Suffering

The Far-Reaching Patience of Readily Accepting Suffering Meditation is a method to overcome the mind being under the control of compelling karmic impulses and disturbing emotions, thereby creating suffering for ourselves. The fact that meditation functions like this shows that...

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...

Transforming Our Behavior through Our Thoughts We’ve covered the first two points – the preliminaries and the actual training in bodhichitta. Now we’re ready for the third of the seven points, which is transforming difficult circumstances into the path to enlightenment. This...

The First Aspect of Close Placement of Mindfulness on the Body: The Body as Being Nonstatic, Impermanent We saw in the Mahayana tradition that with the general way of focusing on the body, what we distinguish about it is that it is unclean and impure. We take our body to mind...

Understanding Rebirth in Life Forms Other Than Human or Animal A topic that is often skipped over is that of the sufferings of the three lower realms, or the “three worse realms” as I prefer to call them. The Tibetan term is actually the “three bad realms,” but “bad” seems a...

Brief Review of the Initial Level of Motivation The teachings for someone of an initial level motivation have five main points to meditate upon: awareness of the preciousness of the fully endowed human body and the difficulty of obtaining it, death, impermanence and the...

We have been going through one of the methods for generating bodhichitta, which is an expansion of the meditations on equalizing and exchanging our attitudes about self and others. It derives from the teachings of Shantideva in Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior (Skt....

Verses 12 through 16 Dealing with Harms We want to attain Buddhahood so that we can benefit all sentient beings. It’s quite a heavy thing to digest. We are reading through Gyalse Togme Zangpo’s text, called 37 Practices of Bodhisattvas. We’ve reached verse 12, and although we...

The Pursuit of Happiness We have two types of happiness, physical happiness and mental happiness, and most of the effort we put into our lives is involved in the pursuit of physical comfort and happiness. In the pursuit of physical happiness and comfort a lot of people engage...

Brief Review of the Initial Scope We have been speaking about a person of the initial level of motivation. The verse in the text is: (3) Anyone who takes keen interest in himself or herself (achieving), by some means, merely the happiness of uncontrollably recurring samsara is...