The Sarvastivada School and the Yogacara (Mind-Only) School hold many different viewpoints on the interpretation of causality, but the ones elucidated by the Mind-Only School are the more comprehensive within the context of the relative truth. The Yogacara School asserts that everyone has a mental continuum from beginningless time until the attainment of enlightenment. This mental continuum sometimes has the five consciousnesses of eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body, but sometimes not. No matter how it manifests itself, a permanent existence called the substrate consciousness is present at all times. Whenever karma is committed, a karmic seed is planted in the alaya consciousness.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Right View : On Cause and Effect]

All our concepts are transmitted to and analysed by our consciousness. What we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel with our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body provides information and evidence for our consciousness to judge and make decisions. If our senses are reliable and accurate, then the information they transmit to us will not be wrong; if our senses are limited, the information they transfer to us cannot be trusted. Our five senses are not ultimately reliable, though, which can be discerned from the example of the pebble. (The pebble seems to be motionless to our naked eye, but the microscope tells us it is continuously moving.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Illusory World]

What can be detected by our five senses, including the people we meet and the surroundings we are living in, all indeed seem very real. They are like what we experience in a dream, which is also vivid to us. When we have a dream at night, we still have a strong attachment to our surroundings. We cannot deny the existence of our dream when we are in the dream. However, when we wake up from the dream, we suddenly realize that the dream and everything in it were unreal. Therefore, we have to accept that all material objects manifest in different forms if we look at them in different ways. What we see in this world depends on the structure of our eyes. The world would look different if we had different eye structures.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Illusory World]

We need to be aware that everything in this world is illusory and insubstantial. What really exists and the nature of this world is “one ten thousandth of a second”. A “moment” can be one hundred thousandth of a second or even shorter, but let’s not make it complicated—we can just take one ten thousandth of a second as the present moment. If we can seize the present moment, then the past and future world do not exist because the past has gone, and the future has not yet been born. What really exists is the “one ten thousandth of a second”; that is our world. How can we prove this? Physicists believe that electrons rotate by circling the nucleus. In Buddhism, we call this “arising and ceasing” instead of “rotating”.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Illusory World]

Buddhism holds that physical suffering and misfortune have various contributing factors as their causes. Some illnesses, the so-called karma-induced illnesses, originated from a previous life. They are medically incurable, no matter how much money is spent. These may be attributed to karma. If you have a cold, headache, or fever, it may also be karma related, but not necessarily caused by karma from past lives. Hence, karma is sometimes directly responsible for certain things taking place, but other times may not be so directly involved. The point is, in all matters, Buddhism has always opposed taking the dualistic approach, affirming one thing while negating the other. The same applies to karma.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Right View : On Cause and Effect]

Our eyes are ordinary sense organs; what can be observed with our eyes are all relative. When we look at things with our naked eyes, static objects are real for us. The movement under the microscope, though, can be called the absolute truth, but absolute truth from the Buddhist point of view means a lot more than that. The microscopic view is only a lower level meaning of the absolute truth.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Illusory World]

Padmasambhava accepted their request and displayed his miraculous power at that critical point. Only after he had subdued all the demons and dispelled all adverse conditions, the most profound tantra from India was propagated in Tibet. Although more than one thousand years of turbulence have passed, the tantric transmissions, empowerments and so on are still being preserved in their entirety in Tibet.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava]

As one Chinese proverb goes, “The more one strives for goodness, the greater the obstacles are.” To propagate the profound highest tantra, one will definitely encounter a great multitude of obstacles. When many esteemed masters such as Shantarakshita (8th century C.E.) first arrived in Tibet, even though they were as marvelous as the Buddha, they were not able to propagate tantra. Hence, they had to seek help from Padmasambhava.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava]

Practitioners wishing for enlightenment: When you have completed the preliminaries and accomplished everything except enlightenment, the Guru Yoga of Padmasambhava is particularly important. Words cannot describe the realization of the true nature of mind or the Great Perfection; the true nature of mind is beyond words. The best way to attain such realization is through guru yoga, and not any other way.

[Excerpt from Luminous Wisdom Book Series ~ The Guru Yoga Practice of the Seven-Line Prayer to Padmasambhava]