Insight Into Emptiness
by Tegchok, Khensur Jampa; Chodron, ThubtenFormat: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2012-07-31
Publisher(s): Wisdom Publications
Other versions by this Author
-
This Item Qualifies for Free Shipping!*
*Excludes marketplace orders.
List Price: $19.90
Rent Book
Select for Price
New Book
We're Sorry
Sold Out
Used Book
We're Sorry
Sold Out
eBook
We're Sorry
Not Available
How Marketplace Works:
- This item is offered by an independent seller and not shipped from our warehouse
- Item details like edition and cover design may differ from our description; see seller's comments before ordering.
- Sellers much confirm and ship within two business days; otherwise, the order will be cancelled and refunded.
- Marketplace purchases cannot be returned to eCampus.com. Contact the seller directly for inquiries; if no response within two days, contact customer service.
- Additional shipping costs apply to Marketplace purchases. Review shipping costs at checkout.
Summary
A former abbot of one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in the world, Khensur Jampa Tegchok has been teaching Westerners about Buddhism since the 1970s. With a deep respect for the intellectual capacity of his Western students, Khensur Tegchok here unpacks with great erudition Buddhism’s animating philosophical principle—the emptiness of all appearances. Instead of commenting on a text or relying on a traditional framework, Insight into Emptiness uses accessible language specifically tailored to the Western mind. Engagingly edited by bestselling author Thubten Chodron, emptiness is here approached from a host of angles far beyond most treatments of the subject, while never sacrificing its conversational approach, and brings the reader into the heart of insight meditation.
Author Biography
Born in 1930, Khensur Rinpoche Jampa Tegchok became a monk at the age of eight. He studied the major Buddhist treatises at Sera-je Monastic University in Tibet for 14 years before fleeing his homeland in 1959 after the abortive uprising of the Tibetans against the Communist Chinese occupation of their country.
After staying in the refugee camp at Buxa, India, Rinpoche went to Varanasi, where he obtained his Acharya (Master) Degree and taught for seven years. He then began teaching in the West - three years in England and ten years at Nalanda Monastery in France, and then in the United States. In 1993, His Holiness the Dalai Lama appointed him as abbott of Sera-je Monastic University in India. He has recently retired from that post.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| An Overview | p. 2 |
| The Origins of This Book | p. 5 |
| A Note on Terminology | p. 6 |
| Appreciation | p. 6 |
| The Benefits of Learning about and Meditating on Emptiness | p. 7 |
| Motivation | p. 7 |
| The Sources of This Teaching | p. 8 |
| The Benefits in General | p. 9 |
| Admiration for the Profound | p. 9 |
| The Three Doors of Liberation | p. 11 |
| Benefits According to the Sutras | p. 12 |
| Why Realizing Emptiness Is Important | p. 17 |
| Background | p. 17 |
| Taking Refuge | p. 18 |
| Cyclic Existence: The Five Aggregates and Six Realms | p. 21 |
| Ignorance, Afflictions, Karma, and Liberation | p. 23 |
| Renouncing Duhkha and Its Causes | p. 25 |
| The Root of Cyclic Existence | p. 28 |
| The Four Noble Truths | p. 29 |
| Enthusiasm for Emptiness | p. 33 |
| Understanding Emptiness Is Crucial | p. 33 |
| The Danger of Misunderstanding Emptiness | p. 36 |
| Doubt Inclined Toward Emptiness | p. 38 |
| The Power of Realizing Emptiness | p. 39 |
| More than One Way to Practice | p. 41 |
| Confidence | p. 42 |
| Looking at the Landscape | p. 45 |
| The Four Seals | p. 45 |
| Aryadeva's Advice | p. 47 |
| An Overview of the Levels of Selflessness | p. 49 |
| The Buddha as a Skillful Teacher | p. 51 |
| The Value of Reasoning | p. 53 |
| Emptiness Is an Obscure Phenomenon | p. 54 |
| What Is A Person? | p. 57 |
| The Person | p. 57 |
| Persons and Phenomena | p. 58 |
| The Five Aggregates | p. 59 |
| The Continuity of Consciousness | p. 62 |
| Who Is Joe? | p. 63 |
| No Permanent, Unitary, and Independent Self | p. 63 |
| Impermanence: Coarse and Subtle | p. 65 |
| The Meaning of "Unitary" and "Independent" | p. 68 |
| The Lack of a Self-Sufficient, Substantially Existent Person | p. 70 |
| Searching for the Person | p. 73 |
| The Basis of Designation and the Designated Object | p. 73 |
| An Inherently Existent Person Can't Be Found | p. 74 |
| The Illustration of the Person | p. 76 |
| The Illustration of the Person, the Mere I, and the Continuity of Mental Consciousness | p. 80 |
| The General I and the Specific I | p. 82 |
| Investigating the I | p. 85 |
| Ignorance and Wisdom | p. 85 |
| The Valid I-Apprehending Mind and the Erroneous I-Grasping Mind | p. 86 |
| Valid and Mistaken, but Not Erroneous | p. 89 |
| The Self that Exists and the Self that Doesn't | p. 91 |
| Independence and Imputation | p. 93 |
| Exploring Selflessness | p. 97 |
| Selflessness in the Four Schools | p. 97 |
| The Two Middle Way Schools | p. 99 |
| Mere Imputation Without the Slightest Existence from Its Own Side | p. 103 |
| Mere Name | p. 108 |
| Imputed and Empty | p. 111 |
| What Is This Fluid? | p. 111 |
| Not Findable, but Existent | p. 113 |
| Searching for the Cart | p. 115 |
| Appearing When Not Analyzed, Unfindable When Analyzed | p. 117 |
| How to Learn about Emptiness | p. 118 |
| Enlightenment Is Possible | p. 121 |
| All Sentient Beings Can Attain Enlightenment | p. 121 |
| Adventitious Stains Can Be Eliminated | p. 122 |
| Inconceivable and Inexpressible | p. 124 |
| Combining Bodhichitta and Wisdom | p. 125 |
| Easing into Emptiness | p. 127 |
| A Review: How Ignorance Arises and Produces Afflictions | p. 127 |
| The Sequence for Meditating on Selflessness | p. 130 |
| Three Modes of Apprehending Phenomena | p. 132 |
| Dependent Arising Contradicts Inherent Existence | p. 134 |
| Dependent Arising | p. 139 |
| Nagarjuna's View | p. 139 |
| The King of Reasonings | p. 140 |
| Dependence on Causes and Conditions | p. 141 |
| Dependence on Parts | p. 143 |
| No Partless Particles | p. 143 |
| Dependent Designation | p. 144 |
| Mutual or Relational Dependence | p. 145 |
| Dependence on Imputation by Name and Concept | p. 147 |
| All Phenomena Depend on Mere Imputation | p. 148 |
| Emptiness and Dependent Arising | p. 150 |
| The Compatibility of Being Dependent and Empty | p. 152 |
| Is There Choice? | p. 153 |
| The Four Essential Points | p. 155 |
| Meditation on the Four Essential Points | p. 155 |
| The First Essential Point: Identifying the Object of Negation | p. 156 |
| The Second Essential Point: The Pervasion | p. 159 |
| One and Different | p. 160 |
| One Nature and Different Natures | p. 161 |
| The Third Essential Point: Are I and the Aggregates Inseparably One and the Same? | p. 163 |
| The Fourth Essential Point: Are the I and the Aggregates Totally Unrelated? | p. 169 |
| Expanding the Analysis | p. 170 |
| The Correct Conclusion | p. 171 |
| When to Reflect on Dependent Arising | p. 172 |
| How Things Arise: Refuting the Four Extremes | p. 175 |
| Not Arising from Self | p. 175 |
| Not Arising from Other | p. 177 |
| Not Arising from Both | p. 181 |
| Not Arising Causelessly | p. 181 |
| Summary of the Four Extremes | p. 183 |
| Ever-Deepening Understandings of Selflessness | p. 185 |
| The Three Turnings of the Dharma Wheel | p. 185 |
| The Chittamatra Perspective | p. 186 |
| Subtler Meanings Revealed in the Three Turnings | p. 189 |
| The Four Reliances | p. 190 |
| Ever-Deepening Levels of Selflessness | p. 191 |
| Deepening Understanding of Dependent Arising | p. 195 |
| Phenomena Are Self-Liberated | p. 197 |
| Self-Emptiness and Other-Emptiness | p. 198 |
| Appearances | p. 203 |
| Things Do Not Exist as They Appear | p. 203 |
| True and False | p. 204 |
| Minds and Their Objects | p. 206 |
| Analogies | p. 211 |
| Realizing It Does Not Exist as It Appears | p. 212 |
| Real and Unreal | p. 213 |
| Inferential and Direct Realization of Emptiness | p. 215 |
| Two Levels of Mistaken Appearance | p. 216 |
| Refining Our Understanding of Emptiness | p. 219 |
| Similes Showing the Five Aggregates Are Empty | p. 219 |
| The Refutation of One and Many | p. 222 |
| Perception Is Not Truly Existent | p. 223 |
| Nothing to Remove, Nothing to Add | p. 224 |
| Avoiding the Views of Nihilism and Absolutism | p. 225 |
| Abandon Meditating on the Nonexistence of Anything At All | p. 227 |
| The Two Truths | p. 231 |
| Basis, Path, and Result | p. 231 |
| The Two Truths | p. 232 |
| Conventional Truths | p. 234 |
| Ultimate Truths | p. 235 |
| Same Nature, Nominally Different | p. 236 |
| Truth and Truly Existent | p. 240 |
| Conventional and Ultimate | p. 241 |
| Similes from the Diamond Cutter SutraùPart I | p. 243 |
| The Simile of a Star | p. 244 |
| The Simile of a Visual Aberration | p. 246 |
| The Simile of the Flame of a Lamp | p. 249 |
| The Simile of an Illusion | p. 250 |
| Similes from the Diamond Cutter SutraùPart II | p. 255 |
| The Simile of a Dewdrop | p. 255 |
| The Simile of a Water Bubble | p. 256 |
| The Simile of a Dream | p. 257 |
| The Simile of a Flash of Lightning | p. 258 |
| The Simile of a Cloud | p. 259 |
| Conclusion: See Conditioned Phenomena as Such | p. 261 |
| How Fortunate! | p. 263 |
| Meditating on Emptiness Is Crucial for Liberation | p. 264 |
| Powerful Purification | p. 268 |
| Notes | p. 271 |
| More Reading | p. 275 |
| Index | p. 277 |
| Biographies | p. 281 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
An electronic version of this book is available through VitalSource.
This book is viewable on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and most smartphones.
By purchasing, you will be able to view this book online, as well as download it, for the chosen number of days.
Digital License
You are licensing a digital product for a set duration. Durations are set forth in the product description, with "Lifetime" typically meaning five (5) years of online access and permanent download to a supported device. All licenses are non-transferable.
More details can be found here.
A downloadable version of this book is available through the eCampus Reader or compatible Adobe readers.
Applications are available on iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and Windows Mobile platforms.
Please view the compatibility matrix prior to purchase.