A Tantra Whose Custodian Tradition Was Nearly Erased

Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen received the complete Kalachakra transmission at Jonang monastery in 1322 from the master Khetsun Yonten Gyatso, then undertook a year long retreat applying its completion stage practice before becoming the tradition's most influential expositor and the source of the school's distinctive shentong, or other emptiness, philosophical view. Cyrus Stearns' biography of Dolpopa treats the Kalachakra transmission and the shentong view as bound together in his teaching rather than as two separate interests. The association became close enough that the Jonang school is remembered as much for Kalachakra as for anything else it taught, which made the tradition's near destruction in the following centuries a real loss of custodianship rather than only an institutional defeat. The Gelug led government that consolidated power in the seventeenth century closed or forcibly converted most Jonang monasteries, and Vesna Wallace's study of the tantra's inner dimension notes the outcome was not a clean end for the material itself: much of the Jonang Kalachakra transmission was absorbed into Gelug hands during the same period, so the practice tradition survived even where the school that had made it central did not.