Tsongkhapa · Theology
Tsongkhapa’s famously concise distillation of the entire Buddhist path into three essentials - the determination to be free (renunciation), the awakening mind of compassion (bodhicitta), and the correct view (of emptiness) - written as a short letter to a disciple.
Tsongkhapa wrote the Great Treatise in hundreds of dense pages. But he also did something harder: he compressed the entire path into a poem of fourteen verses, written as a letter to a disciple, called The Three Principal Aspects of the Path (in Tibetan, lam gyi gtso bo rnam gsum). The claim of the little text is bold. Beneath the thousands of teachings, the countless practices and deities and philosophical subtleties, lie just three things a person absolutely must generate to reach awakening: the determination to be free, the awakening mind of compassion, and the correct view of reality. Everything else is detail or support. These three, moreover, are the shared core of both the sutra path and the tantra path - master them and you have the trunk from which every branch grows. It is one of the most quoted texts in all of Tibetan Buddhism precisely because it hands you the essence in a form you can hold in the mind at once.
The first aspect is renunciation - but the word is easily misread. It does not mean hating the world, fleeing to a cave, or despising ordinary happiness. It means seeing clearly that the pleasures of cyclic existence, however sweet, are unreliable and passing, unable to give the lasting freedom the heart actually seeks - and therefore turning the deepest wish away from them and toward liberation. Tsongkhapa is precise about how this feeling is cultivated: by reflecting on the preciousness and brevity of human life, so the mind stops clinging to this life; and by reflecting on karma and the sufferings of cyclic existence, so it stops clinging to future lives within that cycle. When both cravings loosen, a genuine, uncontrived wish for freedom arises day and night. That is renunciation: not a rejection of joy, but a refusal to keep mistaking the temporary for the ultimate.
The third aspect is the correct view - the understanding of emptiness, that persons and things do not exist in the solid, independent, self-standing way they appear to. This is the aspect that actually liberates, because the root of all suffering is a false grasping at such solid existence, and only a correct seeing can uproot a false seeing. But Tsongkhapa gives the correct view a signature twist that will occupy the rest of these lessons. To have the view is not merely to negate; it is to hold two truths together without letting either collapse. One must see that things are empty of independent existence and, in the very same breath, that they function perfectly well - that cause still produces effect, that the path still leads somewhere. A view that denies the solidity but keeps the causality is correct. A view that denies the causality along with the solidity has overshot into nihilism. The correct view, for Tsongkhapa, is this exact balance: empty, and therefore workable.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Tsongkhapa condensed the entire path into three essentials: renunciation (the determination to be free), bodhicitta (the altruistic wish to attain awakening for all beings), and the correct view of emptiness - and that all three are needed, in that order. Explain each and why the sequence matters.
Leads to Shantideva.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.