Nyingma doxography sorts the entire Buddhist path into nine vehicles arranged as a ladder rather than as nine equally valid alternatives. The first three are shared with every other Buddhist school in some form: the vehicle of the hearers who seek their own liberation by listening to a teacher's instruction, the vehicle of the solitary realizers who achieve the same goal without a teacher, and the bodhisattva vehicle, which aims at full buddhahood for the sake of others. The next three are called the outer tantras, kriya, charya and yoga, which still treat the practitioner and the enlightened deity being invoked as meaningfully separate, approached through purity and ritual conduct. The final three, mahayoga, anuyoga and atiyoga, are the inner tantras, and the ninth and highest, atiyoga, is better known outside specialist literature by its Tibetan name, dzogchen, the Great Perfection. Each lower vehicle is not discarded by the schema but treated as complete and adequate for the practitioner it suits, a path in its own right rather than a mistake corrected further up the ladder. The ninefold structure functions less as a mandatory staircase every practitioner must climb rung by rung and more as a map of entry points, since Nyingma teaching holds that a student's capacity determines where instruction should actually begin rather than requiring every practitioner to formally pass through the lower eight before reaching the ninth. A teacher assessing a new student is, in this framework, first identifying which vehicle already matches that person's present understanding, and only then deciding what comes next for them specifically.