Cause and Effect

The Necessity of Dharma-Lite before Real Thing Dharma When we’re working on the bodhisattva path, we’re trying to overcome our selfish concern, and have concern just for others. However, we’re not going to overcome all of our disturbing emotions until we become an arhat, a...

The Five Types of Results Let’s look now at the presentation of the five types of results. Ripened Results We have ripened results and these are the unobstructed, unspecified items included in the five aggregates. These are things that are neither constructive nor...

Questions First, a few more questions. On a daily basis when can you think about meditation on voidness, how should it be done?  How it should be done is that we try to recognize how things appear in this deceiving way, and almost like a mantra, we could say, “Garbage! This is...

There are three types of karmic aftermath. The first is karmic force or karmic potential. These terms are two different ways of referring to the same thing. There are two types and they’re usually translated as “merit” (bsod-nams) and “sin” (sdig-pa) or something like that,...

Brief Review Definition of Karma We have been discussing karma or, more fully karmic impulses, as a compulsiveness that is associated with our ways of acting, speaking and thinking. The karmic impulse for an action of the mind is the compelling urge that drives our thinking...

Six Types of Causes Our discussion has brought up several questions and topics. We can add more pieces of the puzzle by looking into these topics so that we have a larger picture of what’s involved with karma. One of these topics is the topic of the different types of causes,...

We’ve been speaking about dependent arising, and we’ve seen that it fits together with the topic of voidness – there is no such thing as a self-establishing nature that, by its own power, establishes the existence of conventional objects and what they conventionally are. Their...

Once we have a little bit of an understanding of the twelve links of dependent arising and how our uncontrollably recurring rebirth, samsara, actually works, then we can focus with close placement of mindfulness on the feelings in terms of being the true origins of suffering....

Difficulties with Terminology When Studying Karma One of the difficulties in studying karma is that the Tibetan terminology has many different meanings. For example, in Tibetan, the potentials and tendencies can also be called habits. It’s very confusing that the Tibetan terms...

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...