Sources of the Text I’d like to explain a very important text in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition called The Seven Point Mind Training by a great master from the Kadam tradition, Geshe Chekawa. This teaching is primarily based on the practice of changing the viewpoint of self...

Tsongkhapa offers verses of request for inspiration to follow the lam-rim graded path from its foundation, a healthy relation with a spiritual teacher, through the two stages of tantra, all the way to enlightenment.

Tantra requires a firm foundation in sutra, since it is a very advanced practice that allows us to put together all the various insights of sutra. It’s important to understand why this is so.  Safe Direction and Understanding the Four Noble Truths First, we need a very...

Four ways to examine whether something makes sense or not.

The Four Buddhist Councils were convened to codify Buddha's teachings. Because of differing opinions among the participants, different Buddhist traditions and tenet systems emerged from many of them.

The Indian Buddhist tenet systems differ in their views of the voidness or total absence of impossible ways that establish the existence of something and in their views of what establishes its conventional existence.

To rid ourselves of ignorance, we need to correctly identify it. Learn the stages for doing this in accord with the presentations of the Indian Buddhist tenet systems.

The Indian Buddhist tenet systems present graded levels of understanding of how things exist like an illusion, which we can use in our daily lives.

Karma refers to the compelling urges driving our behavior and the compulsive forms our behavior takes. Learn how each of the Buddhist tenet systems uses the basic terminology to describe the mechanism involved.

The Prasangika refutation of the so-called “false self” provides the subtlest, most sophisticated deconstruction of this misconceived version of how we and others exist. In order to understand fully the Prasangika view, we need to go step by step through the grosser...