Repeatedly gaining precious human rebirths makes the ultimate goals of liberation and enlightenment possible. To understand rebirth, it is essential to understand the nature of our mind and to gain a proper understanding of karma.

Bringing About the Results That, at Present, Have Not Yet Happened In our previous session, I mentioned that we have causal and resultant refuge, or safe direction. The causal one is taking, as the safe direction to go toward, the true stoppings and true pathway minds that...

Mahamudra is a sophisticated Buddhist system of meditation and practice on the nature of the mind.

Exceptional Resolve  The next step after tonglen (giving and taking) is developing the exceptional resolve (lhag-bsam), which is the even stronger wish to be able to eliminate all the suffering of others and bring them the happiness of liberation and enlightenment. What...

How to Practice Giving and Taking: Tonglen  Now, that leads us into our discussion of tonglen and the understanding of how important it is and why then it can be our core practice. “Tonglen” is giving and taking, and is an extremely, extremely advanced and difficult...

Overview of the basic principles of Buddhism and Islam, comparing the discussions of love, forgiveness and ethics in each.

Overview of the Practices for Developing Bodhichitta through Equalizing and Exchanging Our Attitudes about Self and Others Equalizing and exchanging our attitudes about self and others is one of the two methods for working ourselves up to an actual state of mind and heart of...

Even non-Buddhists can have valid apprehension of voidness, but not non-conceptional cognition, and thus cannot achieve a true stopping of suffering.

The Mechanism of Karmic Causes Giving Rise to Karmic Results If we properly understand that there is no such thing as self-established existence (rang-bzhin-gyis grub-pa, inherent existence), we understand conventional existence established in terms of dependent arising. But...

Altai under the Dzungarian Khanate The Altai Republic is situated in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia and borders Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia. Its native inhabitants are presently known as Altaians, consisting of several peoples of Turkic ethnicity speaking...