Disturbing Emotions

We looked at the unawareness of behavioral cause and effect and how that underlies our experience of unhappiness. Now we need to look at the second type of unawareness, a much deeper type of unawareness, which is unawareness of reality: how we exist, how others exist and how...

Verses 2 through 4 Today, you are going to listen to me talk. But the words coming out of my mouth have already been spoken by the Buddha himself many times, and by His Holiness the Dalai Lama many times. Gyalse Togme Zangpo, the author of the text, is teaching us indirectly. ...

Review In the first session, we started our discussion of the five types of deep awareness. These refer to Buddha-nature factors, which we all have that enable us to achieve the state of a Buddha – the various Buddha Bodies. We discussed how we can work with these on a basis,...

Part One: Contrasting Bodhisattvas with Ordinary Beings Two Traditions for Developing Conventional Bodhichitta To destroy self-grasping and self-cherishing and to attain enlightenment, all mind training texts emphasize tonglen. This is the practice of giving and taking as...

Not Getting Angry toward Those Who Are Negative toward Us When people react a long time very negatively toward me, I have a problem to still have this feeling of love and kindness toward this person. Sometimes I feel I need to be tough with this person; it can’t go on like...

Review In our last session we presented the first stages in the process for working ourselves up to developing bodhichitta. We saw that the first type of equanimity that we cultivate is the equanimity that tries to rid ourselves, at least provisionally, of gross disturbing...

The next three links – eight, nine, and ten – are the causal links that actualize (bsgrub-byed-kyi yan-lag). They are what activate the karmic aftermath of throwing karma in the moments preceding death so that the karmic results will actualize. Thus, they serve as the...

Disturbing Emotions Are the Enemy Now for verse three of the Eight Verses of Mind Training: (3) Whatever I am doing, may I check the flow of my mind, and the moment that conceptions or disturbing emotions arise, since they debilitate myself and others, may I confront and...

Contrasting Bodhisattvas with Ordinary Beings The text, Wheel of Sharp Weapons, begins with Dharmarakshita contrasting bodhisattvas with ordinary beings. Bodhisattvas practice tonglen – giving and taking – taking from others the three poisonous disturbing states of mind or...

Fear of "A Breach of Guru-Devotion" Almost every classical text on the disciple-mentor relationship includes a section on the hellish suffering that follows from what is usually translated as "a breach of guru-devotion." The material derives mostly from Ashvaghosha's vivid...