Emptiness

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...

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...

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...

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!...

Introduction We’ve been going through, in summary, the main points of the 16 chapters of Aryadeva’s Four Hundred Verse Treatise. We saw that the first eight chapters speak about how to rid ourselves of incorrect views concerning conventional truth. Now we’re ready to look at...

Different Levels of Dependent Arising 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...

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...

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...

Verses 18 through 24 Brief Review We have this incredibly precious human life, on the basis of which we can attain liberation and enlightenment. It’s very rare to have such a rebirth. It passes quickly and can end at any moment, so we need to take full advantage of it. To do...