Ways of Knowing

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...

Preface Among the Tibetans, the Buddhist monasteries have traditionally been the great centers of learning. The educational system followed by many of them, such as Ganden, Sera and Drepung of the Gelug tradition, is modeled on that introduced more than a thousand years ago...

Non-Determining Cognition A knowing (of something) that is a non-determining cognition is one whose involved object is an objective entity that appears clearly but without decisiveness. When divided, there are three: (1) (non-determining) sensory bare cognition, (2)...

What does it mean to understand something is a very important topic because there are so many things that we need to understand. We’re not talking simply about understanding the various points of the Dharma, but this issue is very important in our daily life as well. We need...

Designation Names, Words and Tags Designation involves the application of a name (ming; word) and/or a tag (brda; label, term) to some item, whether or not that item is validly knowable. Unicorns and self-established existence (rang-bzhin-gyis grub-pa), after all, do not...

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...

Cognition Theory: Cognition of Commonsense Objects Last session we looked at several unique points that Tsongkhapa made and contrasted some of them with the non-Gelug positions on them. Since the presentation I gave was quite sophisticated and advanced, I’d like to start this...

Mind We’ve seen the general application and relevance of this topic, ways of knowing. There are additional general things that we also need to understand in order to be able to go further into the individual seven ways of knowing. The first of these is to understand what we...

Proper Motivation and Explanation of the Title and Homage Before beginning, we set the motivation of wishing to listen to these teachings in order to actually achieve the state of enlightenment in order to benefit everyone. If we set this type of motivation, the benefits of...

Definitions  The next topic is subjects and objects. When we talk about subject here, that word, of course, could be understood in many different ways, but literally, it’s something that has an object. Subjects are functional phenomena (dngos-po) that have objects (yul-can),...