The Three Principle Aspects of the Path Part 5
There's a question that sits at the heart of Mahayana Buddhist practice: Why should I care about anyone else's suffering?It sounds blunt, but it's honest. And Tsongkhapa, in Verse 8 of the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, offers one of the most direct and moving answers to that question the tradition has to offer. Understanding it requires sitting with some uncomfortable truths about the nature of our experience — and then discovering that those truths, far from being a burden, become the very ground of compassion.
A Quick Recap: Where We Are in the Text
Tsongkhapa is widely regarded as one of the great masters in Tibetan Buddhist history — founder of the Gelug lineage, a remarkable yogi who combined extensive solitary retreat with prolific scholarship and wide teaching. The Three Principal Aspects of the Path is one of my favorite texts of his: short, pithy, and complete. It covers the three main principles of the Mahayana path — renunciation mind, bodhicitta, and the wisdom of emptiness — in a way that's both accessible and profound.
We've already worked through the renunciation mind teachings, and we've been moving through the bodhicitta section. To recap briefly: bodhicitta has two dimensions. There's relative bodhicitta — the altruistic wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, rooted in loving-kindness and compassion. And there's absolute bodhicitta, which we'll encounter in Verse 9 and beyond — the wisdom aspect, the non-dual teachings that actually free us. For now, we're still in the territory of relative bodhicitta.
Verse 7: The Condition We're All In
Before diving into Verse 8, it helps to hold Verse 7 close, because these two verses really belong together:
"Beings are swept along by the powerful current of the four rivers, tightly bound by the chains of their karma, so difficult to undo, ensnared within the iron trap of their self-grasping, and enshrouded in the thick darkness of ignorance."
I should say something about the word "ignorance" here. I personally prefer translating the Sanskrit avidya — or the Tibetan marigpa — as "misperception," "confusion," or "underlying confusion." In English, "ignorance" can carry connotations of stupidity or willful neglect. That's not what's being pointed to. It's more like a fundamental unawareness — not knowing what creates suffering and what creates peace, and acting out of that not-knowing habitually, with tremendous momentum.
When I sit with that — the idea that beings are simply unaware, acting out of confusion rather than malice — something softens in me. It's not a cause for judgment. It's a cause for compassion. That's exactly what Verse 7 is preparing us for.
Verse 8: The Teaching on Limitless Samsara and Bodhicitta
"And yet again they are reborn in limitless samsara and constantly tormented by the three forms of suffering. This is the current condition of all your mothers from previous lives. Contemplate their plight and generate supreme bodhicitta."
This verse builds on everything in Verse 7. Because of that fundamental misperception, beings engage in actions of body, speech, and mind that perpetuate their samsaric situation — again and again. The phrase "and yet again" is doing real work here. The point is to stir up a kind of exhaustion, a genuine weariness — very similar to what we were cultivating in the renunciation mind teachings. But whereas renunciation was mostly about our own situation, now we're turning that same lens outward toward all beings. From that comes compassion, loving-kindness, and most importantly, the altruistic wish: I'm going to take responsibility to help.
The Three Forms of Suffering
The verse mentions beings being "constantly tormented by the three forms of suffering," and this is worth unpacking carefully. I prefer to use the Pali/Sanskrit term dukkha here, because "suffering" really only describes the first form — and forcing that word onto all three loses something important.
Dukkha-dukkha — the suffering of suffering. This is the most obvious kind: intense physical pain, emotional pain, not getting what we want, being in a bad mood. Most people can recognize these experiences as uncomfortable, even if they don't always call them suffering.
The dukkha of change. This is something most people wouldn't naturally identify as suffering — which is exactly why the term dukkha is more precise here. It refers to pleasurable experiences. The moment we encounter something pleasurable, it begins to change and end. That's simply its nature. But because we tend to cling to what feels good, when it shifts or disappears, that becomes an unsatisfying or painful experience.
I like to use food as an example. Say you have a really delicious piece of chocolate cake. You take a small piece, finish it, and feel some pleasure and satisfaction. Some people are genuinely content with that. Others immediately want more. Right there is the dukkha of change. And even for the person who feels fully satisfied in the moment — at some point, maybe years later, they'll want that cake again. Which shows it's still operating in the nature of change. If it weren't, one bite would be enough for a lifetime. But that's not how it works.
All-pervasive dukkha. This is the most subtle. It has to do with simply being born — having a body subject to emotional ups and downs, physical deterioration, sickness. It points to a kind of underlying, pervasive dissatisfaction: the sense that there's never quite a place where we can fully land or feel complete. We get some satisfaction, and then it shifts, and we move on to the next thing. For me personally, it often shows up like this: I finish recording a video, and there's this immediate sense of okay, what's next? No real resting point. Of course, this varies from person to person, but that subtle, pervading discontent is what's being pointed to.
When we reflect on this honestly in our own experience, and then look around and see whether it exists in others' lives — and it does — something begins to open. This is how compassion and bodhicitta grow naturally, rather than as a performance.
A Note on Pessimism (and Why This Isn't That)
A lot of people misunderstand this aspect of Buddhist teaching and think it's pessimistic — that it's just pointing out everything that's wrong. But that's not it. What Buddhism is doing with these reflections is identifying the disease so we can treat it with the dharma.
If you find yourself getting discouraged when working with these reflections, I always recommend bringing in the third and fourth noble truths. The first two — the truth of dukkha and the truth of its cause — are meant to motivate us, to get us moving. But the third noble truth is just as important: there is a real possibility of completely ending all of that. And the fourth is the path itself — the path of understanding, reflection, contemplation, and meditation. That's where we put most of our energy. That's what brings agency, and real change. The point of the first two truths is not to dwell in pessimism. It's to become sober. And that sobriety doesn't happen just once — our habits are strong — so we have to get sober again and again. That's why we meditate on these things daily.
All Beings as Our Mothers
Now we come to the part of this verse that can be particularly tricky for modern Western practitioners: "This is the current condition of all your mothers from previous lives."
Karma and cause and effect are already not the most popular teachings in Western dharma circles. Add past and future lives, and I understand why people hesitate. We tend to come from a cultural context that centers materialism and what's immediately perceivable. And sometimes when we arrive at the Buddhist path, we've already walked away from other religious traditions that asked us to accept things beyond our direct experience. That's worth acknowledging.
What's interesting is that Buddhism isn't really asking you to believe any of this. It's saying: here's a possibility — reflect on it. Some of it we can begin to see and develop a reasoned faith in. Some of it, like karma, we can't see directly; we infer it, and over time our conviction deepens. Past and future lives work similarly.
This teaching rests on the principle that mind is a continuity without beginning. It didn't start, and it doesn't end. Within that continuity — as long as we're caught in samsaric confusion — there's the possibility of being born again in another form, based on karma and cause and effect. From that view, we've had many lives — countless, since samsara has no beginning. And in any life born from a womb or egg, we've had a mother. The teaching implies that all beings, especially those with whom we have strong karmic connections, have most likely served us in that role at some point.
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition holds the mother as one of the kindest beings in our life — one who held us in her womb for nine months, gave birth to us, and cared for us when we couldn't care for ourselves. Without our mother, we simply wouldn't exist.
That said — I know many people in the modern West have complicated relationships with their actual mothers. I run into this regularly when teaching this to students. What I usually recommend is working with the mother principle rather than your specific mother. Imagine the most idealized, nurturing figure you can genuinely connect with — a grandmother, a mentor, an archetypal image of caring. Generate a felt sense of beings having served you in that way, let appreciation arise, and from there, cultivate the wish to repay that kindness. That's the real point. Not to get tangled up in difficult family history, but to find a way to recognize that beings have been kind to us — and to let that recognition move us toward wanting to help them find their way to freedom.
If that framing is workable for you, it can actually be quietly healing, even in relation to your actual mother or father. And if not, use whatever figure genuinely evokes that sense of care and warmth in you.
Generating Supreme Bodhicitta
The verse ends simply: contemplate their plight and generate supreme bodhicitta.
What is supreme bodhicitta? It's the aspirational wish — seeing clearly where we're stuck, wanting to be free, and recognizing that we don't want that freedom for ourselves alone. We see others caught in a similar situation. We want to work toward awakening so that we can, in some real way, help guide others toward their own. Not by becoming a savior. Not by liberating anyone from their external circumstances. But by engaging in a fundamental transformation of how we perceive ourselves and everything else — and from that place, being far more skillful at helping someone else find that for themselves.
A Practical Entry Point: The Four Immeasurables
If you're new to bodhicitta practice, a good place to start is the four immeasurables — sometimes called the four boundless states: equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and empathetic joy.
In the Tibetan tradition, we typically begin with equanimity — reflecting on the fact that all beings, equally, want happiness and want to be free from suffering. We bring to mind three categories: people we're close to, people we're indifferent toward, and people we find difficult. We try to bring those three into balance before moving into loving-kindness, so that our warmth can be applied evenly rather than selectively. Then compassion, then joy — taking genuine delight in what brings others happiness. After working through all four, we rest in the bodhicitta wish: the wish to be awake, for the benefit of all beings.
That's a real and workable entry point into bodhicitta practice. You can also explore tonglen — sending and receiving — which is a wonderful complement to this. And as I've said, simply sitting with these verses themselves, letting them land, is wholesome and genuinely helpful.
Closing: The Heart of the Path
These two verses — 7 and 8 — are doing something quite precise. They're asking us to see the full picture: what we and all beings are caught in, and why that should move us. Not toward despair, but toward the kind of courageous, clear-eyed love that the Mahayana path calls bodhicitta.
In the renunciation teachings, we contemplated our own plight. Now we're applying that same clarity to all beings — seeing their suffering with compassion, and cultivating the wish to also help remedy their samsaric situation.
That's not pessimism. That's the beginning of genuine care.
