The Graded Path, and the Ganden School

Tsongkhapa's most influential work is the Lamrim Chenmo, the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, which lays out the whole of Buddhist practice as a graded sequence, from the first turning of the mind toward the teaching, through the cultivation of ethical conduct, compassion and the aspiration to awaken for the sake of all beings, up to the analytical realisation of emptiness and the threshold of the highest tantra. The work gave his tradition a clear and comprehensive map of the path, studied to this day.

In 1409 he founded the monastery of Ganden near Lhasa, from which the early name of his school, the Gandenpa, derives; his followers went on to establish the other great monastic universities of Drepung and Sera, and the Gelug became the largest and, in time, the politically dominant school of Tibetan Buddhism. Tsongkhapa is revered as an emanation of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and is commemorated across the Tibetan world in the festival of lamps that marks the anniversary of his passing. His combination of scholarly rigour, monastic strictness and tantric practice defines the Gelug tradition to the present.