Karma

I make prostration to the Three Rare Supreme Gems. “The Throwing Star Weapon Striking the Vital Point of the Foe.” I make prostration to forceful Yamantaka. (1) In the case of peacocks strutting in jungles of poisonous plants, although medicine gardens have been finely...

The Complexity of Karma Karma is a topic that concerns what happens to us and why. It is something that is very relevant to all of us on a personal level, not something outside of the sphere of our lives. If we can start to understand karma and how it works, we can begin to...

Methodology Karma is a prominent topic discussed throughout the history of Indian thought, with several different explanations found in the varied schools of Indian philosophy, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. Even within the Buddhist fold, there are several different...

The founding of the Sautrantika tenet system is attributed to Kumaralata (Skt. Kumāralāta) (aka Kumaralabdha, Skt. Kumāralabdha) in the late first century CE. He rejected the Sarvastivada abhidharma sources in favor of relying exclusively on the Sarvastivada sutras. His views...

In accord with the Sarvastivada abhidharma texts and The Great Extensive Commentarial Treatise on Special Topics of Knowledge (Skt. Abhidharma-mahāvibhāṣa-śāstra), compiled in the late first century CE at the Fourth Buddhist Council, the Vaibhashika system that followed this...

The Topics for Investigation Our topic for this weekend seminar is “Karma: Who’s to Blame?” There are actually three topics involved in this discussion: karma, the self – “me” – and blame. If we want to examine this question, then we need to analyze and understand what we mean...

The Complexity of Karma This weekend we’re going to be speaking about karma, and although the topic is announced as “karma: free will versus determinism,” that will be just a part of what we’ll talk about. I’d like to go into some detail about what karma is, what the various...

The Four Creative-Energy Drops and the Mental Holograms to Which They Give Rise [For further elaboration, see: Kalachakra: The Four Creative Drops] Introduction As a Buddhist practice, Kalachakra fits within the context of the four noble truths and its practice is a method...

Samsara This evening, we’re going to begin a series of talks on how the understanding of voidness (emptiness) helps us to overcome our uncontrollably recurring rebirths, samsara. Samsara is not some place that we want to escape from and go instead to some transcendent realm...

There are several different discussions of karma in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. I should also point out that all of them are quite different from the Theravada presentation of how karma works. Within Tibetan Buddhism, there are three basic explanations. We are going to discuss only...