The Three Principle Aspects of the Path Part 8

This is part of an ongoing series on The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, a short text by the great scholar-yogi Lama Tsongkhapa — one of the lineage founders within the Himalayan Buddhist traditions. He founded the Gelug lineage and was an extraordinary practitioner and scholar, and his commentaries are still widely studied and considered some of the sharpest and most powerful for developing a deeper connection to, and understanding of, the path to awakening.

The text condenses more or less the whole Mahayana path into three developments: the development of renunciation, the development of bodhicitta, and the one we've been exploring over the last several verses — the development of right view, a connection to the teachings on Buddhist nonduality.

In verse 10, Tsongkhapa pointed out what the view of emptiness is through his own poetic language. From there, the practice is to go away, meditate on it, contemplate it, and try to understand it more. Now, in verse 11, things get a little deeper. Verse 11 gives the definition of not having completed an analysis of right view correctly; verse 12 gives the definition of having completed it. Together, they offer some indications of whether we're moving in a direction closer to the Buddha's teachings on emptiness — particularly in the Prajnaparamita sutras — or moving away from them.

Verse 11: Keeping the Two Truths Apart

Verse 11 talks about moving away, and it goes like this:

The knowledge that appearances arise unfailingly in dependence, and the knowledge that they are empty and beyond all assertions — as long as these two appear to you as separate, there can be no realization of the Buddha’s wisdom.

We looked at the two truths in more depth earlier in this series — relative and absolute truth, and how the two are actually not separate. But when we're in samsara, circling in its confusion, we have a habit of separating them, and for most of us it's a fairly unconscious one. This verse continues to refine our understanding of them.

Tsongkhapa uses the word "dependence" here; we can also say interdependence. And he talks about things being "empty, beyond all assertions." What he's really referring to is beyond all conceptual assertions — any kind of idea, thought, or conceptual overlay. This can be quite subtle for meditators. What he's saying is that when emptiness, free from all conceptual assertions, is separated from appearances — which arise dependently, which are in relationship, which are made of parts — then we've separated the two truths. If we find some kind of nothingness or voidness apart from appearance and just meditate on that, that would not be the correct view of emptiness. That would not liberate us.

Some people might wonder: what's actually the problem with that? What happens is that we don't move toward awakening. That approach moves us away from it — and therefore away from the peace, contentment, openness, and compassion we'd actually prefer to embody. So this isn't a judgment of anyone. Tsongkhapa is simply pointing out a very common sidetrack on the path.

The Finger and the Moon

Once we learn what the two truths are and that they're inseparable — once we understand intellectually that emptiness doesn't mean everything disappears and we rest in nothingness — there is still the challenge of experiencing that. Conceptual understanding is important. It's like the finger pointing at the moon: it gives us a direction, a way to orient ourselves in our practice. But the moon is a little more challenging, because then there's the experience of walking on it, of being on it. You're no longer pointing at it — you're getting closer to it. And when someone actually tastes emptiness, they're experiencing it directly. But on the way to the moon, there can be a lot of different sidetracks.

So I'll come back to something simple. This is one of the simpler — I wouldn't say easy, but simpler — ways to work with this in meditation. We don't have to reject what's arising. We meditate without rejecting. We meditate without seeking some other experience than what's happening right now. And then we find the emptiness beyond all assertions. We find the space. We find the underlying nature, or essence, that is no-thing. We find it with the appearance. The appearance doesn't have to go.

I personally find this one of the most inspiring things in Buddhism, because it really shows what genuine nondual freedom is. It's not some kind of peak experience. It's not some kind of nothingness. It's not that we find a pure space over there that has nothing to do with our life. It happens within life. And of course that's what makes it challenging, because life includes both the things we like and the things we don't — the things we're afraid of and the things we love. It includes all of it. So that's the challenge. We approach it gradually, through lots of different practices, understandings, and approaches within Buddhism, but they're all more or less pointing to the same thing: we don't need to separate the two truths.

Verse 12: When They Arise Together

Now let's move into verse 12, which is the definition of having completed the analysis of right view. I want to point something out first: both of these verses use the word "analysis," which is a clue. We're still talking about what we sometimes call a meaning generality — a mental image. I don't want to get too heady for those of you newer to this, but within Buddhist philosophy, especially in Tibetan Buddhism, there's an explicit naming and understanding that we're actually trying to build a mental image of emptiness first. Some lineages build that mental image and then, at some point, break through it into the actual taste — the nondual, non-conceptual taste of emptiness. Either way, most would agree that having a mental image, and knowing it's a mental image, is important and can be a useful tool on the way to genuine realization. Of course, we don't want to get stuck in the mental image and mistake it for the actual experience. But that's also why we're so fortunate to have figures like Tsongkhapa and others, who are excellent at identifying that sidetrack and showing us how to work through it. Either way, these two verses are really about the process of analytical meditation — investigative meditation — coming to a decisive experience of emptiness through logical reasoning and investigation.

Verse 12 goes like this:

Yet when they arise at once — not each in turn, but both together — then through merely seeing unfailing dependent origination, certainty is born, and all modes of misapprehension fall apart. That is when discernment of the view has reached perfection.

When he says "when they arise at once," he means an appearance, and the recognition of its underlying nature, arising together. Let's keep it simple. Right now I can hear a dog barking. The ear consciousness hears it. My conceptual mind has some idea about it. I might like or dislike it. That's the appearance. And then its underlying nature — we have to see that it's appearing, that it's interdependent, that it's made of parts, and therefore nothing findable when we look closely. So we meditate until we connect with that unfindability. And yet the dog didn't stop barking. I didn't stop hearing it. Its essence then has the potential to be recognized, or discerned. "Discerned" here could mean directly recognized, or it could mean having arrived at a correct mental image, depending on where the practitioner is. But either way, that's what "arising at once" means — not each in turn, but the appearance inseparable from the experience of its inner space, its lack of inherent existence.

Then he says, "through merely seeing unfailing dependent origination." By actually seeing that things are in relationship, made of parts, never autonomous, never truly independent — by seeing that — certainty is born. We start to have certainty in emptiness. And again, there are two kinds of certainty: conceptual and non-conceptual. One typically leads into the other.

Then it says, "all modes of misapprehension fall apart." That points more toward the taste of the actual non-conceptual — our fixation, our clinging, our fixed ideas about things, beginning to dissolve.

Does This Make Us Less Capable?

But something important here: from my understanding, and from what my teachers have shared, this doesn't mean we stop knowing how to relate to the dog's bark. Our relationship to appearances actually becomes more skillful, because we've opened up the limitations of our beliefs and fixations. People sometimes ask whether such a realization would make someone less functional, unable to navigate the world. I would argue it actually makes a person wiser and more capable — especially more capable of acting from compassion and love. The teachers and lineage masters I've met who seem to have a very strong connection to emptiness — some of whom I'm fairly confident have genuine realization — are not duller for it. They're actually far more intelligent than your average person, and they act from compassion as well. So when all modes of misapprehension fall apart, it doesn't mean you go blank. It means more discernment arises. Tsongkhapa even says so: "that is when discernment of the view has reached perfection."

Verse 13: Dispelling Both Extremes

Within The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, verse 13 is probably the most quoted verse across lineages — one of those peak Tsongkhapa expressions. It addresses the particular and special quality of what the Gelug tradition calls the Prasangika view, referring to Prasangika Madhyamaka, or the Middle Way teachings of the Buddha, as elaborated particularly through the commentaries of Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti — both of which are studied extensively in the Gelug tradition, and on both of which Tsongkhapa wrote his own commentaries.

Verse 13 goes like this:

When you know that appearances dispel the extreme of existence, while the extreme of nothingness is eliminated by emptiness, and you also come to know how emptiness arises as cause and effect, then you will be immune to any view entailing clinging to extremes.

Here Tsongkhapa is using logical reasoning to make a definitive point about where genuine certainty and realization of emptiness actually happen. It's not that appearances — what we see with our eyes, feel with our hands, smell, taste, touch, think — prove existence. He's saying that appearances dispel the extreme of existence.

Let me unpack that a little. When we're talking about nonduality through the Prajnaparamita teachings, or the Middle Way teachings of the Buddha, what the Buddha did — and you can see this in the Heart Sutra as well — is dispel the extreme of existence on one side and the extreme of non-existence on the other. Dispelling the extreme of existence is usually the starting point for most of us, because most of us are clinging very hard to what we think reality is, and we suffer as a result. But he's not saying that what appears is total nonsense that doesn't function at all, because that would not be true, and it would not be skillful. That would be the extreme of non-existence. And that's actually something meditators can fall into. You're breaking down existence more and more into parts through meditation. You're seeing that things are interdependent, that nothing is findable in isolation. And then you might land in a kind of nihilism — which is not emptiness.

So what Tsongkhapa is saying is that a meditator who reaches the taste or experience of emptiness in direct meditation sees that through appearances, the extreme of existence is dispelled — because everything is seen to be in relationship, made of parts, and when you look closely, nothing is ultimately findable as a solid, independent thing. The Buddha never denied that things appear and function. Chandrakirti didn't deny it. No one in this tradition denies it. But there's no findability when you actually reason and meditate on it, again and again and again. So through seeing the appearance, you experience emptiness — its underlying nature of space, its underlying nature of no-thingness, or, in the philosophical language of this tradition, its lack of inherent existence, its lack of true existence. You see that directly when the appearance arises in the moment, whatever that appearance is.

The Mother of the Buddhas

Then he says the extreme of nothingness is eliminated by emptiness. This one often surprises people, because many people mistake the word "emptiness" to mean nothingness. As I've been saying from the beginning of this series, that's not what it means.

There are many ways to talk about this, but one is through the homage at the opening of the Heart Sutra: Homage to the Bhagavati Prajnaparamita. That's a big teaching to unpack, but basically it's paying homage to the mother of all the Buddhas — here, a symbol for emptiness, using the image of the enlightened feminine. If we take it just as a poetic phrase, it can seem almost theistic. But when we look into its meaning as a teaching, what it's actually saying is that from the perspective of the nature of underlying reality — which is emptiness — nothing is born. It has no birth. It has no death. It doesn't abide anywhere. And this is something we have to taste in meditation.

When it says the Buddhas were birthed from the mother emptiness, what it's actually pointing to is that the Buddhas, from the perspective of their own nature, were never born. There's no way to even birth awakening. Awakening itself is also empty of true existence — just like the path, just like samsara. The Buddhas found — though "found" is a strange word, since it's not actually findable — they are experiencing appearance merged with its underlying nature. There are many ways to talk about this, and I'm sure scholars and teachers far more accomplished than me can say it better. But that's how I think about this phrase.

So the extreme of nothingness is eliminated by emptiness because, actually, nothing is possible without emptiness. Nothing can appear. Everything would be totally frozen if things weren't empty, because they would be permanent — they wouldn't change at all. So again, we need to get more familiar with what emptiness really means through deeper study. It's not a nothingness, and it's not a somethingness. It's just how things are. It's their inner fluidity. And what does fluidity point to? Impermanence, change, things coming in and out, things looking like they're abiding but actually constantly changing, then looking like they're fading or dying — but again, that's a kind of illusion from the perspective of emptiness.

Everything arises because of emptiness. And yet emptiness itself wasn't born either. So: not born, and yet everything is possible because of it. I'll just leave it there — it's one of the deeper dives in the study of emptiness in Buddhism. But either way, when a practitioner has that experience in which appearances dispel the extreme of existence and the experience of inner space dispels the extreme of non-existence, what Tsongkhapa is saying is that that practitioner has really got it. And here, I think he's not talking about a meaning generality or a mental image. This is someone actually, directly, non-conceptually tasting emptiness.

Closing the Series

That brings us to the last verse, verse 14, which I'll save for the final piece in this series. We've now more or less completed all three principal aspects of the path: the verses on renunciation, on bodhicitta, and now on emptiness — the view. There are also many excellent commentaries and books available if you want to go deeper. Some of this is quite dense, and it does ask for more study, but I thought it was worth presenting and offering some reflections on.

Mostly, I'd offer it as something to sit with. We don't have to resolve all of it at once — but it's worth coming back to, slowly, in our own practice?