Dalai Lama Foundation Study Circle Montreal

Dharma Quote of the Week

We are beings of the Desire Realm, and thus our minds are also included within Desire Realm minds. If we cultivate great compassion, our own minds are the basis for great compassion. By contemplating countless sentient beings and meditating to develop great compassion, one eventually achieves great compassion. At that point, the mental basis–one’s own mind–has become of the entity of great compassion. There is no distinguishing the two at that time. Meditating on great compassion does not mean taking compassion as an object and looking at it; it means taking sentient beings as one’s object and developing compassion for them such that the mind comes to be of the nature of great compassion.

The texts frequently speak of different mental bases: the basis for calm abiding, the basis for meditative absorption, the basis for achieving a path. The way of understanding all of these is the same. You may wonder whether, when one cultivates a certain path, the mind becomes of the entity of that path. It is important to understand this question because that is, in fact, what occurs when one cultivates calm abiding. The mental basis becomes of the nature of calm abiding.

–from Calm Abiding and Special Insight: Achieving Spiritual Transformation Through Meditation by Geshe Gedun Lodro, translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, published by Snow Lion Publications

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