How to Really Know What Is
The Skills of Logical Reasoning & Meditation
Rime Shedra Foundation Course #103
10 Tuesdays, May 2 to July 18, 2023 (Omitting June 27 and July 4)
Text: Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics Volume Two: The Mind, Conceived & Introduced by HH The Dalai Lama, compiled by The Compendium Compilation Committee, with material by John Dunne and edited
by Thupten Jinpa, Wisdom Publications, 2020
The focus of this course will be on how logical reasoning and meditation are used to dispel wrong views about reality which are created by conceptual artifice. The preliminary text for the study of reasoning in the traditional Shedra context is The Classification of Reasons, or Tarik, in Tibetan. The source text for the practice of meditation in Rime Shedra NYC is Kamalashila’s Stages of Meditation in Three Parts.
The Classification of Reasons presents the characteristics and varieties of logical reasoning which are used to clearly understand the nature of the world and our experience of it in order to accomplish valid conceptual understanding. This framework is represented in the shedra curriculum by Dharmakirti’s fifth century text, the Commentary on Valid Cognition or Pramanavartikka, which is a commentary on Dignaga’s seven texts on logical reasoning.
This is the third in a series of three foundational courses in the progressive curriculum of Rime Shedra NYC. The first foundational course focused on the Buddhist view of the phenomenal, objective world. Additionally, it established a standard method for analyzing our experience through a clear conceptual and linguistic framework. The second foundational course focused on Pramana or valid cognition, presenting the Buddhist view of the mind, our subjective world, and covered the variations in cognitive experience as well as the varieties of mental factors that accompany every cognitive experience. This third course builds upon material presented in the prior two courses; however, one need not have attended those courses to attend this one.