Ways of Knowing

Bare Cognition The ways of knowing that take as their appearing objects objective entities and metaphysical entities are, respectively, bare cognition and conceptual cognition. According to the Sautrantika explanation, all validly knowable phenomena are either objective...

Review Among the seven ways of knowing, some are valid ways of knowing and some are invalid. The valid ways of knowing are bare cognition and inferential understanding and all the rest are not valid. “Valid” means that it is fresh and non-fraudulent, and “non-fraudulent” means...

Introduction  Within the discussion of time, we also have the discussion of the future, the present and the past. Jorge touched on that a little bit in the discussion about blocks of time. If there’s nothing that is an absolute present, then likewise past and future, which...

The Indian Tenet Systems on Rebirth, Liberation and a Creator In India, at both the time before and after the Buddha came, there were many systems of tenets. Within the Charvaka school of tenets, there's no acceptance of past lives and future lives. They assert that the mind...

Accounting for Validly Knowing Objects as Being This or That How do we account for something being validly knowable as this or that? We can’t account for it by means of some self-establishing nature inside something that makes it this or that. We can only account for it...

Conceptual Cognition Furthermore, a conceptual cognition is a conceptually implying awareness that cognizes an audio (category) or meaning/object (category) as suitable to be associated (with each other). An audio category (sgra-spyi) is the category of the sound of a specific...

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...

Review Thus far we have covered in our discussion valid and invalid ways of knowing. Valid cognition is cognition that is fresh, accurate and decisive. We have also discussed apprehension, which is accurate and decisive cognition, but not necessarily fresh. Apprehension can be...

The Basis for Valid Cognition of “Not-Yet-Happenings” As we have seen, one facet of a “karmic tendency for a result” is the karmic tendency’s “temporarily not-giving-rise to its result, so long as all the contributing circumstances for giving rise to it are incomplete.” That...

We were speaking about the different types of apprehension before, and we saw that we can have decisive and accurate apprehension either through valid straightforward cognition or valid inferential cognition. Both of these could be conceptual, but only straightforward...