Renunciation

Brief Review We started our explanation of Atisha’s text, and we saw that he was speaking about the stages by which we develop or progress along the spiritual path. We saw that one way of describing how we progress is that the scope or aim of our goal gets progressively...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

Review So far in our Seven Point Mind Training discussion, we’ve covered four out of the seven points. The first point focused on the preliminaries. The second point was about developing actual bodhichitta, which involves developing deepest bodhichitta and then relative...