How Things Exist

Teachings on Emptiness

By: Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Ailsa Cameron - editor

Narrated by: Subhash Mandal

This wonderfully practical book is a manifestation of Lama Zopa Rinpoche's peerless wisdom realizing emptiness and illuminates the personal experience of this rare and precious teacher. Rinpoche offers an incredible amount of information in this concise title by emphasizing the importance of compassion and universal responsibility, showing how we can make this life meaningful, giving a brief explanation of the nature of the enlightened mind and how we can attain it, offering an amazing and extensive explanation of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality, by analyzing the way various phenomena exist and finally teaching us how we can successfully meditate on emptiness.

"The most powerful, immediate way to stop problems is to remember emptiness. You should especially remember emptiness when you are in situations where there's a danger of giving rise to strong anger or uncontrolled desire and creating heavy negative karma and causing great harm to others." -Lama Zopa Rinpoche

The Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive brings you the collected works of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. The Archive was founded in 1996 by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the Archive’s spiritual director, and works to offer the Dharma in as many ways as possible for the happiness and benefit of all beings. Please visit LYWA online at www.LamaYeshe.com.

©2008 Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Extremely Informative

Answered many questions in a succulent and informative manner. Well done here. I will listen to again.

Amazing!

One of the best and clearest teaching on emptiness I have listened to! Purely amazing

Emptiness is ultimate truth

This text by Lama Zopa is more than anything a discourse on the meditative exercises for realizing emptiness through analytic meditation or, in other words, vipassana meditation.

This the real deal.

Lama Zopa provides a brief overview of the graduated path, an explanation of the critical importance of understanding impermanence and emptiness, and then provides a series of meditative exercises for attaining a direct cognition of emptiness.

This is a most profound text.

For the beginner, it will help develop the correct intellectual understanding of the highest prasangika madyamika view of emptiness, which is extremely subtle and borders perilously on the edge of nihilism. This is why they call it the razor's edge. It is beyond ill-advised that one engage in the study of emptiness absent the supervision of a qualified instructor, such as a Tibetan Geshe lest they make the grave mistake of nihilism.

For the exceptionally rare person who has attained enough single pointed focus and suppleneness of mind to engage in vipassana, it serves as the basis for one of the most profound of realizations. The realization that extinguishes all suffering. Next to bodhichitta, this is the most precious state of realization one could attain and is actually foundational to all virtuous states of mind, including bodhichitta and great compassion.

This is why Lama Zopa's commentary here is so profound.

Others have said this is a repetitive text. But as I said, it is a meditative text. It is not meant for casual reading, ego gratification or mere intellectual curiousity. It is meant for the elimination of ego and self cherishing. It is highly practical. It should be approached with a very serious mind, more so even than one would other serious disciplines such as medicine, law or engineering.

In order to realize emptiness, a qualified student must first have the flawless intellectual understanding of emptiness and then--under the supervision of a qualified teacher--they must have enough shamatha to engage in vipassana, the eventual result of which is a doubtless realization of emptiness and of which, this text is a most concise aid for doing so.

Therefore this text should not be approached casually.

awesome truth

gets to the core of emptiness and many ways to convey the experience. great book.

Heavy but inspiring

the amount if times he says chunyon near the end of chapter 3 is aggressively excessive