Cognition

The Meaning of “Mind” in Buddhism I’ve been asked to come here this weekend to teach about appearances (snang-ba), how the mind makes appearances and the various problems that are associated with that. This is not a very simple topic, because in fact all our problems come...

Introduction This evening we are going to be speaking about ways of knowing; in other words cognition theory, and how it is that we know things – how our cognition actually works. This is an important topic since it relates very much to how we experience the four noble...

Introduction  This weekend we are going to be speaking about negations (dgag-pa) and affirmations (sgrub-pa). Although there are quite different explanations of this in the different Tibetan traditions, we’ll present here only the presentation that we find in the Gelug...

Review We’ve been speaking about appearances and how the mind is involved with that. We’ve seen that when we speak about appearances, we’re speaking about something that appears to the mind and has a deep relationship with mind. And when we speak about mind, we’re speaking...

Cognition Theory: Cognition of Commonsense Objects Last session we looked at several unique points that Tsongkhapa made and contrasted some of them with the non-Gelug positions on them. Since the presentation I gave was quite sophisticated and advanced, I’d like to start this...

Non-Determining Cognition A knowing (of something) that is a non-determining cognition is one whose involved object is an objective entity that appears clearly but without decisiveness. When divided, there are three: (1) (non-determining) sensory bare cognition, (2)...

Review Yesterday we began our discussion of the types of appearances that the mind gives rise to. We saw that in order to understand this, we need to understand what we mean by “mind.” We saw that what it’s referring to is mental activity, which is the individual, subjective...

Mind We’ve seen the general application and relevance of this topic, ways of knowing. There are additional general things that we also need to understand in order to be able to go further into the individual seven ways of knowing. The first of these is to understand what we...

Intermittently Manifest Mental Factors Like primary consciousness, the five types of deep awareness and the ten ever-functioning and ascertaining mental factors, the rest of the mental factors also have no beginning. Although they share the same essential nature as the...

Atomic Particles Among forms of physical phenomena are atomic particles (rdul-phran). Although atomic particles do not exist as external phenomena; nevertheless, visible objects, such as clay vases, are made of them. Unlike the Vaibhashika and Sautrantika assertion of atomic...