Lojong: Tibetan Mind Training and the Seven Points

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 21 October 2026

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Lojong (Tibetan blo sbyong, “mind training”) is a Tibetan Mahāyāna system of short, memorable instructions for training bodhicitta, the wish to awaken for the sake of all beings. It is Kadam in origin, traced to the Indian master Atiśa and his followers, and its best-known root text, the Seven Points of Mind Training, was written down by Geshe Chekawa (1101–1175).

Tonglen, “giving and taking”, is one practice inside lojong and has its own page. This page covers the system as a whole: its origins, its main texts, why the slogans differ from book to book, and how it spread beyond its first school. It sits within our guide to Buddhist meditation.

What is lojong?

Lotsawa House, which publishes the texts in English translation, describes mind training as “the system of practical instructions for developing the compassion and wisdom of bodhicitta.” The Tibetan scholar Thupten Jinpa draws a finer line, as quoted by Gloria Chien in her 2015 dissertation on the lojong master Tokme Zangpo. For Jinpa, all Tibetan mind training aims at bodhicitta, while lojong in the narrow sense is “a specific approach to cultivating the awakening mind.” In practice that approach is carried by short lines, which Lotsawa House and many English books call slogans.

Even the English name was argued over. Michael Sweet first rendered blo sbyong as “mental purification” (1996), later as “mind training”, which Thomas Troughton (2008) defended as the most suitable translation (Chien reports both).

Lojong is also not one kind of practice. Sweet, as Chien reports him, describes Chekawa’s Seven Points as an exoteric teaching, while another early mind-training text, the Wheel-Weapon attributed to Atiśa’s teacher Dharmarakṣita, uses tantric practice, invoking the deity Yamāntaka against attachment to self. So “lojong” covers both exoteric instruction and at least one tantric text. On the difference between those two paths, see Tibetan Buddhism.

Where lojong comes from: Atiśa and the Kadam

The tradition traces lojong to Atiśa Dīpaṃkara (c. 982–1054; sources differ by a year or two), the Bengali scholar-monk who reached Tibet in 1042; his page has the biography.

According to Tokme Zangpo’s fourteenth-century commentary (trans. Adam Pearcey, 2018), Atiśa received bodhicitta instructions from three main teachers: Dharmarakṣita, Maitrīyogi and “the guru of Suvarnadvīpa”, the Golden Isle. Tokme says the Seven Points is the Golden Isle teacher’s line. Chekawa’s own closing verse says the same:

Tokme’s lineage prayer names this teacher Serlingpa, directly before Atiśa. The first great lojong anthology opens with three life stories of Atiśa; in Thupten Jinpa’s English translation, as Chien lists them, one is titled “The Story of Atiśa’s Voyage to Sumatra”, identifying the Golden Isle with Sumatra.

In Tibet the teaching passed through the Kadam (bka’ gdams), the community that grew from Atiśa’s students. The Dalai Lama, teaching in 2020, gave the tradition’s own explanation of the name: Atiśa’s disciples were called Kadampas “because they took every letter of the teaching as an instruction to practise.” Tokme Zangpo’s lineage prayer names the Tibetan links after Atiśa, and Chien gives their dates:

• Dromtönpa (1004–1064), Atiśa’s Tibetan disciple (see Atiśa’s page)
• Potowa (1027–1105)
• Sharawa (1070–1141)
• Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1101–1175), who set down the Seven Points

Potowa, Sharawa and Chekawa belonged to what Chien calls the “Kadam lineage of treatises”, which studied six texts, among them Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra and Compendium of Trainings.

Some lineage lists run further back. Tokme Zangpo’s Prayer to the Lineage of Seven-Point Mind Training (trans. Pearcey, 2022) begins with the Buddha and Maitreya and runs through Asaṅga and other Indian masters to Serlingpa and Atiśa. Chien argues that the five masters associated with Asaṅga are the distinctive feature of Tokme’s lineage, and that they gave it greater credibility. It is one author’s list, not one every source gives. (The bodhisattva-vow lineages traced to Asaṅga are a separate subject, covered on bodhisattva vows.)

The Seven Points of Mind Training

Chekawa’s root text is arranged under seven headings, each holding a handful of terse lines. Lines quoted below are from Adam Pearcey’s 2012 translation unless marked otherwise. The complete root text can be read free in that translation on Lotsawa House.

1. The preliminaries. The text says only “First, train in the preliminaries.” The Damngak Dzö version (trans. Pearcey, 2025) spells these out as three contemplations: on how hard it is to find the freedoms and advantages of a human life, on death and impermanence, and on the trials of saṃsāra. They overlap with the “four thoughts” that open the preliminary practices covered on ngöndro.
2. The main practice trains two kinds of bodhicitta, ultimate and relative, as the Damngak Dzö version divides it. On the ultimate side the text opens, “Consider all things and events as dreamlike” (see emptiness). On the relative side the meditation is giving and taking, which is tonglen.
3. Transforming adversity. The point opens, “When all the world is filled with evil, / transform adversity into the path of enlightenment,” and continues: “Drive all blames into one.” “Meditate on the great kindness of all.”
4. Applying the practice through the whole of life. The text sums up the training as five strengths, which the Damngak Dzö annotation names as impetus, familiarization, wholesome seeds, revulsion and aspiration. It also has a brief “mahāyāna advice for transference”, which Tokme’s commentary explains as the advice for the moment of death, framed in the same five strengths. This is not the tantric practice of transferring consciousness; for that, a separate Vajrayāna practice taught with its own transmission, see phowa.
5. The measure of mind training. “All teachings share a single purpose.” Tokme’s commentary names that purpose: “to tame self-grasping.” The test of the training is whether it does that. Another line reads “Always maintain only a joyful attitude.”
6. The commitments, mostly in the negative: “Don’t ponder others’ flaws.” “Don’t transfer the ox’s burden to the cow.”
7. The precepts: “Don’t be dependent on external conditions.” “Don’t be boastful.” “Don’t seek acknowledgement.”

How teachers carry the lines into ordinary life varies. Judy Lief’s Tricycle series, for example, took up one slogan each Friday, and Pema Chödrön’s book treats them as everyday meditations (see below). The root text’s own line “In all activities, train by applying slogans” is narrower than it sounds: it sits inside the giving-and-taking practice of point 2, and Tokme’s commentary reads it as reciting a short aspiration of that practice in all activities, not as a rule for using the whole list.

That is a description of the text, not a method. Tokme’s commentary and the Damngak Dzö version also contain instructions for meditation sessions and for the moment of death. They are not reproduced here: they are practice instructions, and the Damngak Dzö annotation of the root text counts meeting a good teacher among a practitioner’s three main provisions (see the last section).

Who wrote the lojong slogans?

Three answers are in print, and they do not agree.

• “Atisha’s slogans.” Judy Lief, a teacher in the Shambhala tradition of Chögyam Trungpa who edited Trungpa’s Training the Mind (Shambhala, 1993), wrote a weekly Tricycle series on them, which the magazine introduced in 2010 as commentary on “Atisha’s 59 mind-training (Tib. lojong) slogans.”
• Written down by Chekawa. Lotsawa House says the text was “first composed—that is, written down—by Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1101–1175) according to the tradition of Atiśa Dīpaṃkara.”
• No single root text. Thupten Jinpa, as Chien reports him, finds no work of root lines by Atiśa himself. Atiśa’s instruction circulated as scattered sayings, his followers compiled their own versions, and Jinpa distinguishes six that seem to share a common source. Chekawa’s version came to dominate the commentaries.

The commentaries began early. According to Thupten Jinpa, as Chien reports, the first was written by Chekawa’s student Sé Chilbu Chökyi Gyaltsen (1121–1189), and Tokme Zangpo’s is the second earliest (Michael Sweet had taken Tokme’s to be the first).

How many slogans? Why every translation reads differently

English books often speak of “the 59 slogans”. That holds for one family of editions: Trungpa’s Training the Mind, Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are, Ken McLeod’s translation of Jamgön Kongtrul’s The Great Path of Awakening, and the Zen teacher Norman Fischer’s Training in Compassion all present fifty-nine. The Tibetan sources are less tidy. The edition of the root text in Kongtrul’s Damngak Dzö ends with this note (trans. Adam Pearcey, 2025): “There are many different versions of this root text, with variants in sequence and the number of slogans.” So 59 is one arrangement of the slogans, not the number in every version.

The wording varies just as much. Here are two slogans in two translations:

The tonglen couplet differs in the same way: compare the Shambhala wording quoted on our tonglen page with Pearcey’s on Tibetan Buddhism. The Shambhala wording runs through Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are (1994) too: its maxims include “Always meditate on whatever provokes resentment”, which is slogan 49 in Judy Lief’s Tricycle series (2011). Before treating two wordings as the same line, check whose translation each comes from.

The Eight Verses for Training the Mind

The other short classic of the Kadam is the Eight Verses of Geshe Langri Thangpa (1054–1123), whom Lotsawa House calls “the famous Kadampa geshe”. The title varies too: Lotsawa House has Eight Verses of Training the Mind, and the Dalai Lama’s office Eight Verses for Training the Mind. Lotsawa House calls the lines at the end of its fifth verse the text’s “most famous and most striking”:

The seventh verse speaks of offering help and happiness “to all my mothers” while secretly taking on “all their hurt and suffering”. The eighth turns to recognising “all things as like illusions”.

Lotsawa House notes that the verses “are now regularly transmitted around the world by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.” In a 2020 teaching he called them “a short text focussed on the awakening mind of bodhichitta” with its source in Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland. He recites them, he said, every day. His office reports that he reads the first seven verses as teaching bodhicitta and the last as teaching emptiness: one teacher’s reading of the text.

Later classics: Tokme Zangpo and Jamgön Kongtrul

Gyalse Tokme Zangpo, whom Lotsawa House calls a Kadampa master, is dated 1297–1371 there and 1295–1369 by Chien. Chien also shows that he studied at Sakya and had Sakya teachers. He wrote two different works on mind training:

• His Commentary on the Seven Points, the second earliest by Jinpa’s reckoning, as Chien reports (quoted above).
• The Thirty-Seven Practices of All the Bodhisattvas, a separate work. Lotsawa House calls it “one of the most famous native Tibetan texts on mind training”, a summary of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra and other sources in thirty-seven four-line verses. It is not a commentary on the Seven Points. Its eleventh verse states the exchange of self and other directly:

In the nineteenth century Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Thayé (1813–1899) placed the Seven Points, Tokme’s commentary and Atiśa’s Bodhisattva’s Garland of Jewels in the Kadam section of his Damngak Dzö, the Treasury of Instructions. His own commentary is available in English as The Great Path of Awakening, translated by Ken McLeod (Shambhala).

Lojong and Śāntideva

Sweet, as Chien reports him, argues that lojong’s central teaching of giving and taking rests on the “exchanging oneself and others” of chapter 8 of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra. That chapter is discussed on The Way of the Bodhisattva, and its verse 8.129 has its own page: all joy comes from wishing others happiness. The bodhisattva ideal it serves is described on Buddhas and bodhisattvas.

Beyond the Kadam: lojong across schools and in the West

“Kadam” names where lojong came from, not who holds it now. Chien writes that from the early twelfth century, lojong texts became a literature that was “a shared heritage across various Tibetan Buddhist schools.” The first great anthology, the fifteenth-century Mind Training: The Great Collection, was edited by Zhönnu Gyelchok and Könchok Gyeltsen (1388–1469), both associated with the Sakya school. Of its 43 texts, Chien associates most of the authors of texts 5 to 36 with the Kadam school, and the last six concern the Sakya teaching Parting from the Four Clingings. Troughton has argued that the editors took up Atiśa’s lojong to add prestige to their Sakya lineage. Chien says further research is needed on whether that was the editors’ aim. (For the schools themselves, see the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.)

Mind training is not only the Seven Points family, either. The Dzogchen tradition has a cycle of seven mind-training contemplations of its own, published in English as Steps to the Great Perfection: The Mind-Training Tradition of the Dzogchen Masters. The book is by Jigme Lingpa (1730–1798), whom Lotsawa House calls “the great Dzogchen master”, with contributions by Garab Dorje and Longchenpa, translated by Cortland Dahl (Snow Lion). Its publisher calls it “the first-ever English translation of mind-training contemplations from the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism”, and notes that while the Kadam lojong is well known, Western readers have generally not known that Dzogchen has a mind training of its own. The contemplations themselves are not described here.

Modern teachers in several lineages have carried lojong, especially in English:

• The 14th Dalai Lama teaches the Eight Verses widely, as above.
• Chögyam Trungpa’s Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness (Shambhala, 1993) gives fifty-nine slogans with his commentary. The 2003 edition has a foreword by his student Pema Chödrön. (Serious allegations of abuse were made against Trungpa, as the Daily Times-Call reported in 2024; see his page.)
• Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are is framed, in her publisher’s words, around “fifty-nine traditional Tibetan Buddhist maxims” used as everyday meditations.
• Norman Fischer, a Zen teacher, reads the slogans “through a Zen lens”, in his publisher’s phrase, in Training in Compassion (Shambhala, 2013). That is one Zen teacher’s book, not a Zen tradition.

Do you need a teacher to practise lojong?

The Seven Points is not an empowerment practice in the way that deity visualization is: Sweet describes it as exoteric, and its texts are published openly. That does not make it a do-it-yourself technique. The Damngak Dzö annotation lists “meeting a good teacher” first among the “three main provisions” a practitioner needs. And not every mind-training text is exoteric: the Wheel-Weapon, as noted above, uses tantric practice.

Because lojong trains bodhicitta, it sits within the bodhisattva path. Taking that commitment formally is the subject of bodhisattva vows. For anyone who wants to go further than reading, the tradition’s own annotation of the root text points to a teacher; see how to find a Buddhist teacher. Other traditions have their own trainings of the heart, such as loving-kindness meditation, which do not depend on this Tibetan literature.