The Kalachakra tantra and its six branch yoga as the culminating practice

Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen received the complete Kalachakra transmission at Jonang monastery in 1322 from the master Khetsun Yonten Gyatso, then undertook a year long retreat applying its completion stage practice before becoming the tradition's most influential expositor and the source of the school's distinctive shentong, or other emptiness, philosophical view. Cyrus Stearns' biography of Dolpopa treats the Kalachakra transmission and the shentong view as bound together in his teaching rather than as two separate interests. The association became close enough that the Jonang school is remembered as much for Kalachakra as for anything else it taught, which made the tradition's near destruction in the following centuries a real loss of custodianship rather than only an institutional defeat. The Gelug led government that consolidated power in the seventeenth century closed or forcibly converted most Jonang monasteries, and Vesna Wallace's study of the tantra's inner dimension notes the outcome was not a clean end for the material itself: much of the Jonang Kalachakra transmission was absorbed into Gelug hands during the same period, so the practice tradition survived even where the school that had made it central did not.

Two very different things both go by the name Kalachakra in public discussion, and the tradition treats them differently. The empowerment ceremony itself, the ritual initiation into the practice, has been given by the Dalai Lama to audiences of tens of thousands on a public schedule roughly every few years, a scale and openness the Dalai Lama and other teachers including Kalu Rinpoche have explained as appropriate to what they describe as a degenerate age in which wide exposure to the tantra's blessing does more good than restricting it narrowly. That public event, well documented in photographs, news coverage and the Dalai Lama's own published commentary on the ceremony, is not the same thing as the six branch yoga of the completion stage, the sequence of inner practices this belief's own name refers to as the culminating stage of the system. That material is transmitted only within an ongoing relationship between a qualified teacher and a student who has received the empowerment, is not set out in publicly available literature in instructional form, and this entry accordingly describes the tantra's history, its Jonang custodianship and the public initiation phenomenon without reconstructing the six branches it withholds.