The Principal Teachings of Buddhism
by Pabongka Rinpoche, Trs. and Geshe Lobsang Tharchin and Michael Roach

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 his renaissance of the religion of total peace was Tsongkapa (1357 - 1419). He inspired a movement that by the timeTibet 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 renge of the ancient Buddhist classics. He undertook the challenge of compressing all this knoledge into a single poem. The result was his famous Three Principal Paths, fourteen verses written for a favoured student in a faraway land.