Two Levels of Unawareness When we talk about unawareness, or ignorance, we are talking about two levels of it. One is the unawareness of cause and effect. Being unaware of karmic cause and effect, we engage in destructive behavior, and that causes us to experience the...

Review In our first class last week, we spoke about meditation. Meditation is designed to help us to integrate the teachings into our lives, our way of being. Through meditation, we familiarize ourselves with the various states of mind that we have learned about from having...

The Certainty of Karma – The Ripening of Karma in Happiness or Unhappiness We have begun the discussion of the four laws of karma, of behavioral cause and effect (las-'bras), which are the first things presented in this part of the lam-rim. The first law, the certainty of...

Review We saw that karma, according to the simpler explanation, is a mental impulse. It is the mental factor that, like a magnet, draws us into an action of body, speech, or mind. We saw too that, before a karmic impulse for an action arises, there is the feeling of liking to...

We have been discussing the certainty of karma, the first the law of karma, which is that if we experience unhappiness, it is certain that it is the result of destructive behavior, and if we experience happiness, it is certain that it is the result of constructive...

Review We are looking at the four laws of karma, or behavioral cause and effect. The first law is the certainty of karma, which is that if we are experiencing unhappiness, it is certain that that unhappiness is the result of destructive behavior and the tendencies that have...

Review We’ve begun looking at the four main principles, or laws, of karma.  The first one we looked at was the certainty of karma, which is that if we are experiencing unhappiness and suffering, it is certain that that unhappiness is the result of destructive behavior;...

The discussion of karma, behavioral cause and effect, begins in the lam-rim with the discussion of the four main principles of karma. We went through each of these in great depth because it’s very important to understand them and to have confidence that they are correct. ...

We’ve gone through the four general principles, or laws, of karma and have looked at why we would believe that the Buddha is a valid source of information about all of this.  The Two Mental Factors That Make an Action Destructive We’ve seen that the main reason for...

The Mahayana Context of the Lam-rim We’re going through the lam-rim meditations, the graded stages of the path to enlightenment, these stages of insights and realizations that we need to develop within ourselves in order to reach the enlightened state of a Buddha. One of the...