This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Langdarma, the Tibetan Empire's last ruler of its unified era, reigned only briefly, from 841 to 842 CE, yet traditional Tibetan Buddhist historiography credits his short rule with ending a chapter of the tradition's history that had lasted more than a century. Where his predecessor Trisong Detsen had built Samye, Tibet's first monastery, and secured Buddhism's earlier establishment under direct imperial patronage, Langdarma is remembered as the king who curtailed and destroyed the empire's Nyingma monasteries, at that time the only school of Tibetan Buddhism in existence.
His reign ended in assassination in 842, an act most accounts attribute to the monk Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje. Later Tibetan monastic tradition did not remember the killing as a crime; it treated it instead as the justified removal of a tyrant who had turned the crown against the faith it had once sponsored. The Tibetan Empire itself did not survive Langdarma's death by more than a few years, collapsing soon after into a period of political fragmentation that lasted roughly two centuries, with no single central Tibetan authority left standing.
What Langdarma's reign changed for Buddhism's spread in Tibet was rupture: imperial patronage that had built monasteries and secured the tradition gave way, within one short reign, to persecution and then to the collapse of the empire that had sponsored either course.