Liberation and Enlightenment

The Second Noble Truth — True Causes of Suffering Just as we looked at the First Noble Truth in a more personal and accepting kind of way, likewise we need to look at the other three Noble Truths in the same way, so that we can have our Buddhist practice touch us personally...

Review We have been speaking about the graded stages of the spiritual path, where we are trying to basically broaden and expand our motivation starting from a smaller scope until it becomes full. In this way, each stage builds upon the previous one. We also saw that there are...

When You Have Parted from Clinging to Your Own Benefit, You Have Made the Pathway Minds Eliminate Confusion Concerning the third (parting), “When you have parted from clinging to your own benefit, you have made the pathway minds eliminate confusion,”  In general, when you have...

Review We have been discussing yesterday how we develop relative bodhichitta – sometimes that’s called conventional bodhichitta. We make a differentiation between relative and deepest truth: In the Gelug tradition, when we speak about deepest truth, we’re only speaking about...

Review of the Lam-rim Initial Scope Teachings We’ve been discussing how to develop the self in a healthy way through the lam-rim graded stages. We have determined that there is a conventional self, and that it exists, moment to moment, as an imputational phenomenon on the...

Review In our discussion of the seven-part cause and effect meditation for generating bodhichitta, we have gone through the sequence up until the final stage, the result of what we’ve been building up. We spoke of the basis, which is equanimity, free of attachment,...

The Natural Purity of the Mind The family trait that allows for the attainment of the Corpuses of a Buddha is an unaffected, static phenomenon; it is the abiding family-trait, the one that abides as our self-nature. The family traits that become the Corpuses of a Buddha are...

Verses 15 and 16 Verse 15: Not Becoming Discouraged When Meditating on Bodhichitta Remembering Buddha-Nature for Overcoming Becoming Discouraged And when a feeling of discouragement arises, let me praise the glories of the mind. This is speaking about a major problem...

Chapter Two: The Enlightened State Chapter two is the chapter on enlightenment, the state of total purification and growth, the highest bodhi or purified state. This is in 73 verses and discusses the topic in eight points. The Essential Nature of Enlightenment The first of...

Tainted and Untainted Appearances We’ve looked at the variables affecting the type of mental holograms that our mental activity gives rise to. These are the variables of “accurate and inaccurate” and “pure and impure” appearances. We’ve seen that these variables refer to both...