The Grey Earth: A Hereditary School and the Mongol Alliance

The Sakya school takes its name from the "pale earth" (sa kya) of the site in southern Tibet where its principal monastery was founded in 1073, and it is distinctive for its hereditary leadership: authority passes within the aristocratic Khon family rather than solely through reincarnation, so that the tradition's throne-holders are kin. Its most celebrated teacher, Sakya Pandita (1182-1251), was among the greatest scholars of Tibetan history, a master of logic, philosophy and Sanskrit learning.

The school's central esoteric system is Lamdre, "the path and its fruit," which integrates the whole of sutra and tantra into a single graded path. The Sakya also had a decisive political moment: in the thirteenth century Sakya Pandita and his nephew Phagpa entered into a "priest-patron" relationship with the Mongol rulers, and under Kublai Khan the Sakya hierarchs briefly held sovereignty over Tibet, the first time a Buddhist school governed the country, and a model for the later Gelug ascendancy.