Renunciation

Review of the Three Principal Pathways  Tsongkhapa emphasized that there are three principal paths, meaning three principal pathways of the mind, or ways of thinking, ways of understanding that are the essence of the graded path. These are renunciation or the determination to...

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...

Once we have dealt with this Dharma Lite version of renouncing our clinging to short-term benefit in this lifetime, and thinking instead of long-term benefit in this lifetime, then we’re ready to go to the Real Thing Dharma, which is the initial scope of lam-rim motivation....

Preparation for Tantra Practice The practice of tantra needs to be done within the context of the four noble truths, which is the context of all the teachings of Buddha. It’s the most fundamental thing that Buddha taught. It was the first thing that Buddha taught, these four...

Brief Review We’ve been speaking about the different levels of renunciation, and we have extended the traditional way of explaining it just in terms of the intermediate level of motivation in lam-rim to a much broader spectrum, as indicated by the Sakya teaching of Parting...

General Introduction and Overview The teachings are infinite in their extent and are addressed to beings of infinite types of dispositions. They can all be included within three vehicles of mind: Hinayana, Mahayana sutra, and Mahayana tantra. All of these vehicles of mind and...

The Sufferings of the Higher Planes of Existence An actual spiritual person, or Dharma practitioner, is someone who is working to be able to benefit future lifetimes and beyond. Such a person then, on an initial level, would follow the ethics of restraining themselves from the...

Next is the renunciation of clinging to our own aims – in other words self-cherishing – and having our main interest instead being in cherishing others and fulfilling their aims. What are we determining to be free of? We need to identify that, and this is having our main...

The next level of determination to be free is renunciation of clinging to self-established existence and having our main interest instead be in voidness, emptiness. What a Buddha Perceives To understand this, let me explain a little bit about what a Buddha actually perceives...

Tantra Is an Advanced Practice For our last session together, let’s speak a little bit about tantra. We also need to bring tantra down to earth. Often, Western people, when approaching the tantric teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, fall into one of two extremes. One extreme is to...