Incorrect Consideration

Chapters 1 to 4 [Translator’s note: This loose translation was made in 1978, with extensive material in parentheses added from Gyaltsab Je’s commentary and from explanations by Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey and Geshe Sonam Rinchen in order to make the terse verses more readable and...

Developing Respect for Aryadeva Aryadeva was a very great Indian master who was born in Sri Lanka. There are two accounts of how he was born. One was that he was born to a royal family, and the other account is that he was born from a lotus, like Guru Rinpoche. And he lived...

Introduction: Examining the Self and “Me” Our topic for this series of talks is the healthy development of the self through the lam-rim graded stages. The “self” is very central to the Buddhist spiritual path. We can see this even when we set our motivation for listening to...

The Motivation for Working with the Five Aggregates We began our discussion by exploring why we want to learn about the five aggregates that make up each moment of our experience. What is their importance?  It’s a very standard approach in Buddhism to first examine the...

The Relation between Incorrect Consideration of Nonstatic as Static and of Suffering as Happiness We were speaking about our incorrect consideration of things that change. We consider that something like a relationship is going to last forever, whereas, in fact, it is...

The Five Aggregates So, now the Mahayana practice of the four close placements of mindfulness. The way that I’ll present this is the way that His Holiness the Dalai Lama explains it, based on various Tibetan commentaries to the Indian Prajnaparamita literature, which is where...

Incorrect Consideration of the Self We’ve been talking about incorrect consideration and, in the standard presentation, there are four types of incorrect consideration. They are to consider what is nonstatic and impermanent as being static and eternal, to consider what is...

Review We have been speaking about incorrect consideration, and if we think in terms of incorrect consideration of “me,” a person, or a self, whether it’s with respect to ourselves or others, what’s incorrect here is to consider that there is a “me” that’s separate from a body...

 Review Understanding Voidness We have been speaking about voidness, or emptiness, in general. We’ve seen that it refers to an absence of impossible ways of existing. There are impossible ways of existing that refer only to persons or individuals, and then there are impossible...

An analysis of static phenomena, which are validly knowable and unaffected by causes and circumstances, and nonstatic phenomena, which are impermanent, changing from moment to moment.