The Root of the Sakya Path

Within Tibetan Buddhism the formulation is treated as the particular doctrinal signature of the Sakya school, where it functions as the view a student is given at the very outset of training rather than as a conclusion reserved only for its end after years of practice. That placement shapes the whole structure of Sakya training, known as lamdre, the path and its fruit, which presents the result of practice as already implicit within its cause rather than as something added onto the practitioner from some outside source later on. The formulation traces back to the Indian mahasiddha Virupa, whose tantric instructions the Tibetan translator Drokmi brought back from India in the eleventh century and transmitted onward to the founders of what became the Sakya tradition in Tibet. As with related teachings received during that same broad period of transmission from Indian into Tibetan Buddhism, the historical detail of the earliest transmission is carried mainly through the tradition's own lineage accounts and hagiography rather than through independent outside documentation surviving from the period itself. The Sakya school itself rose to particular political prominence in the thirteenth century, when its senior hierarchs were granted authority over much of Tibet under Mongol patronage, a period during which its distinctive teachings, this formulation among them, gained wide circulation well beyond the monasteries in which they had originated.