Tags: tathagatagarbha

Elucidating the Jeweled Matrix

Let’s talk texts. As much as contemplative practice, ritual, or even personal oral instructions are essential to esoteric transmission, it is texts and the transference of texts through time that…

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Śākyamuni’s 3 Revolutions

With the sustaining of a tradition, there is the multi-generational task of repeatedly defining and describing what is understood to be most real (or unreal). Then, every once in a…

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Expressions of the Essence

Buddhist phenomenology tells us that one of the five fundamental constituents of the egoic complex is “form” (rūpa, gzugs), the configuration of tangible materiality that is so integral to ordinary…

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Whose Svabhāva is It?

One of the major tripping points in Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy is identifying what is intrinsically existent ― what is referred to in Sanskrit as “svabhāva” (rang bzhin), and what is…

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The “Other” Emptiness

The technical Tibetan term “zhentong” (gzhan stong, often mis-phoneticized “shentong”) suggests a particular view of reality, one that can be misconstrued due to the word itself. To give a simple…

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