bag chags

To continue to go into details about the source of suffering, it's good to know how the suffering is happening over and over again. Hence the next posts are about keywords related to this explanation.

First it is about bag chags, in Sanskrit vasana. This word is used a lot in presentations about karma. It means habitual tendencies, subtle inclinations that are imprinted in the mind, like a stain. For example, if someone smokes, there will be a habitual tendency for an urge to smoke every day, usually around the same time. There are bigger picture bag chags, such as why some people are kind by nature, and others are cruel; it's the tendency to behave in a certain way that will trigger similar actions in future, reinforcing the bag chags.

As with bad habits, bag chags are hard to remove. They are actually so hard to eliminate that it takes a huge meditational event -- experience reality directly -- to realize that everything we take for granted is wrong, to really start removing them permanently.

Anyway, the bag chags are the starting point. Next about the really nasty habit that is triggered over and over again, every microsecond, in the mind.

By the way, I will deliberately from now leave out the translation for certain Tibetan words we will use in the next presentations -- so you need to look them up, they are sometimes in this blog, or at least in the dharmadictionary. Even better, memorize them!