Four Buddha Bodies

Meditation practice is divided into two sections: Brief explanationDetailed explanation. Prayer to Practice Mahamudra Meditation Properly Verse 15 gives a brief explanation of mahamudra meditation practice with a prayer to be able to practice mahamudra meditation properly....

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...

Do a Buddha’s extraphysical and extrasensory powers make any sense or are they just interesting stories?

Buddha-nature encompasses a whole network of many different factors that will enable us to become a Buddha.

The samsara-builder network of positive force gives rise to a samsaric body and samsaric happiness, while the enlightenment-builder network of positive force ripens into to a Buddha Form Body and untainted bliss. There is a similar distinction with the samsara-builder and...