Dr. Berzin: Rinpoche, you study with both a Gelugpa and a Nyingma teacher, especially about the Prasangika view of voidness (emptiness). Could you please explain the differences between the Gelugpa and Nyingma interpretations of voidness as asserted in Prasangika and please...

Other-Voidness Is an Implicative Negation Dr. Berzin: I’d like to ask you about other-voidness, zhentong (gzhan-stong). His Holiness the Dalai Lama acknowledges the Jonangpas as one of the proper Tibetan Buddhist traditions, but don’t the Jonangpas say that the deepest truth...

Introduction Our topic for this weekend is “ways of knowing” or lorig in Tibetan. This is a very helpful topic because it deals with how we know anything, how we know that what we know is correct, and how we know that it is decisive. It very much affects how we proceed on the...

The Complexity of Karma This weekend we’re going to be speaking about karma, and although the topic is announced as “karma: free will versus determinism,” that will be just a part of what we’ll talk about. I’d like to go into some detail about what karma is, what the various...

Take others’ feelings seriously, to care about how you treat them.

No Permanent Identity of “Me” from Lifetime to Lifetime Based on considering the previous points of analysis, and far more points that could be discussed, we gradually come to accept that we have had beginningless past lives and there will be endless future lives as well. Our...

In this weekend seminar, we are going to speak about the bodhisattva vows. Obviously, to understand the bodhisattva vows, we need to know what a bodhisattva is, and what bodhichitta is, upon which the vows are based. We have many different quotations and sources which point...

Stages in the Contemporary Life Cycle In New Passages, Sheehy explained that the stages of the human life cycle vary according to socioeconomic class and the conditions of the times. Using this thesis, she discovered a new paradigm for the adult life cycle of contemporary,...

Peace of Mind and Its Causes What is a happy mind? It is a satisfied, relaxed state of mind that has a long-term, broad perspective and so is not much disturbed by anything. This leads to a more efficient state of mind, with the ability to discriminate how to deal with...

Dr. Berzin remembers the great Kalmyk geshe, Geshe Wangyal, who always combined the spiritual approach and the buddhological, scientific approach.