Grasping for Impossible Existence

Unawareness, Disturbing Emotions and Karmic Aftermath Have No Beginning We have already established that each of us has an individual mental continuum that has no beginning or end, and that we’ll continue to take rebirth. Without beginning, our mental continuum has also been...

The First of Three Layers of the Impossible “Me” to Be Refuted There are three layers of impossible “me” that we need to refute. We can differentiate more layers, but here we’ll just deal with the main three. Each progressive layer is deeper than the one before it. We project...

Grasping for a Self-Sufficiently Knowable “Me” Can Also Be Doctrinally Based First, let me add one further point. While almost all the Indian Buddhist tenet systems say this grasping for a self-sufficiently knowable “me” is just automatically-arising, according to Prasangika...

The Indian Buddhist tenet systems differ in their views of the voidness or total absence of impossible ways that establish the existence of something and in their views of what establishes its conventional existence.

Gelug Prasangika’s presentation of coarse disturbing emotions, which are based on grasping for a self-sufficiently knowable “me,” and the underlying subtle disturbing emotions, which are based solely on the automatically-arising grasping for self-established existence.

Grasping for truly established existence entails both projecting an appearance of such an impossible mode of existence and believing it corresponds to reality. Dormant grasping for it occurs when one or both aspects of grasping are not manifest.

Nonexistent phenomena can be objects of cognition, but not objects of valid cognition, only of distorted cognition.

By applying methods for developing patience, we can avoid the problems that anger causes.

This variable of pure and impure refers to both aspects of the mental hologram: what it is and how it appears to exist.

An overview of the various Indian tenet systems’ view on how we view ourselves as persons in relation to the samsara-perpetuating five aggregates.