Disturbing Emotions

Questions Is There an Inherent Right to Happiness? Do beings have an inherent right to happiness? Do parents have a responsibility to take care of their children and love them as much as possible? I would say yes, if we make the decision to become a parent. However I can’t...

The Three Objects and the Three Poisonous Attitudes The text continues with what we do after formal meditation on the tonglen giving and taking practice for developing relative bodhichitta. It says: (In regard to) the three objects, (take) the three poisonous attitudes and...

Let’s continue with our format, which is to speak about various topics within tantra based on your questions and interests. The Meaning of a Deity’s Hand ImplementsWhat about the weapon-like instruments that the various Buddha-figures are holding, is there a practical way that...

Jealousy and other disturbing emotions are symptoms of a larger problem: our basic, fundamental ignorance of how phenomena actually exist. Here, we look more deeply at convention, categories, and how things exist, and how we can use an understanding of it all to overcome...

Review of the Lam-rim Initial Scope Teachings We’ve been discussing how to develop the self in a healthy way through the lam-rim graded stages. We have determined that there is a conventional self, and that it exists, moment to moment, as an imputational phenomenon on the...

Verses 18 through 24 Brief Review We have this incredibly precious human life, on the basis of which we can attain liberation and enlightenment. It’s very rare to have such a rebirth. It passes quickly and can end at any moment, so we need to take full advantage of it. To do...

Review of the First Link: Unawareness We have started our discussion of these 12 links, and we saw that they describe the mechanism for how we generate our uncontrollably recurring aggregates – the body and mind and so on – of each lifetime, and specifically our tainted...

Both grasping at mental activity's natural facets for security and fearing them as a threat arise from projecting and believing in dualistic and triplistic appearances. Deconstructing these confusing appearances leaves us with merely the experience of these natural functions....

Question about Understanding Words  When we are, for instance, doing a meditation retreat in a Buddhist context and reciting mantras, although we might recite it and we have some concept of the audio category of the sound of the mantra, we could have no idea of the meaning....

Brief Review of the Initial Level of Motivation The teachings for someone of an initial level motivation have five main points to meditate upon: awareness of the preciousness of the fully endowed human body and the difficulty of obtaining it, death, impermanence and the...