H.H. Sakya Trizin: Nature of The Mind

His Holiness Sakya Trizin: With the two together, method and wisdom, one can realize the true nature.

His Holiness Sakya Trizin: With the two together, method and wisdom, one can realize the true nature.

Nature of The Mind by His Holiness Sakya Trizin

One of the main teachings of the Buddha is the law of karma, the teaching that all the lives we have are not without cause, are not created by other beings, and are not by coincidence, but are all created by our own actions. All the positive things such as love, long life, good health, prosperity and so forth are also not given by anybody else. It is through our own positive actions in the past that today we enjoy all the good things. Similarly all the negative aspects, like short life, sickness, poverty, etc. and all the undesirable things are also not created by any outsider but by our own actions, the negative deeds we committed in the past.
If one really wishes to be free from suffering and to experience happiness, it is very important to work on the causes. Continue reading »

Realization of the Nature of Mind

Dezhung Rinpoche Kunga Tanpa'i Nyima: Everything that we experience is simply appearance; it has no intrinsic reality, and when we come to understand this, then we understand buddha nature, and we have become free from suffering.

Dezhung Rinpoche Kunga Tanpa’i Nyima: Everything that we experience is simply appearance; it has no intrinsic reality, and when we come to understand this, then we understand buddha nature, and we have become free from suffering.

On Realization of the Nature of Mind by Dezhung Rinpoche Kunga Tanpa’i Nyima

When you come to approach the Dharma you should do so with the attitude that it is for the benefit of others; the concern should be for all sentient beings who have been your mother and father since beginingless time. Out of a concern to help them you are listening to the Dharma in order to become a buddha, for this is the one way in which you can truly help others. But when you listen to the Dharma you should be free from inattention, free from ill feeling or emotional disturbance and you should listen as one who is hoping for some kind of cure for an ailment which is with us intrinsically, all the time. When we listen to the Dharma we should be free from any sense of ordinariness; that is, we think no longer of this world of mundane cares, this world in which we live, but imagine that we are listening to the Dharma in the presence of a buddha whose resplendent form sits shining before us, that the place we are in is a beautiful meadow filled with light, with flowers, with fragrance in the air, that we ourselves are not in our corporeal forms, but that we are all in the form of enlightenment, the bodhisattva, that nothing is weighted down by tangibility, by substantiality, that everything appears, magic, fresh and breathtaking, like a clear dream. If with these ideas in mind we listen to the Dharma, we will understand it and apply it. Continue reading »

A. Berzin: Mind and the Five Aggregates, Karma Kagyu

Mind is the individual, subjective mental activity of experiencing something, and it constitutes a beginningless and endless individual continuum. 

Mind and the Five Aggregates: Karma Kagyu

Dr. Alexander Berzin

The Importance of Understanding the Mind

Mind is important to understand, since we all want to be happy and not to suffer and be unhappy. The source of a stable and lasting happiness, however, is not material wealth or physical pleasure, but the mind and our attitudes and emotions. Therefore, we need to understand what mind is and how it works in each moment. We also need to understand everything that makes up each moment of our minds, which is what the five aggregates are all about. When we understand them, we will understand our attitudes and emotions and how they work. If we understand how they work, we can gain confidence that we can overcome the destructive ones and we can change our attitudes. In short, we need to work on our minds, and doing that requires understanding our minds.
All Buddhist schools agree on what mind is, but there are several ways of presenting it and several different analyses in Buddhism of how mind works. Here, we shall present the sutra explanation given by the Karma Kagyu school.

Continue reading »