Gampopa's innovation of teaching mahamudra approachable without tantric initiation, mentioned in the main entry as the reason the system became widely practiced, had a second consequence: it supplied the doctrinal opening through which mahamudra could be taught to Western students largely outside the tantric training structure the tradition assumes.
Tibetan teachers who established Kagyu centers in the West from the 1960s and 1970s, including Kalu Rinpoche and Chogyam Trungpa, drew on Gampopa's "sutra mahamudra" precedent to offer instruction to students who had not undergone the preliminary practices, empowerments and years of retreat mahamudra transmission traditionally presupposes, a choice justified as continuous with Gampopa's own innovation rather than a modern departure. Trungpa developed his own idiosyncratic style, teaching mahamudra alongside a broader synthesis he called "crazy wisdom," and his Naropa Institute in Colorado became an influential channel through which mahamudra-adjacent teaching reached a wide American audience with little connection to traditional Tibetan structures.
This transmission has drawn the caution the main entry notes Tibetan teachers apply to Dzogchen's popularization: instruction detached from the ethical training and preliminary practices the tradition regards as prerequisite risks producing a conceptual imitation rather than actual recognition, a concern some Western teachers addressed by reinstating structured requirements, while others defended rapid access as faithful to the precedent Gampopa set eight centuries earlier.