Emptiness

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....

Background to the Text This weekend I’m going to be speaking about The Heart Sutra. Actually, with a longer title, it’s The Essence of Far-Reaching Discriminating Awareness, the Vanquishing Lady Surpassing All. When we talk about far-reaching discriminating awareness – and...

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...

Three Layers of Unawareness Voidness (stong-pa-nyid, Skt. śūnyatā; emptiness) is a total absence of impossible ways of existing: impossible means there is no such thing. Here, we are speaking specifically about the voidness of impossible ways in which the conventionally...

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,...

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...

Cognition Theory: Cognition of Commonsense Objects Last session we looked at several unique points that Tsongkhapa made and contrasted some of them with the non-Gelug positions on them. Since the presentation I gave was quite sophisticated and advanced, I’d like to start this...

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...

Question about Mediation of Disputes at Work When we try to apply this principle of looking at the validity of others’ points of view, particularly in a work situation when you’re a manager, sometimes we can be overwhelmed by the view of the workers and it’s hard to...