Cherishing Difficult People (4) Whenever I see beings instinctively cruel, overpowered by negativities and serious problems, may I cherish them as difficult to find as discovering a treasure of gems. This verse deals with how to transform negative circumstances into positive...

Points 3 and 4 Point 3: Transforming Adverse Circumstances into a Path to Enlightenment The third point looks at transforming adverse circumstances into a path to enlightenment, and it’s divided into several parts. One concerns our thoughts and the other – our actions. ...

Dr. Berzin speaks about various topics with his students regarding the highest class of tantra, anuttarayoga, such as visualization practice and its obstacles, dream yoga and working with subtle energy-channels and energy-winds.

Review True Sufferings We began our discussion with how the cognition of voidness liberates us from uncontrollably recurring rebirth, samsara. To understand that, we need to understand what actually the true sufferings are that we want to become liberated from. Why is it that...

Samsara This evening, we’re going to begin a series of talks on how the understanding of voidness (emptiness) helps us to overcome our uncontrollably recurring rebirths, samsara. Samsara is not some place that we want to escape from and go instead to some transcendent realm...

Review  In our discussion of self-voidness in the context of the Gelug assertions, we saw that we can speak about impossible ways of existing with regard to persons and with regard to all phenomena. First, we focus on understanding that there is a self that is not to be...

​​The main theme of the conference in 1988 in Sarnath was the preservation of all the Tibetan spiritual traditions, lineages and cultural aspects, without sectarian distinction, especially in light of the future of Tibet. Approximately 350 incarnate lamas (tulkus) and abbots...

The Establishment of the Jurchen Empire The Jurchen were a Tungusic Manchu people whose homeland was in northern Manchuria and the adjacent region of southeastern Siberia across the Amur River. They were for­est dwellers whom the Khitans conscripted for their ritual hunts....

The Dalai Lama’s view of a 21st-century Buddhist means having fuller knowledge about modern education and modern science, while having full conviction about Buddha’s teachings about limitless altruism, bodhichitta and the view of dependent arising.

Conversion to Buddhism We’ve been speaking about some of the various difficulties that many people have in working with Buddhism. We’ve seen that it’s very important to have a realistic attitude. In terms of this, one of the pieces of advice that His Holiness the Dalai Lama...