Vaibhashika

Introduction  When we look at the concept of the self in Buddhism, we need to analyze it from the points of view of the four schools of the Indian tenet systems. We’re going to refine our understanding further and further as we work our way through these schools. When we speak...

The Meaning of “Mind” in Buddhism I’ve been asked to come here this weekend to teach about appearances (snang-ba), how the mind makes appearances and the various problems that are associated with that. This is not a very simple topic, because in fact all our problems come...

In accord with the Sarvastivada abhidharma texts and The Great Extensive Commentarial Treatise on Special Topics of Knowledge (Skt. Abhidharma-mahāvibhāṣa-śāstra), compiled in the late first century CE at the Fourth Buddhist Council, the Vaibhashika system that followed this...

Introduction: Deconstructing the Self and the Aggregates According to the Buddhist analysis, the self is imputed on the individual continuity of the five aggregates. The aggregates are made up of all non-static phenomena – everything that changes from moment to moment – and...

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 of Mental Urges in Karmic Actions of the Mind In the previous part of this series, we modified Vasubandhu’s Sautrantika presentation of the division between performer impulses (byed-pa’i las, Skt. kāritrakarma) and exertional impulses (rtsol-ba-can-gyi las, Skt....

Review of the First Level of Recognizing the Object to Be Refuted: The Coarse Impossible "Me" We were working on the first point of the four-point analysis, which is to recognize the object to be refuted. We saw that there are many levels of the object to be refuted, and we...

Review In the discussion of the mental factor of an urge, in which we have borrowed and adapted to the Vaibhashika view the distinction between a performer and exertional impulse that Sautrantika draws, we have seen that urges that affect and drive a consciousness and its...

We have seen that a revealing form of the body is a visible, momentary shape of the body with which one implements a method for causing a karmic action of the body to take place. A revealing form of speech (ngag-gi rig-byed-gi gzugs, Skt. vāgvijñaptirūpa) is a type of...

As we have seen, sound in general, including a revealing form of speech, is a non-appropriated (ma-zin-pa, Skt. anupātta) form of physical phenomena. Not being a part of the body, sound cannot be the physical support for a consciousness and its accompanying mental factors. But...