Mental Factors

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...

Introduction This weekend I want to speak about the types of appearances that the mind gives rise to: accurate and inaccurate, pure and impure, tainted and untainted, samsaric and nirvanic. That’s an awful lot of variables, isn’t it? As I was preparing this, when one thinks...

Having a Quiet Mind and Caring Attitude In the development of balanced sensitivity, there are many different variables involved in overcoming the extremes of being either insensitive or oversensitive regarding ourselves and others. This has to do with how we pay attention to...

The mind gives rise to many types of appearances, in terms of both the objects of cognition and the ways of cognizing them that arise. In both cases, what arises may be accurate or inaccurate, pure or impure, tainted or untainted, samsaric or nirvanic. Why is it important to...

Review  The presentations of the various metaphysical topics in Buddhism, as I’ve explained, are useful in helping us to deconstruct various problems that we might face. One way that we saw that we can deconstruct what we experience is to analyze them within an experience....

Intermittently Manifest Mental Factors Like primary consciousness, the five types of deep awareness and the ten ever-functioning and ascertaining mental factors, the rest of the mental factors also have no beginning. Although they share the same essential nature as the...

Review Yesterday we began our discussion of the types of appearances that the mind gives rise to. We saw that in order to understand this, we need to understand what we mean by “mind.” We saw that what it’s referring to is mental activity, which is the individual, subjective...

Questions and Answers Let’s start our session with some questions. Karma I wonder if this statement is right or not: Every perception that we have through our six senses, along with the mental factors, is our karma, our past accumulated karma. Are perceptions which I perceive...

Background We are continuing our discussion of how to adjust our mental factors within the context of developing balanced sensitivity. His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of the different aspects of Buddhism, and he differentiates Buddhist science from Buddhist religion and...

Discerning Meditation In general, meditation has two stages: discerning meditation and stabilizing meditation. In discerning meditation, we work through either progressive steps or a line of reasoning, as we did in the thinking process, to build up to a state of mind that...