Lamrim Chenmo

The organising idea of the lamrim genre, inherited from Atisha, is that the Buddhist teachings contradict one another only when read flat; arranged as stages for persons of increasing capacity, every teaching finds its place in a single ascent. Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise builds the ascent in full. It opens with the foundations: reliance on a qualified teacher, the freedoms and endowments of a human life and how rare they are, and the meditations that turn the mind toward practice. The path of the person of small capacity follows, contemplating death's certainty and its unknown hour, the sufferings of bad rebirths, refuge in the Three Jewels and confidence in the law of karma. The person of middling capacity contemplates the defects of cyclic existence altogether and generates renunciation, studying the four truths and the twelve links of dependent origination.

The person of great capacity enters the Mahayana: bodhicitta is generated through the sevenfold cause-and-effect instruction descending from Atisha and through the exchange of self and other descending from Shantideva, and the six perfections are treated at length. The final third of the work is its scholastic summit, two great expositions of shamatha, meditative serenity with its nine stages and its pitfalls of laxity and excitement, and vipashyana, insight, where Tsongkhapa argues his exacting Madhyamaka reading of emptiness against rivals, insisting that analysis and absorption must join for insight to liberate.

Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa was born in 1357 in Amdo in northeastern Tibet and trained across the schools of his day, mastering the scholastic curricula of Sakya and Kadam masters, the tantric systems, and the Madhyamaka philosophy he would make his hallmark. In 1402, in retreat at Reting, the monastery north of Lhasa founded by Atisha's disciple Dromton, he composed the Great Treatise at the request of his students, anchoring it in Atisha's Lamp for the Path and in the Indian treatises he cites on nearly every page, Nagarjuna, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Chandrakirti, Shantideva and Kamalashila, whose Stages of Meditation shapes the serenity and insight chapters. The work stands first in a family: Tsongkhapa later wrote middling and concise lamrims, and the genre he consolidated produced celebrated successors down to the Fourth Panchen Lama's Easy Path and beyond.

Institutionally its influence is hard to overstate. The Ganden monastery he founded in 1409 grew into the Gelug school, whose great seats of Ganden, Drepung and Sera trained scholars on his works for centuries and whose lineage came to include the Dalai Lamas; the annual Monlam prayer festival he instituted framed the school's public life. The Lamrim Chenmo itself has been continuously taught, transmitted and memorised for six hundred years, and a complete English translation appeared in three volumes between 2000 and 2004, bringing the whole architecture to readers outside Tibetan.