Tenet Systems

Buddha-Nature What do family-traits mean? A family-trait is “gotra,” which is family or caste. The traits are characteristics of someone who belongs to a certain family or caste. It can be the family or caste of those who can become Buddhas, so the Buddha-family. There are...

What Do We Know after Negating Something  We have been speaking about affirmations and negations, and we have seen that they’re very important. There are quite a few things that came up from yesterday and some questions that are still there. A negation is one in which there’s...

How to Refute the Assertions of Lower Tenet Schools The way in which we should understand how the position of a higher school of tenets undermines or damages another lower school can be understood in terms of how Madhyamaka undermines and refutes the Chittamatra assertion in...

The View of Voidness in the Four Buddhist Philosophical Tenets As for how to recognize the nature of the mind, the masters of the different traditions, Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, Gelugpa, have all discussed and presented various methods. But if you really get to the essence of...

Review  In our discussion of self-voidness in the context of the Gelug assertions, we saw that we can speak about impossible ways of existing with regard to persons and with regard to all phenomena. First, we focus on understanding that there is a self that is not to be...

Verses 22 through 25 We have been going through the 37 Bodhisattva Practices by the great teacher, Togme Zangpo. We reached verse 22. Verse 22 to 24 talk about the cessation or stopping of suffering, and about deepest truth.  Developing Deepest Bodhichitta, the Realization of...

We’ve discussed the impossible ways of existing of a person and voidness, or emptiness, which is the absence of something corresponding to these impossible ways. If we wish to go deeper, then we need to discuss the impossible ways of existing of all phenomena, which would...

An advanced, detailed presentation, according to the various Buddhist tenet systems, of the practitioners’ progress in terms of the “five paths.” These five refer to the five levels of pathway minds we achieve, which lead to liberation and enlightenment.

An overview of the various Indian tenet systems’ view on how we view ourselves as persons in relation to the samsara-perpetuating five aggregates.

We can view sectarianism in Buddhism superficially but looking at it deeply, we discover it to be a complex issue.