Dependent Arising

Review We’ve been speaking about voidness or emptiness, and we’ve seen that voidness is the total absence of impossible ways of accounting for, or establishing the existence of validly knowable objects. It deals with the issue of how to account for the fact that there are...

We have been speaking about voidness, which is an absence of impossible ways of existing, and we have been presenting it in a very general way, using the term a bit loosely, so that we can incorporate in our discussion of voidness the various levels of understanding of...

Review of the Conventional “Me” Being an Imputation on the Five Aggregates We’ve been speaking about voidness (emptiness) and we have seen that voidness is a negation phenomenon, something that we know by negating or refuting something else. What we are refuting, when we know...

Accounting for Validly Knowing Objects as Being This or That How do we account for something being validly knowable as this or that? We can’t account for it by means of some self-establishing nature inside something that makes it this or that. We can only account for it...

We have been talking about the self or “me,” which is imputed onto the stream of continuity of our aggregate factors that make up each moment of our experience. That conventional “me” is what the word or concept of “me” refers to on the basis of these ever-changing aggregates...

Three Divisions of the Complete Stage After the generation stage, we go on to the complete stage practices. This is explained in three divisions: The basis, or basic situation that we are dealing with The path to follow The result that is manifest. The Basis The first of...

Review We’ve been speaking about conventional objects, which are things that can be validly known as this or that: as a teacher, as a student, as a given activity such as learning or teaching, as a given object such as a table or a chair, and as an adjective as well, such as...

Promise to Compose The text continues, As for the methods that can lead you to know, face to face, the actual (deepest) nature of mind, I shall now set out the guideline teachings of my root guru, Sanggye Yeshe, who (as his name literally means) is (the embodiment of) the...

Going Beyond a Settled Mind: Vipashyana Once you have gained a stilled and settled state of mind of shamatha, one that is held with great flexibility of mind and exhilaration and ecstasy, just to have this by itself, this single-pointedness of a stilled and settled state of...

We’ve been speaking about dependent arising, and we’ve seen that it fits together with the topic of voidness – there is no such thing as a self-establishing nature that, by its own power, establishes the existence of conventional objects and what they conventionally are. Their...