Origin The genre begins with Atisha in eleventh-century Tibet and reaches its fullest form in Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise at the opening of the fifteenth century.
The genre begins with Atisha's short Lamp for the Path in the eleventh century and reaches its fullest form in Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path. The claim is structural rather than doctrinal: that the teachings are not a collection of independent methods but a sequence, in which each stage prepares the capacity the next requires, and that taking them out of order wastes them. Practitioners are sorted by scope, from concern with a better rebirth, through concern with one's own liberation, to concern with the liberation of all beings, and the curriculum runs through all three in turn. The Gelug school's character as a scholastic order follows from taking that order seriously. Gampopa's Jewel Ornament of Liberation gives the Kagyu tradition a text in the same genre. The Sakya curriculum, the Lamdre or path together with its fruit, is graduated in the same way but organised around tantric material transmitted under initiation rather than around the Kadam stages.
Facts
Origins
Held ByGelug above all, whose character as a scholastic order follows from taking the order of the stages seriously; the Kagyu have a text in the same genre in Gampopa's Jewel Ornament of Liberation, and the Sakya Lamdre is graduated in the same way around tantric material. 1 Origin PeriodThe genre begins with Atisha in eleventh-century Tibet and reaches its fullest form in Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise at the opening of the fifteenth century. 1 Origin of the NameTibetan lam rim, stages of the path. 1 Structure
StructurePractitioners are sorted by scope, from concern with a better rebirth, through concern with one's own liberation, to concern with the liberation of all beings, and the curriculum runs through all three in turn. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionThe teaching of one school or lineage within the tradition 1Tradition: Tibetan Buddhism Doctrinal CategorySalvation and Liberation 1 Position Profile
Key TextAtisha's Lamp for the Path to Awakening, and Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path, the Lamrim Chenmo. 1 Learn More
Why a Kingdom in Western Tibet Sent for a Bengali Abbot
The graduated path genre exists because of a crisis a Tibetan kingdom believed it was having. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the kings of Guge in western Tibet, heirs to territory that had scattered after the empire's collapse, watched tantric practice spread without the scholastic training that had once framed it, and worried that methods meant for advanced practitioners were being taken up by people with no grounding in ordinary conduct or basic doctrine at all. King Yeshe O is remembered as having staked everything on a Bengali response to the problem, reportedly spending a fortune in gold on the invitation, and dying, in the traditional account, before an answer arrived, so that it fell to his grand nephew Jangchub O to complete the mission his relative had begun. Atisha finally traveled to Guge in 1042 and wrote the Lamp for the Path there at the king's own request, a short text answering the specific worry that had summoned him by placing every teaching, sutra and tantra alike, inside a single graded sequence a practitioner works through in order rather than sampling as inclination allows. Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise, more than three centuries later, is an expansion of that same short text and the same original diagnosis, not a new response to a new problem.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Tsongkhapa's Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path sets out the Gelug curriculum as a graduated sequence, and the school's character as a scholastic order follows from taking that order seriously.
Gampopa's Jewel Ornament of Liberation is a stages-of-the-path text, and the Kagyu school carries a graduated curriculum alongside its mahamudra instruction.
The Sakya curriculum is the Lamdre, the path together with its fruit, graduated in the same way as lamrim but organised around tantric material transmitted under initiation rather than around the Kadam stages.
Positions on This Question
The graduated stages of the path are the organising form of Tibetan teaching. The genre grew from the Kadam tradition and was given its most influential form by Tsongkhapa, and it is used well beyond the Gelug school most identified with it.
Sources
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