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.