Refuge

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...

Contemplation on the Rare Precious Human Life, Certainty of Death and Necessity of Dharma  We’ve been talking about the precious human rebirth that we have all achieved. This precious human rebirth has the eight respites and ten enrichments necessary for Dharma practice. We...

A Precious Human Rebirth It is very important to appreciate the fact that we have a precious human body as a working basis and that it enjoys all the various respites from all the difficult situations with no chance to practice and that it also has the enriching factors of...

Refuge as the Basic Orientation of Our Lives We’ve been speaking about various problems that we sometimes face with Buddhism, and we’ve been focusing on the difficulty that many of us often have in actually applying the Buddhist teachings to our lives. Another area that’s...

I think it is important not to cover too much material at one time but to really chew on what we have been discussing and clear up any questions that you might have related to it. Visualizing Ourselves as a Buddha-Figure without Bodhichitta You mentioned something about not...

Review — The Emotional State for Taking Refuge In the previous session, we spoke about the importance and necessity of putting a positive direction in our life. We saw that refuge is a direction in which we protect ourselves from difficulties. We went through a whole list of...

Sources of Safe Direction In terms of objects that provide refuge or safe direction, there are the ultimate and provisional sources of safe direction. Sources of safe direction that can bring us to the ultimate or final endpoint of the path are referred to as ultimate or final...

Brief Review In our last session, we discussed death, impermanence, and the suffering of the three lower realms. These unfortunate states of rebirth are as a hell creature, a hungry ghost or an animal. The suffering of each of these three rebirth states can be explained...

Bringing About the Results That, at Present, Have Not Yet Happened In our previous session, I mentioned that we have causal and resultant refuge, or safe direction. The causal one is taking, as the safe direction to go toward, the true stoppings and true pathway minds that...

When we formally orient our lives with the safe and positive direction of refuge, we commit ourselves to actions for training, which are helpful for maintaining this direction.