Precious Human Life

Mental Activity and How the “Me” Exists We began our discussion of the healthy development of the self through the lam-rim graded stages. We established the need to clearly differentiate between the conventional self and the false self, the one that needs to be refuted. When...

The Three Levels of Motivation for Real Thing Dharma The lam-rim presents three levels of motivation: Initial level – we think in terms of ensuring that we have one of the better types of rebirths, not just in our next lifetime, but in all future lifetimes. ...

Verses 2 through 4 Today, you are going to listen to me talk. But the words coming out of my mouth have already been spoken by the Buddha himself many times, and by His Holiness the Dalai Lama many times. Gyalse Togme Zangpo, the author of the text, is teaching us indirectly. ...

Verses 1 through 7 Taking Advantage of Being in a Holy Place As I explained yesterday, we are at a special place here where the Buddha manifested his enlightenment and where many enlightened beings have been. Nagarjuna and his two spiritual sons, for instance, and many...

The Difficulty of Obtaining a Precious Human Rebirth and How to Take Best Advantage of It It is important to think in the beginning about the difficulty of obtaining a precious human rebirth with all its respites from situations preventing Dharma practice and all its...

Three Types of Spiritual Persons To continue with the text, the next verse reads:  (2) Since (practitioners) come to have small, intermediate, and supreme (scopes), they are known as the three types of spiritual persons. I shall therefore write about these specific divisions,...

Fear of Death and Lower Realms I wanted to ask something about fear. Rinpoche said that we can develop fear for states of rebirth that can come to us after death. I was thinking that fear is suffering too. Are we making ourselves suffer for something that may or may not happen...

Review of the Importance of Working to Gain Precious Human Rebirths in the Future  In the previous session, we spoke about the person of initial scope or initial motivation. The verse in the text stated: (3) Anyone who takes keen interest in himself or herself (achieving), by...

(1) As a Triumphant Ones’ offspring, having firmly gained hold of bodhichitta like this, I’ll strive never to transgress its training, without ever wavering. (2) For something undertaken all of a sudden or something I didn’t examine well, even if I’ve given a promise about...

There are three emotional states that we need to develop as our motivation for refuge, for going in this safe direction. They are usually called fear, belief or confidence and compassion. The main issue is learning how to put them together in a way that they mean something and...