The Kalachakra depiction of the non-Indic prophets and its prophecies of a future war with their followers must be understood in its historical and cultural context.

The next set of three links concern activation of the karmic tendencies at the time of death. The eighth and ninth links, thirsting and an obtainer attitude, activate the karmic tendencies, while the tenth link, further existence, refers to the activated tendencies themselves....

Inferential Cognition  The next is inferential cognition, and here in the Gelugpa Sautrantika system, this is a cognition that arises depending on a line of reasoning. For example, we could directly perceive smoke coming from the house on the other side of the valley. If...

The First Law of Karma There are certain general aspects of karma called “the four laws of karma.” If we ask why these laws work the way they do, it is just the way it is. It is like asking why does everybody want to be happy and not to suffer? It is just the way it is. We...

Childhood and Renunciation of Princely Life In eastern India, in the land of Jahor, in the city of Bangala, in the Golden Banner Palace, lived King Kalyana the Good and Queen Prabhavati the Radiant. The royal palace was crowned with thirteen golden roofs, one set atop the...

Prophesies Before Milarepa received his various disciples, the Buddha-figure Vajrayogini appeared to him in a vision and prophesied that in the not too distant future he would receive a sun-like disciple, a moon-like disciple, and many other disciples who would be like the...

Shantideva was born in the eighth century as the son of the king of a land in the Bengal region of East India. When he was about to ascend to the throne, he had a dream of Manjushri, who said, “The throne is not for you.” Heeding Manjushri’s advice, he renounced the throne and...

A portrait of the life and deeds of one of the most famous masters of Tibetan Buddhism.

Review of the First Link: Unawareness  We have started our discussion of these 12 links, and we saw that they describe the mechanism for how we generate our uncontrollably recurring aggregates – the body and mind and so on – of each lifetime, and specifically our tainted...

We were talking about the first link in this chain of dependent arising and we saw that this is the link of unawareness and it has to do with unawareness of how we and others exist. The main emphasis that we need to focus on is ourselves. We saw that there are two levels of...