Emptiness

Meditation on emptiness as the way to develop deepest bodhichitta.

A deep understanding of the various components of an empowerment is important for gaining the most benefit from the experience.

Emptiness, or voidness, means a total absence of impossible ways of existing. Nothing exists in an impossible way.

Tsongkhapa explains the factors required for effective meditation in both sutra and tantra practice and how both practices are necessary for cognizing voidness (emptiness) with a joined state of shamatha and vipashyana.

To know how to cognize voidness, both conceptually and non-conceptually, and thus how to rid ourselves of the true causes of our true sufferings, we need to know the steps that each Indian Buddhist tenet system explains for the meditative process for realizing voidness.

The Gelug presentation of meditations on the different Indian Buddhist tenet systems concerning the selflessness of persons and phenomena.

Shabkar presents Nagarjuna and Tsongkhapa’s explanation of how voidness and cause and effect reinforce each other.

When voidness is cognized conceptually, its superficial truth appears; this is known as denumerable voidness. When voidness is cognized non-conceptually, an absolute absence of truly established existence appears; this is known as non-denumerable voidness.

A concise lam-rim text on how renunciation, bodhichitta and a correct view of voidness (emptiness) are the three pathways of mind essential for reaching enlightenment through either the sutra or tantra vehicles of practice.

The Fourth Panchen Lama presents the sutra method of mahamudra meditation for gaining shamatha on the conventional nature of the mind and then joined shamatha and vipashyana on the mind’s deepest nature, its voidness (emptiness).