The Eight Worldly Concerns Apart from the experiences and feelings within our minds, there is also the content of our life. It’s the same thing here; we should try not to make a big deal out of it all. The Buddhist teachings emphasize a list of eight transitory things in life...

The Gelug Svatantrika presentation of the eight branches of an arya pathway mind as explained by Tsongkhapa in “A Golden Rosary of Excellent Explanations.”

Review In our discussion of the Seven Point Mind Training, we’ve discussed the first of these points, the training in the preliminaries, which prepare us to follow the Mahayana training, and the second point, the actual training in bodhichitta. We’ve discussed the training in...

The Early Yarlung Kings According to the traditional account, the first king of the Yarlung Dynasty (Yar-klungs) in Central Tibet came there from the central North Indian kingdom of Magadha. He was called Nyatri Tsenpo (gNya’-khri btsan-po) and it was thought that he descended...

We need to know the basis, the conventional “me,” that does exist – then the false “me” that we are projecting on it, and then the negation and total absence of that impossible “me.”

How to Use the Five Forces in This Life The fourth of the seven points is the condensation of the practices for one lifetime – how to condense all the practices into the essentials for a lifetime. This process is divided into two stages: what we do during one lifetime, and...

Review of the Qualities of a Spiritual Teacher A guru is a great teacher, a great spiritual master or mentor, someone who is not only able to teach from knowledge of the texts but is also able to teach us by his or her own example. A living example of what Buddha has taught, a...

Introduction The topic of karma is central to the Buddhist teachings and relates very closely to ethical self-discipline. We use ethical self-discipline to overcome and rid ourselves of karma. This fits nicely within the context of what are known as the “four noble truths,”...

The true suffering in life that we all face is that, with the types of limited bodies and minds that we have, we perpetuate our problems.

Overview of the Initial Scope In the past few sessions, we’ve been speaking about reliance on a spiritual master and the precious human rebirth. Both these topics serve as a foundation for the subject matter that follows. It is possible that there are people of extremely sharp...