university (unprecedented for a poor African American woman of her era), through leadership roles in the NAACP, and ultimately to co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee.

She consistently promoted the movement for the benefit of other people, not just herself, believing that good leaders promote the success of the movement, not their own status or public profile.

The Path Forward

Commitment to mind training means focusing on meditation, teachings of compassion, and developing personal power through your career yoga and karma yoga, with dedication and the intent to honor the commitments you’ve made. Never give up. When something appears as an obstacle in your mind, heart, awareness, or physical reality, stay committed.

What seems like an obstacle will become a catalyst for growth. Your mind and heart will expand, revealing that the apparent barrier on the path was actually supporting your enlightenment.

As you develop yourself in martial arts, meditation, career skills, and enlightenment practices, you become a powerful and capable vessel for bringing compassion and enlightened structures to others. This gives you reasons to develop yourself that transcend mere personal benefit.

Remember: you cannot fake it, you cannot cheat it, and you cannot skip steps. But with true commitment, the empowering kind that lifts you up rather than weighing you down, you can achieve the enlightenment and mastery that serves both yourself and all beings.

The path requires that you “eat bitter”, maintain consistency, release expectations, resolve conflicts, and ultimately transform any self-centered motivations to other-centered motives, while remaining open-minded and humble. This is the sixth step of mind training, and it opens the door to everything that follows.

From a Satsang given by Ahjan Samvara on the Lojong Teachings. Full Satsangs are available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ahjan_samvara

Continue your journey of mind training with dedication, consistency, and compassion for all beings.

Take Ahjan Samvara’s course on Gratitude:the Buddhist way out of suffering into Joy: https://www.udemy.com/course/gratitude-the-buddhist-way-out-of-suffering-to-joy/