Self-Cherishing

Affection  In making cherishing others our main practice, we need to take into consideration the fact that everybody appreciates kindness and affection, but sometimes the word “affection” is misunderstood. It is more than just love. Love is (in the Buddhist definition)...

Foundation for Development of Equanimity In order to generate the enlightening aim of bodhichitta with which we wish to attain enlightenment in order to benefit all living beings, it is first necessary to develop a sense of equanimity and an equal attitude toward everyone. If...

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...

How to Practice Giving and Taking: Tonglen  Now, that leads us into our discussion of tonglen and the understanding of how important it is and why then it can be our core practice. “Tonglen” is giving and taking, and is an extremely, extremely advanced and difficult...

Differentiating the Various Aspects of Feelings Adjusting the ten mental factors is an effective means for increasing attentiveness to problems and for enhancing the intention to respond. Several factors, however, may still hamper this response. One of the more troublesome is...

An in-depth presentation of the self, self-centeredness and love in Islam, based on the “Quran,” and in Buddhism, based on the Mahayana teachings.

To overcome the karmic obstacles we create for ourselves, we must forcefully destroy the self-grasping underlying our compulsive destructive behavior.

With an extensive presentation of harmful situations that befall us, their karmic causes and the ways of behaving that will counter them, Dharmarakshita leads us to the practice of tonglen, giving and taking.

Teachings on changing our attitudes toward self and others through mind training (lojong), enabling us to turn any situation we encounter into a path to enlightenment.

Renunciation is the determination to be free of our sufferings and their causes. When focused on others, with the determination that they be free, this is compassion.