The Principal Teachings of Buddhism

The spread of the teaching of Gautama Buddha began in India over two thousand years ago and reached perhaps its highest peak in the hidden mountain kingdom of Tibet, five centuries before our time. The great illuminary of this renaissance of the religion of total peace was Tsongkapa (1357-1419). He inspired a movement that by the time Tibet was lost in 1959 saw nearly a million monks living in thousands of monasteries around the country. Tsongkapa was the greatest commentator in the history of Buddhism and wrote some 10,000 pages in eloquent explanation of the entire range of the ancient Buddhist classics. He undertook the challenge of compressing all this knowledge into a single poem. The result was his famous Three Principal Paths, fourteen verses written for a favored student in a faraway land. Tsongkapa’s masterpiece appears here with a commentary by the illustrious Pabongka Rinpoche (1878-1941), generally regarded as the foremost Tibetan teacher of Buddhism during the last century. The work has been translated by Geshe Lobsang Tharchin, one of the last Buddhist masters of old Tibet.