Emptiness

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...

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...

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...

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?...

Review We were discussing the various methods used in Buddhism to strengthen the evolving Buddha-nature factor that we identified within the network of good qualities, namely our innate joy, our ability to experience things with happiness. As you recall, in order to strengthen...

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...

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,...

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...

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! This is...

Conceptual Cognition of Space-like Voidness Needs to Induce Zestful Vigor Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche II: Lama Tsongkhapa is saying that whatever Nyingma is saying is totally wrong. It is too early for us. Dr. Berzin: What do you mean by “too early for us”? Okay, now here it...