Dr. Berzin recounts the road that led to his works on Kalachakra.

An Environment Conducive for Meditation To actually engage in meditation, we need circumstances conducive for it. There are many lists of factors that will be conducive for meditation, but these are usually discussed or presented within the context of doing a meditation...

[Clarification of His Holiness' answers by Dr. Berzin are included within square brackets.] Topics for Introductory Talks for Taking the Kalachakra Initiation Dr. Berzin: When I go to the West next year to give introductory talks for the Kalachakra initiation, what would be...

Three Types of Spiritual Persons To continue with the text, the next verse reads:  (2) Since (practitioners) come to have small, intermediate, and supreme (scopes), they are known as the three types of spiritual persons. I shall therefore write about these specific...

Review We have covered two valid ways of knowing: Fresh, decisive, accurate bare cognition – non-conceptual cognition of obvious phenomena as the appearing objects Inferential cognition – conceptual cognition of obscure and extremely obscure phenomena by relying on a valid...

Reasons for Preliminaries Becoming Flat People engaged in preliminary practices sometimes find them becoming flat. The primary fault lies with our motivation. The main measure to prevent this is continually reaffirming our reasons for engaging in the preliminaries. If, as...

“Moreover, O noble goddess, as Jala-vahana the merchant’s son made all beings in the kingdom of King Sureshvara-prabha without illness or with merely small illness, their bodies were endowed with strength and delight as before. All beings in the kingdom of King...

Mental activity is made up of six types of consciousness that are aware of an object as being a sight, a sound, and so on, and 51 types of mental factors that qualify or help with the cognition of that object.

Introduction to Voidness (Emptiness) Voidness, or emptiness, is an extremely important and central topic in the Buddhist teachings. What it means is an absence; something is absent, not there. What is absent is an impossible way of existing, something that has never existed at...

Universal ethics is capable of solving all of the world’s problems, on both a global and individual level.