Cognition

Intellectual Understanding vs Intuitive Understanding  Let’s examine what an intellectual understanding of something is versus an intuitive understanding of it. First, I should say the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist literature on epistemology does not include these classifications...

Objects of Cognition There are four (types) of cognitive objects: (1) appearing, (2) cognitively taken, (3) conceptually implied and (4) involved. Appearing objects and cognitively taken objects are mutually inclusive. Except for (those having) appearances of falling hairs and...

 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...

Deceptive Cognition or Seemingly Bare Cognition There are some further ways of knowing besides the standard list of seven. The one delineated in most detail is deceptive cognition (’khrul-shes). Deceptive cognition is also called “seemingly bare cognition” (mngon-sum...

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...

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...

Our minds give rise to many different kinds of appearances. To avoid confusion, we need to recognize and discriminate among the various different ways in which our minds make things appear to us.

Nonexistent phenomena can be objects of cognition, but not objects of valid cognition, only of distorted cognition.

With non-determining cognition, the involved object of the cognition appears clearly and accurately, but without a decisive determination of it.