Buddha-Nature

Tantra as a Structure on Which to Weave Sutra Practice This evening I’ve been asked to speak a little bit about tantra in general. When we look at the word tantra, it’s a Sanskrit word and what it means is the warp of a loom. A loom is something that you weave cloth on, and...

Today, we are gathered in a very special place, Bodh Gaya, the site in India where the most skillful, compassionate, and kind universal teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha, manifested his state of enlightenment. The Dharma teaching we shall be dealing with here on this occasion is...

Precious Human Life Today, we are at Lama Tsongkhapa Institute, which is headed by two great spiritual masters. We have come together for spiritual teachings, and we are all very fortunate to have this opportunity. I am very happy to be here with you today. In general, it is...

What Is Buddha-Nature? Our topic for this seminar is the five Buddha wisdoms, or as I prefer to call them, the five types of deep awareness. I find the term five types of wisdom to be less accurate and helpful because everybody has these, including the worm and the cockroach....

The six-session yoga is a practice which helps us to keep the commitments from receiving an initiation or empowerment in the anuttarayoga class of tantra. And so this evening what I’d like to do is give a little bit of introduction and background to what’s going on with this...

Review We started our discussion of how to make our tantra practice more effective. We saw that the most fundamental thing to start with is to understand what tantra is and what the essential points of tantra practice are – how does it work. Also, we saw that the word “tantra”...

Proper Motivation and Explanation of the Title and Homage Before beginning, we set the motivation of wishing to listen to these teachings in order to actually achieve the state of enlightenment in order to benefit everyone. If we set this type of motivation, the benefits of...

The Five Systems of Five Buddha-Families  We’ve seen that when we speak about the five Buddha-families, if we look at it from the dimension of what will develop into all the aspects of a Buddha, we have this one set of five: mental activity, good qualities, verbal expression,...

Explanation of the Title With these points in mind, let us now turn to the text. The title of this classic is, in Sanskrit, Mahayana-uttaratantra Shastra and in Tibetan Theg-pa chen-po rgyud bla-ma'i bstan-bcos (An Indicative Composition on a Vast Vehicle of Mind, the...

Review We’ve been talking about the various mental factors, and we’ve seen that there are ten that function all the time and help mental activity to function. We don’t want to get rid of them. In fact, we can’t get rid of them without destroying mental activity itself....