Steven > Recent Status Updates

On the advice of Lama Zopa Rinpoche, I'm going to read a little bit of the lam rim each day in order to improve my meditation practice. When you are done with the entire treatise, you're supposed to start over so that the study never stops. Tsongkhapa is hands down my favorite philosopher of all time, and this is undoubtedly his most famous work. Emaho!

Shelving this for now. I am going to start the actual text by Tsongkhapa and will probably return to this later.

I received this empowerment last month and I will be receiving it again in March from my root teacher. In the interim, I am reading this commentary so that I can be properly prepared. Pabongkha Rinpoche offers some excellent advice as usual.

The previous chapter was a continuation of textual analysis, but there weren't any new philosophical concepts presented.

The previous chapter was a continuation of textual analysis, but there weren't any new philosophical concepts presented.

It is so rare to find a writer that is so intimately acquainted with themselves, nature, and science all at the same time. It's hard for me to describe this book, and I'm sure the author would be delighted about that. It is equal parts autobiographical narrative, poetry, and ecology, arranged in a way that is so beautifully articulate and reflective

I'm not even very far into this book and it's already delightful. Nature is queer and so are we

Tsongkhapa once again reiterates that action cannot happen in a vacuum, nor can it arise through anything other than causes and conditions. The only reason that we can impute both action and agent is because actions have effects, and these effects imply both an agent and prior conditioning. If action did not have an agent, action would happen endlessly. If agent were not the basis for action, no action could happen

It's admirable that Saitō wants to rewrite Marx's legacy, but to base the entirety of his thought on unpublished material seems like a bit of a cop out to me. Even if Marx's thinking did transform into a more egalitarian and less eurocentric theory of economy late in his life, it transformed too late--The letter that Saitō cites as the "culmination" of his thought was written just two years before his death

Tsongkhapa makes an interesting point that exhaustion of a phenomena is not the same thing as a phenomena not existing. Exhaustion is based on an object referent (meaning that something that used to be there is no longer there) whereas nonexistence is simply an absence of causes, conditions, and effects. The effect of an action destroys the causes and conditions phenomenologically, leading to their exhaustion.

Tsongkhapa makes another complicated argument about why arising necessarily entails enduring and ceasing. If arising existed but not endurance and ceasing, then the produced would be like space. If enduring existed but not arising or ceasing, the produced could not endure (because it never arose nor ceased). If the produced ceased without arising or enduring, this is nonsensical, because nothing arose at all