Emptiness

I have a stack of questions here in front of me. Let me try to answer some of them during the course of explaining what will happen today during the first day of the actual empowerment. Following the Visualizations One thing to keep in mind about what is going on here is...

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...

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,...

Review of the Conventional “Me” Being an Imputation on the Five Aggregates We’ve been speaking about voidness (emptiness) and we have seen that voidness is a negation phenomenon, something that we know by negating or refuting something else. What we are refuting, when we know...

We have been speaking about voidness, which is an absence of impossible ways of existing, and we have been presenting it in a very general way, using the term a bit loosely, so that we can incorporate in our discussion of voidness the various levels of understanding of...

Fine Points about Categories There was an interesting question Ulla brought up this morning that I thought about. That is: how do we know a double negative? We were speaking in terms of specifiers. How do you know that something is not anything other than itself? Let’s say...

Review  We have been speaking about the importance of understanding voidness, whether we speak in terms of self-voidness or other-voidness, and we’ve seen that it is necessary for overcoming and achieving a true stopping of the true sufferings that we all experience and the...

Chapters 9 to 12 Nine: Indicating the Meditations for Refuting Static Functional Phenomena (1) All (functional phenomena) arise as a fact of being the result (of a collection of causes and circumstances). Therefore, there’s no such thing as a static (functional phenomenon...

How to Approach the Voidness Cognized in an Arya’s Total Absorption Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II: Now, the biggest debate regarding Prasangika in Sakya, Kagyu, Nyingma and Gelugpa concerns differences in how to approach the voidness that is seen in total absorption. They all...

Review We have discussed the source of our problems in life, our ignorance or unawareness concerning behavioral cause and effect and the nature of reality. Either we don’t understand them, or we understand them incorrectly. Because of our unawareness of the nature of reality,...