Vows

I have a stack of questions here in front of me. Let me try to answer some of them during the course of explaining what will happen today during the first day of the actual empowerment. Following the Visualizations One thing to keep in mind about what is going on here is...

From my heart, I take safe direction from the Three Precious Gems. May I free all beings from torment and place them in everlasting bliss. To become fully enlightened for their sake, I develop bodhichitta and train myself through bodhisattva acts.In the sky before me, on a...

We can have some questions about the points we’ve just covered and then we can go on. Let’s keep our questions specific to this topic. In the afternoon, we can open it up to more general questions about tantra. Questions and Answers Strengthening Belief in Rebirth You made the...

Review We started our discussion of how to make our tantra practice more effective. We saw that the most fundamental thing to start with is to understand what tantra is and what the essential points of tantra practice are – how does it work. Also, we saw that the word “tantra”...

Brief Review We have been discussing the fundamental elements that we need before taking the bodhisattva vows. We spoke about the foundations in the lam-rim, the graded stages of the path, and we spoke about the process and meditation for building up a bodhichitta motivation....

Review We need to set the proper motivation; namely, that we wish to benefit all beings and to achieve a state of enlightenment in order to be able to do so. With this motivation, listen to these teachings on The Foundation for Good Qualities with the sincere wish to put them...

The Ceremony for Wishing Bodhichitta, Together with Advice  When we talk about developing bodhichitta, of course, this is a process that we need to work up to and that requires a great deal of work and effort to sincerely feel. There are stages of meditation for developing...

Review Having an Accurate Idea of Bodhichitta and Enlightenment We have seen that there is a relative and deepest bodhichitta, and it is aimed at enlightenment, and specifically our own individual enlightenment that has not yet happened, but which can be imputed on our mental...

Fear of "A Breach of Guru-Devotion" Almost every classical text on the disciple-mentor relationship includes a section on the hellish suffering that follows from what is usually translated as "a breach of guru-devotion." The material derives mostly from Ashvaghosha's vivid...

Review of Some Essential Points First, I shall speak a little about what is going to take place today. We have reached the point in the empowerment at which we have entered the mandala. First, we did so with blindfolds on and now our blindfolds have been removed. We have...