The Three Principle Aspects of the Path Part 4

In the graduated path to awakening, renunciation gives us the clarity to see our confusion and the motivation to seek freedom from it. But renunciation alone doesn't take us all the way. Without bodhicitta—the altruistic wish to attain awakening for the benefit of all beings—we can't reach full enlightenment. This is the teaching at the heart of Je Tsongkhapa's famous text, The Three Principal Aspects of the Path.

In this teaching, we'll explore what bodhicitta really means, why it matters so deeply on the Buddhist path, and how we can begin to cultivate it in our own practice and daily life.

Why Renunciation Isn't Enough

We're continuing our series on The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, a text that has been pivotal in my own practice over the past twenty-five years. Written by the renowned scholar-practitioner Je Tsongkhapa, this short but profound Lamrim text condenses the entire Mahayana path into three essential principles: renunciation, bodhicitta, and emptiness.

In previous installments, we explored renunciation mind—that quality of developing exhaustion with the ways we conduct ourselves through body, speech, and mind that cause harm and suffering. Renunciation isn't about rejecting the world or dissociating from life. It's about recognizing our inner samsaric state and seeking a remedy, a way out of our patterns of confusion and harm.

But here's where the path deepens. Verse six of our text reads:

Yet if this renunciation is not embraced by the pure motivation of bodhicitta, it will not become a cause for the perfect bliss of unsurpassed awakening. So the wise should generate supreme bodhicitta.

What does this mean? Simply put: renunciation alone won't lead us to full awakening. We need something more.

Understanding the Mahayana Motivation

To understand why bodhicitta matters, it helps to know a bit about how Tibetan Buddhism organizes the path. Following the Nalanda tradition—that great Indian Buddhist university—Tibetan Buddhism recognizes three vehicles, or yanas: the Shravakayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana.

The Shravakayana path, based on the Pali Canon, focuses on individual liberation from samsara. It's a valid and profound path that leads to becoming an arhat—someone who has freed themselves from cyclic existence. But this isn't the same as full Buddhahood.

The Mahayana path builds upon these teachings and introduces bodhicitta—the commitment to work toward our own liberation not just for ourselves, but in service of all beings. We're upgrading our motivation from seeking freedom for ourselves alone to seeking it so we can help others become free as well.

This isn't about putting down other Buddhist traditions. It's simply the framework within Tibetan Buddhism for understanding different levels of motivation and their results. As the 19th-century master Patrul Rinpoche said, "If we only have one thing, the precious bodhicitta is enough. If we have nothing else, we must have the method of the precious bodhicitta."

The Plight of All Beings: Verse Seven

To develop bodhicitta, we need to understand the situation we and all other beings find ourselves in. Verse seven describes this with powerful imagery:

Beings are swept along by the powerful current of the four rivers, tightly bound by the chains of their karma so difficult to undo, and snared within the iron trap of their self-grasping and enshrouded in the thick darkness of ignorance.

Let's unpack this verse, because it gets to the heart of how suffering works and why compassion naturally arises when we understand it.

The Four Rivers

The four rivers are birth, old age, sickness, and death. Imagine being caught in powerful rapids—you can't fight the current, you're just swept along. This metaphor captures how we experience samsara.

These aren't just four things that happen once in a lifetime. From a Buddhist perspective, they recur again and again through countless lifetimes until we stop the underlying projection—until we recognize in our own minds what is true and what is not true.

If you've read the Buddha's biography, you'll recognize these four rivers as the experiences that awakened him to the reality of suffering. Protected in his palace as a youth, he eventually ventured out and encountered old age, sickness, and death for the first time. These encounters sparked his quest for awakening. Birth appears in this list because it marks the beginning of a new round of having to face old age, sickness, and death—experiences most of us would prefer to avoid but can't.

Bound by Karma

The verse continues: we're "tightly bound by the chains of karma, so difficult to undo." We explored karma in previous episodes, and it's worth repeating that karma is easily misunderstood. It's an extremely hidden phenomenon, not something to accept blindly.

But here's what's crucial: when Buddhism points out karma, it's not saying, "This is how it is, deal with it." It's saying, "This pattern of cause and effect is created, and it's binding you to suffering—and you can change it." The teachings on karma are actually compassionate because they show us we're not stuck. We can augment our karma, and ultimately, we can cut its root entirely. That's what awakening is: freedom from being bound by cause and effect.

The Iron Trap of Self-Grasping

Now we get to the root: "snared within the iron trap of self-grasping." This is the big one. Self-grasping is what drives all our afflictive emotions and karmic patterns. It's this deeply held belief that "I am the most important thing, what I think and feel matters most."

Even if we wouldn't consciously admit to believing this, how are we actually behaving? This isn't about shame or guilt—it's about recognizing the mechanism that's getting in the way of our happiness and freedom. From the Buddhist perspective, the more self-grasping we have, the more we suffer.

Think about it this way: when someone insults you, anger or hurt arises. But who exactly are they insulting? Your body? Some aspect of your personality? If you actually look for this solid, findable self that's being insulted, you won't find it. We'll explore this more deeply when we get to the verses on emptiness, but the point here is that self-grasping is based on a misperception of who and what we are.

Enshrouded in Ignorance

The verse ends with "enshrouded in the thick darkness of ignorance." This ignorance is the fundamental misperception—grasping at a truly existent, independent, inherently existing self and other. This isn't saying you don't exist. That would be nihilism, which doesn't lead to awakening either.

Rather, there's an appearance of self that seems solid and unchanging, but when we investigate, we find it's always shifting. We take this appearance so seriously, and from that fundamental confusion, all other forms of suffering proliferate.

Seeing the Whole Stack

Here's what makes this teaching so powerful: we can see how suffering stacks up. At the surface, we experience the four rivers—birth, aging, sickness, death, and everything in between. These experiences are driven by karma. Karma is fueled by self-grasping. And self-grasping comes from the fundamental ignorance of perceiving an inherently existent self.

Most of us stay stuck at the outer level, trying to fix each problem as it arises. We get sick and try to treat the illness. We have a conflict and try to resolve it. We feel stressed and try to relax. But the Buddhist teachings point underneath all of that to the root cause.

This is where the real compassion of these teachings shines through. Understanding this stack means we can reverse-engineer it. We don't have to keep playing what I call the shell game of suffering—just shifting one form of dissatisfaction for another. We can actually get to the root and transform it.

Even just having the suspicion that there's something deeper going on is incredibly powerful. It means we have agency. We're not victims of random circumstances. There's a pattern we can understand, see directly in our own minds, and remedy through practice.

Why This Matters for Bodhicitta

So how does understanding all this lead to bodhicitta? When we start to recognize these patterns in ourselves, we naturally begin to see them in others. Every being around us is caught in the same four rivers, bound by the same karma, trapped by the same self-grasping, operating under the same fundamental confusion.

This isn't about judging ourselves or others as broken or sinful. Buddhist philosophy is grounded in Buddha nature—the understanding that we're not fundamentally flawed. We're originally awake. But we get confused, we move away from that natural state, and then we engage in actions that cause harm and create karmic consequences.

When we see that all of this confusion is based on misperception, compassion naturally arises—both for ourselves and for others. We think, "I want to be free from this, and I want everyone else to be free too." That's the seed of bodhicitta.

It's like having a good friend who's about to make a terrible decision. You can see where it's going to lead—maybe financial harm, health problems, or damage to their reputation. You want to help them, but you also need to have the clarity and skill not to fall into the same confusion yourself. If you're mired in whatever delusion they're caught in, you can't help them effectively.

That's what bodhicitta is about. We develop the wish to attain awakening so we have the means, skill, and inner freedom to actually guide others to liberation. As Shantideva beautifully put it: "If you stir milk, butter arises. Likewise, if you stir the teachings, its essence, bodhimind, arises."

A Practice Reflection

Before we close, I want to offer something to reflect on. Spend some time thinking about this progression from gross to subtle—how we get caught in confusion and how that confusion manifests as suffering.

Notice when you're dealing with difficulties at the surface level versus when you sense there might be something deeper going on. Can you glimpse the karma driving your reactions? Can you feel the self-grasping underneath your emotions? This isn't about fixing anything yet—just becoming more familiar with how these patterns work.

And here's the important reminder: we're not exploring dukkha and suffering to bring ourselves down. We're pointing out where the problem is because there's a remedy. If there were no remedy, there would be no point in discussing it—that would just be cruel.

But there is a remedy. We can see this confusion directly in our minds. We can understand it. We can work with it through meditation and study. And ultimately, we can free ourselves and help others do the same. That's the promise and purpose of the Mahayana path.

Closing Thoughts

For me personally, bodhicitta didn't make complete sense until my teachers went deeper into emptiness teachings. When we start to see reality's illusory nature—how we're experiencing a kind of personal projection—the pieces click together. We see how bodhicitta and emptiness work hand in hand, how recognizing the lack of inherent existence naturally gives rise to compassion.

We'll get into those connections more as we progress through the verses on emptiness. But even now, let this understanding settle: bodhicitta isn't about being a perfect person. It's about understanding that we and all beings share the same Buddha nature, the same potential for awakening. We all get confused and move away from it. We all cause harm because of that confusion. And we all deserve compassion—ourselves included.

When this understanding deepens, our practice takes on new meaning. We're not just meditating for ourselves. We're cultivating the clarity and freedom to help others find their way home to their own awakened nature. That's the beauty and power of bodhicitta—the heart of the Mahayana path.