Four Buddha Bodies

Meditation Practices on the Laws of Karma Yesterday we talked about the laws of karma, the laws of behavioral cause and effect. In terms of karma in general, the main practice entails specifically to restrain yourself from committing any of the ten destructive, or nonvirtuous,...

Buddha-Nature What do family-traits mean? A family-trait is “gotra,” which is family or caste. The traits are characteristics of someone who belongs to a certain family or caste. It can be the family or caste of those who can become Buddhas, so the Buddha-family. There are...

Transforming Our Behavior through Our Thoughts We’ve covered the first two points – the preliminaries and the actual training in bodhichitta. Now we’re ready for the third of the seven points, which is transforming difficult circumstances into the path to enlightenment. This...

(1) Closer Analogies The Kalachakra Tantra has many unique features not shared in common with the other anuttarayoga Buddha-figure systems. The upward and downward analogies of general anuttarayoga still pertain to its practice, except that Kalachakra does not entail practice...

Review Yesterday we were speaking about the seven diamond-strong points which are presented here in the text. We saw that these seven are the Buddhas, the Dharma, the Sangha, the source (which refers to Buddha-nature), then enlightenment, the qualities of that state, and the...

Review We were speaking this morning about deepest bodhichitta. And we saw that it was not enough just to have relative bodhichitta, either: Just the aspiring state in which we aspire to attain our not-yet-happening enlightenmentOr, in addition, the pledged state of aspiring...

Exceptional Resolve  The next step after tonglen (giving and taking) is developing the exceptional resolve (lhag-bsam), which is the even stronger wish to be able to eliminate all the suffering of others and bring them the happiness of liberation and enlightenment. What is...

The samsara-builder networks of positive force and deep awareness are involved with perpetuating our samsaric existence, while the pure builder ones bring about our attainment of liberation and enlightenment.

The tulku system of reincarnate lamas is unique to Tibetan Buddhism. Learn the minimum stage of practice required for generating a line of tulkus.

Understanding and appreciating Kalachakra’s unique features and methods for attaining enlightenment grow based on first understanding and appreciating the unique features of Mahayana sutra, general tantra and anuttarayoga tantra.