Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Closing out the Three Principal Aspects of the Path series, Ven Jampa Gendun gathers the text’s final instructions in this 6-minute session. He connects the motivation of helping others to the need to realize emptiness, briefly sketching the four philosophical stages through which that realization unfolds. The sharpest passage unpacks Tsongkhapa’s advice to “resort to isolation” — not a cave in the Himalayas, Ven Jampa Gendun warns, but inner freedom from the eight worldly dharmas: the paired hopes and fears around pleasure, gain, praise, and fame that express ego’s basic grip on ordinary life. He closes with a Thoreau quotation, Tsongkhapa’s final exhortation to “accomplish quickly your final aim,” and a set of dedication prayers that bring the series to an end.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 15 3 PA 1990 11 30.mp3
UUID: b9ae187c-41b3-417d-be9a-cf09d5e2be6c
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1990-11-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 6.4 minutes
Words: ~706
So, you know, if we developing this determination to help others to grow, and this becomes the primary motivating force for our practice. The determination to help others to grow. Our wholehearted determination becomes the primary motivation for us for our practice. In order to actually bring this about in fact, to bring about the ultimate welfare of both oneself and others it is necessary that we see deeply into the nature of reality. If, you know, that if we’re going to become happy, healthy, loving, sane human beings, we have to you know, if we’re going to achieve this optimum mode of being, which we call Buddhahood.
In order to do that, we have to see deeply into the nature of reality. And in order to do that, we have to pass through the four stages of coming to a realization of emptiness. The Hearer stage, the mind only stage, the Autonomy Middle Way stage, and the Consequentialist Middle Way stage, which we’ve just done. So, you know, one when when one achieves a direct realization of emptiness, then all obstructions all obstructions which limit our potential are eliminated and one experiences awakening. Awakening is attained.
So having listened to the teachings on the three principal aspects of the path and understood the significance of the meanings of these instructions on the three principal aspects of the path, Tsongkhapa advises us to resort to isolation. To isolation does not simply mean removing yourself from from busyness externally, from busyness of external life but but also removing yourself from the busyness of your internal life and the busyness of our internal life which is being gotten out here is the busyness of our eight principal preoccupations of ego. The eight worldly dharmas. You know, to if you if you run away to a cave in Himalayas and you carry with you the eight worldly dharmas, then you wasted your time. And the eight worldly dharmas, you know, the all the various these are the kind of the the the gross expressions of ego in our life.
Hope all our hopes and fears. Hope hope for pleasure, fear of pain, hope for gain, fear of loss, hope for praise, fear of blame, hope for fame, fear of infamy. So isolation is is not only removing ourselves from the busyness of our external life, removing ourselves from the busyness of the eight principal preoccupations of ego, these hopes and fears. Having done that, we are to make a consistent healthy effort until we have accomplished our goal, the goal of our spiritual life. And a way of viewing this goal which is suggesting what this goal possibly might be is a being who experiences unremitting peace within and motivated by compassion skillfully works without to help others to experience the same peace.
A quotation from Henry David Thoreau. I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this, but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time it can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn.
The sun is but a morning star. And Tsongkhapa, the the final the very final line of the text says, accomplish quickly your final aim, my child. That’s the Three Principal Aspects of the path. Thank you. We’ve we’ve accumulated positive potentials, therefore, actions equal to space and to, you know, to dedicate it in such a way that it will never come to fruition unless it’s for our enlightenment and our ultimate goal, what it means to be a human being.
So, you know, making strong prayers with that may all my activities be only for the benefit of others, and that may all my actions be in accordance with my holy teachers’ words. And may all sentient beings be happy. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to the light-filled realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more.