Tenet Systems

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

Learn why Study Buddhism prefers the term “voidness” over “emptiness.”

The Indian Buddhist tenet systems differ in their views of the voidness or total absence of impossible ways that establish the existence of something and in their views of what establishes its conventional existence.

Tsongkhapa was a revolutionary reformer who reinterpreted and clarified many of the key Buddhist teachings, especially concerning the assertions of the Prasangika tenet system concerning voidness, the two truths, the two obscurations and cognition theory.