Liberation and Enlightenment

Tainted and Untainted Appearances We’ve looked at the variables affecting the type of mental holograms that our mental activity gives rise to. These are the variables of “accurate and inaccurate” and “pure and impure” appearances. We’ve seen that these variables refer to both...

Review In our discussion of the seven-part cause and effect meditation for generating bodhichitta, we have gone through the sequence up until the final stage, the result of what we’ve been building up. We spoke of the basis, which is equanimity, free of attachment,...

Dharma-Lite vs. The Real Thing Dharma I’m very happy to be back here in Seattle once more and to have the opportunity to speak to you about the meditations for developing bodhichitta.I suppose that it would be appropriate to give an introduction. Bodhichitta is something that...

Origins The Vaisheshika (bye-brag-pa) school of Indian philosophy bases itself on The Sutra of Particulars (Skt. Vaisheshika Sutra) by the sage Kanadi (Drang-srong gZegs-zan), as commented on in the 5th century CE by Prashastapada. The slightly later Nyaya (rigs-can-pa) school...

Origins The Samkhya (grangs-can-pa) school of Indian philosophy traces itself from the ancient sage Kapila (Drang-srong Ser-skya), author of The Numbered Items Sutra (Samkhya Sutra). This sutra, however, was compiled only in the 14th century CE. The earliest Samkhya text to...

The Importance of Having an Accurate Idea of Enlightenment With bodhichitta – relative bodhichitta is what we are talking about here – it's very important to have an accurate mental representation of enlightenment, an accurate idea of what enlightenment is. Otherwise it's...

ReviewWe have been discussing yesterday how we develop relative bodhichitta – sometimes that’s called conventional bodhichitta. We make a differentiation between relative and deepest truth:In the Gelug tradition, when we speak about deepest truth, we’re only speaking about...

We started our explanation of Atisha’s text and we saw that he was speaking about the stages with which we develop or progress as we go along the spiritual path. And we saw that one way of describing how we progress is that our scope or aim of our goal gets progressively...

We’re going to start the weekend seminar on a very important and essential text (which is found in all the Tibetan traditions) from India called Seven Point Mind Training, which I received teachings on primarily from two of my main teachers: Serkong Rinpoche and Geshe...