The detailed life of Yeshe Tsogyal that circulates today, with its noble birth, its refused marriage, its years of practice in freezing caves, its meeting with Padmasambhava and its final liberation, comes from a namtar, a liberation story, that is itself a treasure text. It was revealed in the seventeenth century, some eight hundred years after the events it narrates, by a terton who presents it as her own account, recovered rather than composed.
That is a genuinely awkward source situation and the atlas states it rather than smoothing it over. Contemporary eighth century documentation of her is thin to absent; the imperial period records that survive from Dunhuang and elsewhere do not give her the kind of attestation a historian would want. Scholars accordingly hold different positions: that a historical woman of that name and role stands behind the tradition, that the figure has been assembled over centuries from several women and from a template, and that the question cannot be decided on present evidence.
None of that touches her religious importance, which is not a claim about the eighth century. What the treasure literature transmits is a model of a fully realised female practitioner inside a tradition that had few, and it transmits it with the authority of scripture. Readers of a life story revealed as treasure are not being offered a biography in the modern sense, and the tradition has never pretended otherwise.