Verse 4: Impermanence; give up this life's concerns
Verse 4 of Gyalse Tokme Zangpo’s 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, from the section “The preliminaries.” Below: the verse in three translations and what seven teachers say about it.
Open in the study browser →Family and longtime companions will part from each other. Possessions gained with effort will be left behind. Consciousness, a guest, will leave the guesthouse of the body. Let go of this life. This is the way of a bodhisattva.
The practice of all the bodhisattvas is to renounce this life's concerns, For friends and relatives, long acquainted, must all go their separate ways; Wealth and prized possessions, painstakingly acquired, must all be left behind; And consciousness, the guest who lodges in the body, must in time depart.
You will separate from long-time friends and relatives; You will leave behind the wealth you worked to build up; The guest, your consciousness, will move from the inn, your body. Forget the conventional concerns — this is the practice of a bodhisattva.
"Our body is like a hotel, our mind is like a guest, in the next morning, and the guest has left the hotel." Letting go of this life means releasing mental attachment, not dumping your possessions — which would only create difficulties. What we truly need isn't things but loving kindness and compassion; prepare for death by developing bodhicitta, Amitabha visualization, and accumulating merit — the wealth that travels.
Death strips everyone equally — "the king leaving his kingdom, the beggar his stick." At death companions can't help, relatives can't follow, body and possessions are abandoned in a separation that is permanent. Since the time of death is uncertain, only Dharma provides lasting benefit — prepare now.
Practical calibration: the Dalai Lama's 50/50 advice — half our concern for this life's necessary affairs, half for what goes beyond it. Friends part like leaves blown together briefly on karma's winds; possessions "often become garbage. Nobody wants to keep them" — or become inheritance disputes; Shantideva's advice is to give things away now. The corpse becomes repulsive — attachment to this temporary form is unrealistic.
Three facts — loved ones separate, effortful wealth stays behind, the mind is a guest in "a kind of hotel." The renunciation is mental non-clinging, supported by seeing phenomena as dreamlike, lacking true existence.
Impermanence meditation dissolves clinging that's rooted in perceiving things as permanent and real. The practice doesn't demand giving everything away; it redirects the energy of clinging toward practice.
Enormous mental energy goes into protecting and enhancing exactly these three — relationships, wealth, body — generating karma through attachment, yet all separate from us. Contemplate your own funeral; widen the frame from this lifetime to beginningless rebirths, and anxiety about loss naturally shrinks. Verses 4–6 talk · Sangye Khadro on the eight worldly concerns
"Forget the conventional concerns." Commentary in Talk 3 (2006) (covers vv4–7) and Tricycle verse 4 (subscriber).
every teacher rushes to prevent the misreading — this is not "abandon your family and give away your house" (GR, KTGR, KS are explicit). It's withdrawal of investment, calibrated by AB's 50/50. The guest/guesthouse image appears in all of them; it may be the single most quotable line of the preliminaries for your group. ---
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche — The Heart of Compassion (Shambhala). A purchased book — no text is reproduced here.