Atisha

Atisha was an established teacher at Vikramashila, one of the great monastic universities of eastern India, when envoys arrived from the kings of western Tibet asking him to come north. The invitation had been pursued for years and at considerable cost, and the tradition tells it as a story of gold raised and a king dying in captivity so that the ransom could be spent on the invitation instead. He agreed to go for three years, arrived in 1042, and never returned to India.

What his hosts wanted was not more texts. They had a great many, translated over two waves, tantric and scholastic, contradictory in places, with no account of how any of it fitted together. What Atisha wrote for them is a short work of some sixty verses, the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, and its achievement is organisational. It sorts practitioners into three capacities according to what they are actually aiming at, the better rebirth, personal liberation, and the liberation of everyone, and then assigns each teaching its place in that order, so that the whole inheritance becomes a sequence rather than a heap.

Every later stages of the path text in Tibet, across all the schools and including Tsongkhapa's enormous treatise, is built on that framework. A short book written to answer a practical question from a remote patron turned out to determine the shape of Tibetan Buddhist education for the next thousand years.

The Tibet Atisha arrived in had been through a long interruption. The imperial patronage that funded the first translations had collapsed in the ninth century, monastic institutions had thinned, and in the gap tantric material had circulated without the training that was supposed to accompany it. The western kings who invited him were explicit about the problem: men were performing rites they had no authorisation for, and were using the vocabulary of transcending morality as a licence.

His response was structural rather than polemical. He insisted on monastic discipline, on taking refuge and cultivating the mind of awakening before any tantric practice, on the necessity of a qualified teacher and an unbroken lineage, and on the ordering of the whole path so that a practitioner could see what he had not yet earned. He was called, later and affectionately, the refuge scholar, because of how much he made of the most elementary commitment.

His principal Tibetan disciple, the layman Dromtonpa, founded the Kadam school on that basis, and the mind training instructions transmitted in that lineage, short verse sequences on exchanging self for other and taking on the suffering of others, spread out of it into every Tibetan school and are now among the most widely practised teachings in Tibetan Buddhism. Atisha died at Nyethang near Lhasa in 1054, seventeen years into a three year visit.