Introduction [As background, see: The Two Truths: Vaibhashika and Sautrantika] The Tibetans study four tenet systems (grub-mtha’) of Indian Buddhism. Among them, Vaibhashika (bye-brag smra-ba) and Sautrantika (mdo-sde-pa) are Hinayana systems – specifically, subdivisions of...

When voidness is cognized conceptually, its superficial truth appears; this is known as denumerable voidness. When voidness is cognized non-conceptually, an absolute absence of truly established existence appears; this is known as non-denumerable voidness.

The Second Noble Truth — True Causes of Suffering Just as we looked at the First Noble Truth in a more personal and accepting kind of way, likewise we need to look at the other three Noble Truths in the same way, so that we can have our Buddhist practice touch us personally...

Taking the Kalachakra empowerment also entails six uncommon practices that create close bonds with six Buddha-family traits.

Review  We’ve been discussing the three principal pathways of mind. The first is renunciation, with an added preliminary step helpful for us Westerners, which is turning away from the obsession with immediate gratification to taking interest in what’s going to happen to...

Introduction to the Topic  In this seminar, we’re going to explore the topic, “What does it mean to understand something?” This is a very important topic and one that is not traditionally dealt with in Dharma presentations. However, we need to understand the teachings and...

We were speaking about the different types of apprehension before, and we saw that we can have decisive and accurate apprehension either through valid straightforward cognition or valid inferential cognition. Both of these could be conceptual, but only straightforward...

Intellectual Understanding vs Intuitive Understanding  Let’s examine what an intellectual understanding of something is versus an intuitive understanding of it. First, I should say the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist literature on epistemology does not include these classifications...

In the previous session, we discussed what a conceptual understanding is, and we used the example of understanding voidness. We saw that, basically, in addition to apprehending the sound voidness correctly and decisively through the medium of the audio category voidness, the...

What does it mean to understand something is a very important topic because there are so many things that we need to understand. We’re not talking simply about understanding the various points of the Dharma, but this issue is very important in our daily life as well. We need...