Emptiness

Generating a Bodhichitta Aim Earlier, we saw that once genuine, pure renunciation is generated in our mental continuum, that is the point when we are truly on the Dharma path. This is the start of the path. We may have heard about the Mahayana and Hinayana paths and might even...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Questions First, a few more questions. On a daily basis when can you think about meditation on voidness, how should it be done?  How it should be done is that we try to recognize how things appear in this deceiving way, and almost like a mantra, we could say, “Garbage!...

Review  We’ve been discussing the three principal pathways of mind. The first is renunciation, with an added preliminary step helpful for us Westerners, which is turning away from the obsession with immediate gratification to taking interest in what’s going to happen to...

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...

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...

How to Refute the Assertions of Lower Tenet Schools The way in which we should understand how the position of a higher school of tenets undermines or damages another lower school can be understood in terms of how Madhyamaka undermines and refutes the Chittamatra assertion in...