Tsongkhapa

Tsongkhapa, named for his birthplace in the Tsongkha region of Amdo in north-eastern Tibet, was born in 1357. He went to central Tibet as a young man and studied with teachers of all the main schools, mastering Madhyamaka philosophy, logic, monastic discipline and tantra. He became known for his insistence on a rigorous, graduated path grounded in ethics and philosophical study.

In 1402 he completed the Lamrim Chenmo, the “Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment”, building on the Indian teacher Atiśa’s Lamp for the Path. He also wrote a great treatise on the stages of tantra and major works on Madhyamaka, in which he defended Candrakīrti’s Prāsaṅgika interpretation. In 1409 he founded the Great Prayer Festival in Lhasa and the monastery of Ganden, which became the seat of his tradition.

His followers formed the Gelug (“virtuous”) school, which through the line of the Dalai Lamas became the most politically powerful school in Tibet. His disciple Gendun Drub was later recognized as the first Dalai Lama. Tsongkhapa died in 1419 at Ganden.

His insistence that the correct view of emptiness must be reached through careful reasoning, and that it leaves conventional truth and ethics intact, made his interpretation the most influential, and the most debated, in Tibetan philosophy. Teachers of other schools, notably the Sakya scholar Gorampa in the fifteenth century, criticized his reading of Madhyamaka, and the debate continues in the monastic colleges.