Karma

If I explain like I have been doing, is this something that you find beneficial? I ask because there are many different ways the Dharma can be taught. Dr. Berzin: Rinpoche is asking for some feedback. Is this a suitable manner to present this material for you? If you find this...

How a Mental Urge, and Not a Revealing Form, Functions as a Karmic Impulse for Actions of the Body  Vasubandhu explains in A Discussion for the Establishment of Karma (Las-grub-pa’i rab-tu byed-pa, Skt. Karmasiddhiprakaraṇa) (Derge vol. 136, 144B): Suppose (Vaibhashika) asks,...

Explanations of Karma If we’re going to work to overcome karma, to rid ourselves of this compulsiveness in our behavior, we need to know how karma works. There are several detailed explanations of this to be found in Buddhist literature. In general, there is the explanation...

Why Haven’t We Already Built Up Enough Positive Force to Develop Bodhichitta? We’ve seen that in order to strive for bodhichitta for the first time, we need to have heard about enlightenment and understand it a little bit and have confident belief that it exists and it’s...

Review We need to set the proper motivation; namely, that we wish to benefit all beings and to achieve a state of enlightenment in order to be able to do so. With this motivation, listen to these teachings on The Foundation for Good Qualities with the sincere wish to put them...

We were talking about the first link in this chain of dependent arising and we saw that this is the link of unawareness and it has to do with unawareness of how persons exist, both ourselves and others. And the main emphasis that we need to put first is in terms of...

Review True Sufferings We began our discussion with how the cognition of voidness liberates us from uncontrollably recurring rebirth, samsara. To understand that, we need to understand what actually the true sufferings are that we want to become liberated from. Why is it that...

The Relation between Reinforced and Enacted Karmic Impulses and Inciting and Incited Karmic Impulses  One of the main sources about karma from the Abhidharma Basket is Revealing Karma (Las gdags-pa, Skt. Karmaprajñapti) by Buddha’s disciple Maudgalyayana. In it, Maudgalyayana...

Further Background Material Range of the Analysis Since the issue of free will versus determinism hinges on the understanding of “ not-yet-happenings,” let us focus our analysis, for the moment, primarily on them. Moreover, let us limit our discussion to the Gelug Prasangika...

Review This morning we spoke about the four noble truths in general, and then we presented what Kalachakra adds to this. The main thing that we were emphasizing was a little bit more extensive explanation of the true causes of samsara. And we went through the explanation of...