Purification of Body, Speech, and Mind

by Khandro Rinpoche

Practically speaking, it is very difficult — but essential — to bring the mind back to awareness and free ourselves from the habitual patterns that create karma. The path of training the mind therefore introduces various practices.

Purification Of Body includes practices such as sitting meditation, circumambulation and prostrations, which physically bring the mind back to awareness and free the body from creating negative karma. Such "physical" spiritual practices enable us to develop and maintain awareness and to transform habitual tendencies of the body so that instead of harming others, our physical actions become beneficial.

Purification Of Speech includes practices such as the recitation of praises, supplications, prayers, or mantras. These skillful means transform speech by overcoming habitual patterns and negative tendencies. Mantra practice, for example, uses the same essential power of speech to create the ground of more virtuous karma. If we are unable to let go of harmful speech — gossip, idle chatter, and all speech that creates negative karma — we can rely on these practices to transform our speech into something compassionate and beneficial for all sentient beings.

Purification Of Mind includes skillful means such as devotion, confidence, faith, revulsion for samsara, the Four Thoughts That Transform the Mind, and the generation of loving-kindness and compassion for sentient beings through tong/en. Such practices transform the mind so that it generates virtuous instead of unvirtuous actions. Without such supports, mind will continue thinking in its habitual ways and give rise to all the same thoughts. To bring the mind back to awareness, we must rely on skillful supports — contemplation, visualisation, recitation, or meditation — that are free from self-grasping. It is essential to understand the influence of mind on our words and deeds. When the mind is trained, it immediately brings awareness to the body, to speech, and to our thoughts. In this way, we create a more favourable ground less contaminated with the three root poisons.

The main thing to understand from contemplating karma is that all actions have a motivation and that motivation needs to be examined. For this we must turn inward and develop awareness of body, speech, and mind. Then we will not only aspire to selfless compassion and generosity, we will actually be able to put them into practice. Our contemplation should lead to the discipline of not creating harmful karma. As much as possible, no action of our body, speech, or mind should arise from non awareness or distraction. No one needs the karma of harming others due to a momentary lack of awareness, when deep down in our hearts, our intention is to help all sentient beings.