The Common Preliminaries: The Four Reversals

Sep 23, 2025

By Michael Erlewine

I am often asked how I got into practicing dharma, and of course, there is a history, but in effect I was always naturally dimly aware of what are called the “Common Preliminaries,” so let’s look at them. This is where I (and many) started out seriously practicing dharma, many, many years ago. I never thought of these are a religion or and “.ism,” but rather just the way things are.

In the next few blogs let’s look at the Common Preliminaries, which are also called “The Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind Toward the Dharma,” “The Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind,” or just “The Four Thoughts.” They are sometimes called “The Four Reminders” and “The Four Reversals.”

However you want to spell it, the import is that these four thoughts or concepts are capable of turning us away from our everyday distractions toward discovering the actual nature of our mind. And that is the whole point of dharma practice.

They are termed the Common Preliminaries because they are common to all forms of Tibetan Buddhism and they go before any other practices. By “go before” it is meant that before you begin any dharma practice, one should review the Four Thoughts so that we remember why we are practicing. And by “review,” it is not meant to simply read through them, but rather to bring their import to mind.

In other words, we usually have to turn our mind away from our everyday preoccupations in order to get anything done dharma-wise. So, we have to actually contemplate these four thoughts as they pertain to us.

I was raised Roman Catholic, so I was used to things such as the Ten Commandments and the like. But the Four Thoughts are not written in stone somewhere; rather they are inherently inscribed into our mind, already an intrinsic part of who we are. All we have to do is to become aware of them.

In fact, a large part of why I originally became serious about Buddhism was because when I encountered the Four Thoughts, I was already instinctively familiar with them and had been thinking the same things myself. They were as natural as anything I knew and I already was thinking (and even worrying) about them much of the time. So, for me these four thoughts were a sign that Buddhism is something natural to me that I could easily understand, and that has proved to be true.

And unlike the Ten Commandments, which are imperatives, the Four Thoughts are meant to serve as just reminders of something we intuitively already know, at least the first three of them. These four thoughts were how Buddhism first caught my attention, what flagged me down in the first place. It was like finding my own form of religion, although I consider Buddhism more of a psychology, something natural than a religion, but you get what I mean.

As I have written in previous blogs, the Four Thoughts were not only my introduction to Buddhism as a newbie. When, after a great many years of practice (decades), I finally was ready to start learning Mahamudra Meditation, said to be the tip of the top of meditation practices in our lineage, the first thing I was told is to spend some time once again on the Four Thoughts. I then spent something like three years working just with those four thoughts. They are that important.

So, as they say, without further ado, let’s look at the Four Thoughts That Turn the Mind Toward the Dharma. We will do this in the next few blogs, but as we go in, here are the Four Thoughts as I originally encountered them. This is how they appear in the traditiona. Tibetan practice sadhanas:

THE FOUR THOUGHTS

(1) This Precious Human Birth

First,
This precious human birth,
So favorable for the practice of the dharma,
Is hard to obtain and easily lost.
At this time,
I must make this meaningful.

(2) Impermanence and Death

Second,
The world and all its inhabitants are impermanent.
In particular,
The life of each being is like a water bubble.
It is uncertain when I will die and become a corpse. As it is only the dharma that can help me at that time,
I must practice now with diligence.

(3) Karma and its Consequences

Third,
At death there is no freedom,
And karma takes its course.
As I create my own karma,
I should therefore abandon all unwholesome action,
And always devote my time to wholesome action.
With this in mind,
I must observe my mind-stream each day.

(4) The Shortcomings of Samsara

Fourth,
Just like a feast before the executioner leads me to my death,
The homes, friends, pleasures, and possessions of samsara,
Cause me continual torment by means of the three sufferings.
I must cut through all attachment and strive to attain enlightenment.

As mentioned, it was these Four Thoughts that got my attention when I first encountered Buddhism. They indeed turn my mind. I had looked into many spiritual directions, had read about the trinity of this and the sacredness of that religion, all of which seemed so abstract to me, so distant and other-worldly – a world I did not know. When I came across the Four Thoughts, they seemed so down to earth, so very natural.

In fact, they made clear to me what I had pretty much come up with on my own. They spoke right to the heart. They were better than any religion I knew and I had some experience with organized religion.

Having been raised Catholic, I went to Catholic school for a while, was an altar boy, learned church Latin – the works. But I left that. I never had a quarrel with Christ (still don’t!), but organized religion and the behavior of its authorities appeared arbitrary and cruel to me. It lacked the intimacy laced with the taste of blood or reality that Mother Nature showed me – something real. Enough said.

That First Thought, that “life is precious,” did not need to be explained to me. I had always thought that my life was precious and hoped that I might be put to some good use and not just wasted. And here was an acknowledged spiritual direction telling me straight out that my life was precious. I just inhaled it. And that was just the First Thought.

It was the Second Thought that struck me to the core, impermanence. Death and impermanence had always hovered just out of eyesight in the peripheral vision of my life. I had never looked it straight in the eye and here was an instruction to do just that. There was nothing churchy or ‘clergy’ about this. It was what was always in the back of my mind anyway, part of what I sensed to be true. Mother Nature had always confirmed this.

And the idea of karma and rebirth (that not only had we lived before and would again, but had done this innumerable times) was more than I could hope for. After all, I was raised with the deep impression that (as the beer commercial says) “we only go around once” and that without warning we are tossed into this world and have to figure it out (heaven or hell) on our own in one shot.

It took years for me to realize that the great majority of people in the world believe in rebirth and still more years before I dared believe it myself, and that only those of us here in the West are stuck in the view that at our core, beneath everything, we are sinners.

The Buddhists teach just the opposite: that our obscurations, our so-called “sins” are just on the surface and that beneath that we all have Buddha Nature. All we have to do is to become aware of this by removing our obscurations. After all, the word “Buddha” simply means ‘awareness’ or “the one who is aware.”

It seemed too good to be true. But when I began meeting these high Tibetan lamas and rinpoches, arguably the most authentic authorities I have even known, they spoke of rebirth as a fact, as a personal experience and not as an abstract idea. Here were authorities who actually were authorities. Imagine that!

And it was those Four Thoughts that first got my attention, that turned my mind or that I recognized without a doubt to be the truth as I already dimly knew it. All I had to do was to work on removing my own obscurations, which is what mind training or ‘meditation’ is all about.

In succeeding blogs and as time permits, I will describe each of the four thoughts in more detail.