Buddha-Nature

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....

Question about Other Voidness Your Holiness spoke of the other voidness view of the Jonangpas yesterday. Could Your Holiness say something about the other voidness view of Mipam. Is this something different? Other voidness, as was discussed yesterday, was the view presented...

Buddha-Nature  What do family-traits mean?  A family-trait is “gotra,” which is family or caste. The traits are characteristics of someone who belongs to a certain family or caste. It can be the family or caste of those who can become Buddhas, so the Buddha-family....

The Dharma Gem The first of the seven vajra points was the Clear Evolved Ones, the Buddhas. Now, we are up to discussing the second point, the Dharma Gem. For this, just as there were eight qualities for the Buddha Gem, there are eight qualities for the Dharma Gem. Of the...

Review  Yesterday, we were speaking about the seven diamond-strong points which are presented here in the text. We saw that these seven are the Buddhas, the Dharma, the Sangha, the source (which refers to Buddha-nature), then enlightenment, the qualities of that state and...

Review We were speaking this morning about deepest bodhichitta. We saw that it was not enough just to have relative bodhichitta, either: Just the aspiring state in which we aspire to attain our not-yet-happening enlightenment Or, in addition,...

Verses 15 and 16 Verse 15: Not Becoming Discouraged When Meditating on Bodhichitta Remembering Buddha-Nature for Overcoming Becoming Discouraged And when a feeling of discouragement arises, let me praise the glories of the mind. This is speaking about a major problem...

The Natural Purity of the Mind The family trait that allows for the attainment of the Corpuses of a Buddha is an unaffected, static phenomenon; it is the abiding family-trait, the one that abides as our self-nature. The family traits that become the Corpuses of a Buddha are...

The 64 Good Qualities of a Buddha There are two types of good qualities enjoyed by all of the Buddhas. These are the 32 good qualities that come from partings and the 32 good qualities that ripen. That makes 64 good qualities mentioned here. These 32 qualities that are...

Bringing About the Results That, at Present, Have Not Yet Happened In our previous session, I mentioned that we have causal and resultant refuge, or safe direction. The causal one is taking, as the safe direction to go toward, the true stoppings and true pathway minds that...