Buddha-Nature

Tantra as a Structure on Which to Weave Sutra Practice This evening I’ve been asked to speak a little bit about tantra in general. When we look at the word tantra, it’s a Sanskrit word and what it means is the warp of a loom. A loom is something that you weave cloth on, and...

What Is Buddha-Nature? Our topic for this seminar is the five Buddha wisdoms, or as I prefer to call them, the five types of deep awareness. I find the term five types of wisdom to be less accurate and helpful because everybody has these, including the worm and the cockroach....

Today, we are gathered in a very special place, Bodh Gaya, the site in India where the most skillful, compassionate, and kind universal teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha, manifested his state of enlightenment. The Dharma teaching we shall be dealing with here on this occasion is...

The six-session yoga is a practice which helps us to keep the commitments from receiving an initiation or empowerment in the anuttarayoga class of tantra. And so this evening what I’d like to do is give a little bit of introduction and background to what’s going on with this...

The Five Systems of Five Buddha-Families  We’ve seen that when we speak about the five Buddha-families, if we look at it from the dimension of what will develop into all the aspects of a Buddha, we have this one set of five: mental activity, good qualities, verbal expression,...

Explanation of the Title With these points in mind, let us now turn to the text. The title of this classic is, in Sanskrit, Mahayana-uttaratantra Shastra and in Tibetan Theg-pa chen-po rgyud bla-ma'i bstan-bcos (An Indicative Composition on a Vast Vehicle of Mind, the...

We started our discussion of how to make our tantra practice effective or more effective. And we saw that the most fundamental thing to start with is to understand what tantra is and what is the essential point of tantra practice – how does it work. And we saw that tantra...

Question about Other Voidness Your Holiness spoke of the other voidness view of the Jonangpas yesterday. Could Your Holiness say something about the other voidness view of Mipam. Is this something different? Other voidness, as was discussed yesterday, was the view presented...

Review We’ve been talking about the various mental factors, and we’ve seen that there are ten that function all the time and help mental activity to function. We don’t want to get rid of them. In fact, we can’t get rid of them without destroying mental activity itself....

Buddha-Nature What do family-traits mean? A family-trait is “gotra,” which is family or caste. The traits are characteristics of someone who belongs to a certain family or caste. It can be the family or caste of those who can become Buddhas, so the Buddha-family. There are...