Cognition

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...

 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...

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...

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

An overview of the Gelug presentation and some of its ramifications concerning the view of valid cognition.

Understanding the difference between the definitions of these three terms helps us to deconstruct conceptual thoughts that we have.

The Indian Buddhist tenet systems present graded levels of understanding of how things exist like an illusion, which we can use in our daily lives.

What does it mean to understand something, as opposed to knowing it or simply apprehending it?