Cognition

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...

 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...

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...

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...

Disturbing emotions occur not only in conceptual cognitions, which are always mental cognition, but also in non-conceptual sensory and mental cognition.

Distorted cognition is a way of knowing that takes its own object in an inverted manner.

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.

To understand the Gelug Prasangika presentation of dependent arising and the voidness of self-established existence, we need to understand the distinctions between imputation, mental labeling and designation.

Only the omniscient awareness of a Buddha can cognize all the causal factors that affect which specific “presently-happening result” arises from a karmic tendency.