Having sex with someone else’s partner inevitably brings problems and needs to be avoided.

Advice on how to face death and help those who are dying.

We need to develop the determination to be free of our habitual routines that cause us stress and train ourselves in self-discipline, concentration, and discriminating awareness.

Suffering and Rebirth The Buddhist teachings teach us methods for overcoming various types of suffering. We have the general suffering of unhappiness, which can accompany either our sensory experiences or also our mental experiences. We also have a problem with our ordinary...

Review  The presentations of the various metaphysical topics in Buddhism, as I’ve explained, are useful in helping us to deconstruct various problems that we might face. One way that we saw that we can deconstruct what we experience is to analyze them within an...

In the discussion of ways of knowing things and the objects that are known, we touched on the division between conceptual and non-conceptual cognition, and these points introduce us to the topic of what’s called generalities (spyi) and particulars or instances (bye-brag)....

We’ve been speaking about the various areas or topics of analysis that we have in the Buddhist presentation of metaphysics. We’ve seen that all of these systems of analysis can be used on a very practical level to help us to deconstruct – first of all to understand, and then...

Definitions  The next topic is subjects and objects. When we talk about subject here, that word, of course, could be understood in many different ways, but literally, it’s something that has an object. Subjects are functional phenomena (dngos-po) that have objects...

Introduction: Deconstructing the Self and the Aggregates According to the Buddhist analysis, the self is imputed on the individual continuity of the five aggregates. The aggregates are made up of all non-static phenomena – everything that changes from moment to moment – and...

Introduction  We are going to begin our discussion of Buddhist metaphysics. This is a large topic that covers an enormous amount of material, and all of this material is quite difficult; it is very complex, with many, many different items involved. However, I think the...