Emptiness

Sources of the Text I’d like to explain a very important text in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition called The Seven Point Mind Training by a great master from the Kadam tradition, Geshe Chekawa. This teaching is primarily based on the practice of changing the viewpoint of self...

Introduction  Concerning the life of Tsongkhapa, one of the most important points is what a great revolutionary Tsongkhapa was. Through all his tremendous efforts in meditation and preliminary practices building up positive force and so on, he gained a newer and deeper...

This weekend I’ve been asked to speak about self-voidness and other-voidness, what is called in Tibetan rangtong (rang-stong) and zhentong (gzhan-stong; shentong). This is a very advanced, very complicated and very important topic. Therefore, it requires a great deal of...

Introduction If we want to summarize the Buddhist teachings in one word that would describe what Buddha was trying to impart to us, I think that word would be “realism.” Realism means seeing clearly what is reality, and getting rid of our unawareness and confusion about that....

Conceptual Fabrication – A Way of Being Aware or Conventional Objects Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II: All four Tibetan traditions share this verse (XVIII.5) of Nagarjuna in common: From the depletion of karmic impulses and disturbing emotions (there is) liberation. Karmic...

Review: The Context for Meditating on the False "Me" Yesterday we began our discussion of how to meditate on the voidness of the false “me” experiencing the four noble truths. We looked at the general context within which this is studied and meditated upon. We saw that this...

The next set of prayers are prayers not to be confused about the practice of the path. This is divided into two sections: Prayers to not be confused about the words concerning meditationPrayers to not be confused about the meaning of the words. Prayer Not To Be Confused about...

How to Integrate the Teachings Before we began today, I asked you to try to remember the main points of what we discussed last evening. This is a very important thing to try to do after we have heard a lecture, or after we’ve read something. I am not just referring to reading...

We were speaking about voidness (emptiness) and we saw that voidness is a negatingly known phenomenon, it’s a negation. We know it by negating something. If we put the word voidness into different terms, then we could say that it is an absence of something. There are many...

Introduction When we speak about the two truths in Chittamatra and the other Mahayana schools, we’re not talking about two different types of true phenomenon, we’re going to talk about the true truths. But speaking about the two truths that are descriptive of all phenomena,...