Cognition

 Mental Factors There are primary consciousnesses and mental factors. In any cognition there are always these two kinds of conscious phenomena, which share five congruent features (mtshungs-ldan lnga). They share a common (1) object (yul), (2) reliance (rten), (3) mental...

Tainted and Untainted Appearances We’ve looked at the variables affecting the type of mental holograms that our mental activity gives rise to. These are the variables of “accurate and inaccurate” and “pure and impure” appearances. We’ve seen that these variables refer to both...

Understanding Different Interpretations and Analysis in Buddhist Schools We have presented the Sautrantika way of enumerating the different ways of knowing. As we go deeper in our studies we find that there are certain variants to be found. For instance, in Asanga’s...

Brief Review Of the six far-reaching attitudes, generosity and so forth, we began discussing the sixth one, the far-reaching attitude of discriminating awareness. Prior to that were the verses concerning a combined state of a stilled and settled mind and an exceptionally...

Gaining Liberation To gain liberation from uncontrollably recurring rebirth, samsara, we need to reverse the mechanism of the twelve links. We do this by ridding ourselves of the first link, unawareness or ignorance about how the self – me and all others exist. When we have...

An overview of the two general positions regarding the main points of cognition theory of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

To know how to cognize voidness, both conceptually and non-conceptually, and thus how to rid ourselves of the true causes of our true sufferings, we need to know the steps that each Indian Buddhist tenet system explains for the meditative process for realizing voidness.

Mental activity is made up of six types of consciousness that are aware of an object as being a sight, a sound, and so on, and 51 types of mental factors that qualify or help with the cognition of that object.

An introduction to the system of ways of knowing (lorig), a major component of the Buddhist map of the mind. The text covers the various ways in which we cognize objects – valid, non-valid, conceptual, non-conceptual and so on.

We need a detailed map of all possible ways of knowing and states of mind so that we can always identify what is occurring on our mental continuum, so that we can guide ourselves toward any constructive goal.