This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Two centuries after the Tibetan Empire's collapse had left the plateau fragmented among competing local powers, the Indian Buddhist master Atisha arrived in Tibet in 1042 CE at the invitation of Yeshe-O, king of the western Tibetan kingdom of Guge. Yeshe-O sought to restore a purer form of Buddhism to a land the empire's fall, and Langdarma's persecution before it, had left without the coherent religious authority it once had under imperial sponsorship.
Atisha spent three years based at Tholing, where he compiled his best known work, the Bodhipathapradipa, or Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, working alongside the translator Rinchen Zangpo. Rinchen Zangpo had himself been sent by the same King Yeshe-O to study in Kashmir years earlier and, on his return, built more than a hundred monasteries across western Tibet, laying groundwork Atisha's own arrival then built upon further.
Tibetan tradition credits Atisha as a leading figure of the later diffusion, phyi dar, that restored Buddhism across Tibet after its imperial era ended. His teaching in Tibet founded the Kadam lineage, one of the schools from which every major Tibetan Buddhist tradition still practiced today ultimately descends, carrying his arrival's influence forward long after his own three years at Tholing had ended.