Tsongkhapa

Tsongkhapa (1357-1419), born in the Amdo region of eastern Tibet, is the founder of the Gelug school, the tradition to which the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas belong, and one of the most important figures in the whole history of Tibetan Buddhism. He lived at a time when many felt that monastic discipline had grown lax and that tantric practice was being pursued without the ethical and philosophical grounding it required, and his life's work was a great synthesis and reform. He insisted on three things held firmly together: strict monastic discipline (the Vinaya) as the foundation; rigorous study of Buddhist philosophy, above all the Madhyamaka of Nagarjuna in its most thoroughgoing form; and the practice of tantra undertaken only on that ethical and intellectual basis.

In 1409 Tsongkhapa founded Ganden Monastery near Lhasa, which became, with the later foundations of Drepung and Sera, one of the three great Gelug monastic seats, and in the same year he inaugurated the Monlam Chenmo, the Great Prayer Festival held at the Jokhang temple over the first weeks of the Tibetan new year, drawing monks from across the region for a fortnight of communal ritual and debate; the festival, now observed for more than six centuries, remains one of the most visible living expressions of the reform he began.

Tsongkhapa's most influential work is the Lamrim Chenmo, the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, which lays out the whole of Buddhist practice as a graded sequence, from the first turning of the mind toward the teaching, through the cultivation of ethical conduct, compassion and the aspiration to awaken for the sake of all beings, up to the analytical realisation of emptiness and the threshold of the highest tantra. The work gave his tradition a clear and comprehensive map of the path, studied to this day.

In 1409 he founded the monastery of Ganden near Lhasa, from which the early name of his school, the Gandenpa, derives; his followers went on to establish the other great monastic universities of Drepung and Sera, and the Gelug became the largest and, in time, the politically dominant school of Tibetan Buddhism. Tsongkhapa is revered as an emanation of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and is commemorated across the Tibetan world in the festival of lamps that marks the anniversary of his passing. His combination of scholarly rigour, monastic strictness and tantric practice defines the Gelug tradition to the present.