Atisha's Short Treatise and Its Long Afterlife

In 1042 the Bengali master Atisha arrived in western Tibet at the invitation of King Jangchub O, who wanted a guide that would stop translators and yogis from treating sutra study and tantric practice as rival paths pulling students in opposite directions. Atisha's answer was the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, a text of roughly seventy verses that sorted the entire Buddhist teaching by the scope of the practitioner rather than by school or scripture: those seeking only a fortunate rebirth, those seeking their own liberation from rebirth altogether, and those seeking full buddhahood for the sake of every being. Three and a half centuries later Tsongkhapa took that same three scope frame and expanded it into the Lamrim Chenmo, the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, completed in 1402, walking a reader from the most basic reflection on mortality up through the perfections and into tantra as a capstone built on that foundation rather than a shortcut around it. John Powers' survey of Tibetan Buddhism describes the lamrim genre that followed as the tradition's own solution to a practical problem, how to teach decades of scripture to one student in an order that will not strand them halfway.