This course explores the question: How do you obtain accurate and valid knowledge about the world? That's the subject of pramana, or Buddhist epistemology. We typically assume that what we know about the world is valid. But is it? Our mind processes information so quickly, it responds so fast to what's happening around us that we usually don't realize when we are having a conceptual experience that is not actually in agreement with the object that we are experiencing.
This course is an introductory exposition of topics drawn from the Pram?na tradition, based on the Classifications of Mind root text. Students explore the criteria for the validity of cognition, the fourfold classification of direct valid cognition, seeming direct cognition and non-valid cognition.
This course is a systematic training in the meditation of special insight in the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. The students learn the skills to gain certainty in the view of emptiness through the practice of the Four Mah?y?na Yogas, cultivating inferential wisdom and bringing it to personal experience.