Applying Sutra-Level Guru-Meditation to a Faulty or Abusive Teacher His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama had two regents during his minority. They taught him extensively and conferred upon him numerous tantric empowerments. They also engaged in a power struggle and had...

General Introduction and Review The various Tibetan traditions coming from the Buddha – Kadam, Sakya, Kagyu and Nyingma – all follow a presentation of ways to train our attitudes that comes from a common source: Shantideva’s Engaging in Bodhisattva Behavior. Shantideva’s...

Review We’ve been speaking about appearances and how the mind is involved with that. We’ve seen that when we speak about appearances, we’re speaking about something that appears to the mind and has a deep relationship with mind. And when we speak about mind, we’re speaking...

Deceptive Cognition or Seemingly Bare Cognition There are some further ways of knowing besides the standard list of seven. The one delineated in most detail is deceptive cognition (’khrul-shes). Deceptive cognition is also called “seemingly bare cognition” (mngon-sum...

Review The five aggregates are groupings with which we can classify the various aspects of our experience to help us better understand what is happening in each moment. After all, the focus of Buddhist study and practice is our own experience and how we experience life. The...

To deconstruct our moment-to-moment experiences, we need to deconstruct our aggregates through an analysis of causality: causes, conditions and results.

Questions Is There an Inherent Right to Happiness? Do beings have an inherent right to happiness? Do parents have a responsibility to take care of their children and love them as much as possible? I would say yes, if we make the decision to become a parent. However I can’t...

Jealousy is universal. Our colleague gets a promotion and we think, “They don’t deserve that!” Our friend finds a great partner and we think, “What about me?” From time to time we all have these feelings. Here we look at the different types of jealousy, and how we can overcome...

Ultimately, jealousy comes not from others, but from thinking too much about ourselves. As we become super-attached to one particular aspect of our life, anyone else who is doing even slightly better in that area will be a target for our jealousy. Underlying all of this is...

Jealousy and other disturbing emotions are symptoms of a larger problem: our basic, fundamental ignorance of how phenomena actually exist. Here, we look more deeply at convention, categories, and how things exist, and how we can use an understanding of it all to overcome...