Tenet Systems

Introduction This evening we are going to be speaking about ways of knowing; in other words cognition theory, and how it is that we know things – how our cognition actually works. This is an important topic since it relates very much to how we experience the four noble...

Review: The Context for Meditating on the False "Me" Yesterday we began our discussion of how to meditate on the voidness of the false “me” experiencing the four noble truths. We looked at the general context within which this is studied and meditated upon. We saw that this...

The Four Noble Truths: Two Sets of Cause and Effect As Shantideva said: (IX.1) The Sage has spoken about all these branches for the sake of discriminating awareness. Therefore, generate discriminating awareness with the wish to pacify sufferings. Gaining a state of...

We were speaking about voidness (emptiness) and we saw that voidness is a negatingly known phenomenon, it’s a negation. We know it by negating something. If we put the word voidness into different terms, then we could say that it is an absence of something. There are many...

Review  Yesterday, we started our discussion of the topic of self-voidness and other-voidness, and what we saw was that it’s extremely important to have an understanding of voidness (emptiness) in order to overcome the sufferings of samsara. We can gain an appreciation of its...

Inferential Cognition The next is inferential cognition. And here in the Gelugpa Sautrantika system this is a cognition that arises depending on a line of reasoning. So we could directly perceive smoke coming from the house on the other side of the valley. If we’re...

Are There Common-Locus Objects Extending over the Three Times? Consider the location of a presently-happening object, such as the “presently-happening-yoghurt in the pot.” For ease of discussion, let us refer to “yoghurt in the pot” simply as “yoghurt.” Both the...

Three Layers of Unawareness Voidness (stong-pa-nyid, Skt shunyata; emptiness) is a total absence of impossible ways of existing: impossible means there is no such thing. Here, we are speaking specifically about the voidness of impossible ways in which the conventionally...

Brief Review Our text is Bodhisattvacharyavatara, Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior, by the great master Shantideva. This is one of the texts in a collection of three known as “The Root, Engaging, and the Four” as previously explained. This text has ten chapters, and we are...

What arises in a moment of mental activity includes both ways of cognitively taking objects and cognitive objects that are cognitively taken. Although we can say that both of these appear in a moment of cognition, in the sense that both of these arise, usually what is  meant...