When was the beginning?

Geshe Sonam Rinchen

The style of Geshe Tashi with the general way he begins a teaching is to ask everyone present to meditate on the breath silently. 

This was how it was in the beginning and I had turned up at the Finsbury Park Jamyang Centre for the first time ever Geshe Tashi and myself grew together an ex busker beatnik joker jogging down a road towards enlightenment. 

 I drifted into a calm state in the meditation that endured for a few minutes but it was then destroyed by a huge roar from the nearby Old Arsenal Football stadium.

Geshe la laughed and said he was about to start teachings of The Three Principal Aspects of the Path: which is a short text written by Lama Tsong Khapa. This is a very popular text and has had commentaries published on it by a few Tibetan masters including Geshe Sonam Rinchen who teaches westerners in Dharamsala in 1978, where he teaches Buddhist philosophy and practice. He has also taught in Japan, Australia, Great Britain, South Korea, Ireland, New Zealand and Switzerland.

This is short text by Je Tsong Khapa is a essential as a recitation material for any one following the themes from Lama Tsong Khapa and covers the whole essential points of Buddha Dharma in three hops into the Lam Rim.

These are renunciation, compassion for all creatures great and small, and finally emptiness the source of manifestations beyond cognition and the forming of words and ideas; which is beyond any god realm of archetypal confusion surrounding the field of creator gods.

The volume created by Geshe Sonam Rinchen’s in his book which as usual has been adequately translates by Ruth Sonam and can be purchased through Jamyang Bookshop or via Wisdom Books Ilford.

Some say that the karmic causes that came into being when Alison Murdoch cycled down Renfrew Road and found the Old Court House which we had to fight the local council for; we needed to move away from the cheers from the Arsenal stadium. Now we are in the area of Millwall soccer ground at the Den, New Cross a couple of miles away and far from the sounds of cheering.

Of course if we had moved into the location in which I now find myself living in near West Ham we would be singing “I’m forever blowing bubbles” not “Walking down the Old Kent Road”. But don’t worry about my offbeat crazy attempts at humour; the joker is wild; at least bubbles come in the Diamond Sutra of which an excellent one is on display in the British Library discovered by Aural Stein on the Silk Road from the seventh century which says in the final.

The Diamond Sutra ends with these verses; “Subhuti, how can one explain this Sutra to others without holding in mind any arbitrary conception of forms or phenomena or spiritual truths? It can only be done, Subhuti, by keeping the mind in perfect tranquillity and free from any attachment to appearances."

"So I say to you -
This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:"

"Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream."

"So is all conditioned existence to be seen."

Thus spoke Buddha.