Dates: Aug 30, Oct 25
Anger, craving, jealousy, and the states related to them are called afflictions (kleśa) in Buddhist psychology — the disturbing mental states that drive suffering and the actions that produce more of it. Within the Prāsaṅgika presentation of the lamrim, an affliction does not appear as an unexplained force. It arises through identifiable conditions — a latent seed on the mindstream, contact with an object, and above all the distortion in attention that converts the first two into actual disturbance. Three further conditions reinforce that process once it begins. This course works through all six directly in the lamrim, moving from precondition to mechanism in the first class and to reinforcement in the second.
Each 90-minute session combines a 30-minute lecture grounded in the source texts, a 20-minute small group discussion, and a 20-minute guided meditation drawn from the material covered that day.
Class 1 — Seed, Object, and Attention: How Affliction Arises The karmic imprint left by past action, the sense contact that meets it, and the distortion in attention that converts the two into actual disturbance. Seed and object are necessary but not sufficient on their own; attention is where the causal work is done, through the four distorted views and the misapprehension underlying them. Participants trace a recent experience of their own through all three conditions in sequence.
Class 2 — Discourse, Habituation, and Companions: What Keeps It Going Three conditions that do not trigger affliction fresh but strengthen its grip once wrong attention is already active: language absorbed as view, repetition that lowers the threshold for recurrence, and companionship that waters particular seeds over time. Participants trace their own reinforcement loops across all three
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
- Recognize, in their own experience, the specific conditions that precede an afflictive state, rather than experiencing affliction as sudden or causeless.
- Locate the exact moment where attention shifts from bare contact into elaboration, and catch that shift before it completes.
- Name the external and internal reinforcement patterns — language, repetition, company — that keep a particular affliction returning, and identify which ones are active in their own life.
- Apply an antidote at the point in the causal sequence where it will do the most good, rather than only after an affliction has fully arisen.
- Describe, in one’s own words, the causal relationship between all six factors as a single compounding sequence rather than as six unrelated triggers.
If you have wondered what actually happens between an encounter and the reaction that follows it, this course offers a way to look closely at that gap, using texts that have been examined for centuries. Join us for two sessions of study, discussion, and practice.
