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.