Lamrim (The Graduated Stages of the Path)

The graduated path genre exists because of a crisis a Tibetan kingdom believed it was having. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the kings of Guge in western Tibet, heirs to territory that had scattered after the empire's collapse, watched tantric practice spread without the scholastic training that had once framed it, and worried that methods meant for advanced practitioners were being taken up by people with no grounding in ordinary conduct or basic doctrine at all. King Yeshe O is remembered as having staked everything on a Bengali response to the problem, reportedly spending a fortune in gold on the invitation, and dying, in the traditional account, before an answer arrived, so that it fell to his grand nephew Jangchub O to complete the mission his relative had begun. Atisha finally traveled to Guge in 1042 and wrote the Lamp for the Path there at the king's own request, a short text answering the specific worry that had summoned him by placing every teaching, sutra and tantra alike, inside a single graded sequence a practitioner works through in order rather than sampling as inclination allows. Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise, more than three centuries later, is an expansion of that same short text and the same original diagnosis, not a new response to a new problem.