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...

We started our discussion of conceptual cognition last time and I asked you to think of a dog and examine: what is it that appears? Did you think of all dogs in general? Or did a mental picture of a specific dog come to your mind? Answer please. My dog. So, a specific...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 us...

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...

The methods for cultivating boon experiences and stable realizations is divided into two sections: The methods for cultivating boon experiencesThe methods for cultivating stable realizations. Prayer to Cultivate Boon Experiences Properly Verse 20 is a prayer to be able to...