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...

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 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...

Sources of the Madhyamaka View of Karma Let us survey the Madhyamaka view of karma, starting with Nagarjuna (Klu-grub, Skt. Nāgārjuna) in the late second century CE. It follows the Sarvastivada abhidharma assertion, also found in the Mahayana sutras, that the karmic impulses...

The name of this work is The Wheel of Sharp Weapons Effectively Striking the Heart of the Foe. I pay heartfelt homage to you, Yamantaka; your wrath is opposed to the Great Lord of Death. [1] [notes by Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey: see below] (1) In jungles of poisonous plants...

Part One: Contrasting Bodhisattvas with Ordinary Beings Two Traditions for Developing Conventional Bodhichitta To destroy self-grasping and self-cherishing and to attain enlightenment, all mind training texts emphasize tonglen. This is the practice of giving and taking as...

Karma: Neither Deterministic nor Predetermined We’ve been discussing karma, and we saw that there are various systems with which karma is explained. However, what we are speaking about when we talk about karma is our compulsive behavior, what brings on our compulsive behavior,...

Brief Review  In the first session, we introduced the topic of Karma: Who’s to Blame? We saw that the approach we need to follow is an analytic one in which we examine each of the three components: karma, self and blame. If we want to get a harmonious picture of how these...

Formulation of the Topic for Analysis  In Buddhism, a temporal interval is what we’re speaking about when we talk about time; it’s an interval between the occurrence of a cause and the occurrence of an effect. What is most common in Buddhism (and what all Buddhist tenet...

Review of Mental Urges in Karmic Actions of the Mind In the previous part of this series, we modified Vasubandhu’s Sautrantika presentation of the division between performer impulses (byed-pa’i las, Skt. kāritrakarma) and exertional impulses (rtsol-ba-can-gyi las, Skt....