In the eighth century Tibet was importing Buddhism from two directions at once. Indian teachers were arriving from the south with a systematic path of study, ethical training and staged meditation, in which awakening is approached over a long course of cultivation. Chinese teachers were arriving from the east with Chan, in which awakening is not built up in stages at all but recognised, suddenly, in the mind as it already is.
Both were plausible readings of the same tradition and both had powerful patrons in Tibet. The accounts say that the emperor Trisong Detsen, having built the monastery at Samye and having to decide which model his new state religion would follow, convened a confrontation between them. Kamalasila argued the Indian gradualist position. The Chinese master known in Tibetan sources as Moheyan argued the other.
The question was not academic and it is still not. If awakening is sudden and available in the mind as it stands, then the whole apparatus of graded study, monastic discipline and accumulated merit is at best a support and at worst a distraction. If it is gradual, then the apparatus is the path. Every Buddhist tradition since has had to place itself somewhere on that line, and Zen and the Tibetan schools ended up in visibly different places.
What Tibet did afterwards is not in question. It built an Indian-facing Buddhism, translated the Indian curriculum wholesale, and told the story of Samye as the moment that direction was chosen.