Emptiness

The Tantra Tradition of Mahamudra The text continues, As for the actual basic methods, although there are many ways of asserting mahamudra, there are two when divided according to the sutras and tantras. On the basis of our efforts to eliminate obstacles and build up...

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...

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...

Verses 8 through 37 Reaffirming Our Motivation and Review Look at all the people around you, whether they are close or distant, rich or poor, all of us are equal in wanting happiness and no suffering. The best way to accomplish this is the practice of Dharma. We have fully...

Key Elements of Deepest Bodhichitta We have spoken about how to develop deepest bodhichitta, and we’ve seen that it is very important and helpful for being able to do the practice of tonglen, giving and taking. Now, we are ready to discuss the development of relative,...

The Benefits of Taking the Body of a Buddha-Figure as the Basis for Voidness in Tantra  The next point in our four-point analysis of why tantra is more efficient than sutra is that there’s a special basis for voidness. When we focus on voidness, voidness is the total absence...

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...

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 (ldog-pa). How do we know that something is not anything other than itself?...

Introduction We’ve been going through, in summary, the main points of the sixteen chapters of Aryadeva’s Four Hundred Verse Treatise. And we saw that the first eight chapters speak about how to rid ourselves of incorrect views concerning conventional truth. And now we’re ready...

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...