Three Capacities, One Graded Path

The organising idea of the lamrim genre, inherited from Atisha, is that the Buddhist teachings contradict one another only when read flat; arranged as stages for persons of increasing capacity, every teaching finds its place in a single ascent. Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise builds the ascent in full. It opens with the foundations: reliance on a qualified teacher, the freedoms and endowments of a human life and how rare they are, and the meditations that turn the mind toward practice. The path of the person of small capacity follows, contemplating death's certainty and its unknown hour, the sufferings of bad rebirths, refuge in the Three Jewels and confidence in the law of karma. The person of middling capacity contemplates the defects of cyclic existence altogether and generates renunciation, studying the four truths and the twelve links of dependent origination.

The person of great capacity enters the Mahayana: bodhicitta is generated through the sevenfold cause-and-effect instruction descending from Atisha and through the exchange of self and other descending from Shantideva, and the six perfections are treated at length. The final third of the work is its scholastic summit, two great expositions of shamatha, meditative serenity with its nine stages and its pitfalls of laxity and excitement, and vipashyana, insight, where Tsongkhapa argues his exacting Madhyamaka reading of emptiness against rivals, insisting that analysis and absorption must join for insight to liberate.