From a Vision to a Written System

Sakya tradition traces Lamdre to a vision rather than to a text. The Indian adept Virupa, a former monastic scholar who according to traditional biography abandoned formal ordination for wandering yogic practice, is said to have received the teaching directly from the tantric deity Nairatmya, and to have transmitted it onward through a short line of Indian masters including Avadhutipa and the eleventh century teacher Gayadhara. Gayadhara taught it to the Tibetan translator Drokmi Lotsawa, who brought it into Tibet, and there it stayed an oral transmission for another century before Sachen Kunga Nyingpo, a head of the Khon family that had founded Sakya monastery in 1073, organized and committed it to writing in the twelfth century. Cyrus Stearns' study of the tradition's early masters traces that chain as the source of Lamdre's particular authority inside the Sakya school: unlike a teaching whose pedigree rests on unbroken institutional transmission alone, Lamdre's claim rests on a named sequence of individual masters each said to have attained realization through the very practice they then passed on. The transmission did not stay a single unbroken line inside Sakya either: in 1429 Ngorchen Kunga Zangpo founded Ngor monastery specifically to formalize his own line of Lamdre transmission, giving the teaching a second major institutional home alongside Sakya itself, and a later Tsar sub-tradition added a third, so Lamdre today reaches practitioners through several distinguishable transmission lines descending from the same original vision rather than through one centralized channel.