Ways of Knowing

Bare cognition is a fresh, nonfraudulent awareness that is non-deceptive and parted from concepts.

Buddhist psychology and science have a great deal of relevance for Westerners. The religious aspects of Buddhism can supplement, but not substitute them.

The Tibetan debate process is a learning and clarifying process for ways of knowing, which is then intended for application in meditation and in practice.

The superficial and deepest truths of anything are those phenomena that the valid conceptual and non-conceptual cognitions, scrutinizing superficial truth on the one hand or deepest truth on the other, take as their involved objects and explicitly apprehend.

A semblance of a bare cognition is an awareness that is deceptive with respect to its appearing object.

Presumptive cognition is an invalid cognition that conceptually takes its object correctly and freshly but presumes it to be true either for no reason, a wrong one, or even a right one but without understanding why it is correct.

These three types of comprehensible phenomena include all existent phenomena – all phenomena that can be validly known.

Indecisive wavering is a mental factor in conceptual cognition that vacillates between two conclusions concerning its object.

Subsequent cognition is an invalid awareness that apprehends what has already been apprehended.

According to the Sautrantika tenet system, there are seven ways of knowing an object. To understand the seven in more detail, we first need to know what a way of knowing (“lorig” in Tibetan) is.