Prasangika

The Need for Understanding Correctly the Two Truths To gain a true stopping (’gog-bden; true cessation) of suffering and thus attain liberation, we need to gain a true stopping of unawareness (ma-rig-pa; ignorance) and of the rest of the emotional obscurations (nyon-sgrib)...

Unawareness of How We Exist and Disturbing Emotions  We are talking about the self, “me,” how we exist and how we establish that we exist. This is a very crucial question that is asked in Buddhism. When we are unaware of how we and everyone exists, when either we don’t know or...

Definition of the Two Truths Deepest Truth A mind that analyzes the deepest nature of a knowable phenomenon takes as its involved object (’jug-yul) its deepest essential nature, i.e. it takes the voidness of the phenomenon as the main object with which it cognitively engages....

Review We are continuing our discussion of what karma actually means. We discussed the presentation the Indian master Asanga made within the context of the Chittamatra system of tenets. If we translate Chittamatra literally, it means “mind-only.” We saw that, in this system,...

Madhyamaka-Svatantrika Madhyamaka is divided into two schools according to the Gelug presentation of it. We have Svatantrika and Prasangika, and Svatantrika is divided also into two: Sautrantika-Svatantrika and Yogachara-Svatantrika. Sautrantika-Svatantrika accepts externally...

The Two Truths Have the Same Essential Nature When the statement is made that the two truths have the same essential nature (ngo-bo gcig), but different conceptual isolates (ldog-pa tha-dad), it does not mean that they are referring to the same essential nature. It is not that...

Introduction We’ve been going through, in summary, the main points of the sixteen chapters of Aryadeva’s Four Hundred Verse Treatise. And we saw that the first eight chapters speak about how to rid ourselves of incorrect views concerning conventional truth. And now we’re ready...

Brief Historical Background of Non-Gelug and Tsongkhapa’s Systems Now we’re ready to look at Vasubandhu and Nagarjuna’s presentation of karma as asserted by Tsongkhapa. This is in accord with Tsongkhapa’s special way of explaining the Prasangika system of Madhyamaka. Someone...

Going from a Conceptual to a Non-Conceptual Cognition of Voidness Let us go back to what we were discussing before about voidness meditation. The earlier Tibetan traditions were saying that to attain the non-conceptual cognition of voidness, first we need to attain conceptual...

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...