Person · Buddhist teacher & reformer
Atiśa Dīpankara Śrījñāna
Also known as Atisha, Dipankara Srijnana, Atisa, Jowo Atisha
Born in Bengal, abbot at Vikramashila, and taken to western Tibet in 1042 at the invitation of the king of Guge — where he spent his last thirteen years reorganising monastic discipline and the curriculum, and where the Kadam lineage that became the Gelug school begins.
- Date
- c. 982 – 1054
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Bodhipathapradipa; Tibetan histories
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.323, 87.286
Worth knowing
He is the single most consequential export of the Pala monasteries. The Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, written in Tibet, is still the basis of the graded-path literature that runs through Tsongkhapa to the present Dalai Lama's teaching. He died at Nyethang near Lhasa and never returned.
About the place
Placed at Vikramashila, where he was abbot before leaving for Tibet. He was born at Bikrampur in what is now Bangladesh and died at Nyethang in Tibet, where his relics remain.
Connections (5)
- Life routeVikramashilā
Atiśa was abbot at Vikramaśilā when the Guge kings of western Tibet asked for him, and left about 1040 at nearly sixty. He never came back. The Indian tradition's transmission to Tibet runs through this one monastery's appointments in its last century and a half. The Guge kings' invitation is said to have cost a weight of gold and the life of an earlier king taken hostage trying to raise it, which is what the transmission was worth to them.
- Teaching lineageTabo Monastery, Spiti
Atiśa is recorded at Tabo on his way into Tibet in the 1040s, and the Guge kingdom that invited him is the same that founded the monastery in 996. Western Tibet's revival and the western Himalayan monasteries are one programme: buy Indian teachers, build temples, translate everything. His Lamp for the Path reorganised the whole teaching as a graded sequence, and the Kadam school he founded became the base from which the Gelug order later grew.
- Teaching lineageNako Monastery, Kinnaur
Rinchen Zangpo was sent from Guge to Kashmir to study and came back with artists and texts; the murals at Nako, Tabo and Alchi are what that mission produced. Atiśa arrived a generation later into a landscape Rinchen Zangpo had already built. Rinchen Zangpo is credited with founding a hundred and eight temples across western Tibet and the Indian Himalaya, of which Tabo, Nako and Alchi are what actually survives.
- Teaching lineageAlchi Monastery, Ladakh
Atisha went to western Tibet in 1042 at the invitation of the Guge king Jangchub O, and the second diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet dates from that journey — the monastic reform, the graded-path literature, and the Kadam lineage from which the Gelug school descends. Rinchen Zangpo, who built Alchi and the western Tibetan temples with Kashmiri painters, was the translator who had prepared the ground for him a generation earlier.
- AnalogueThe Drukpa Kagyu
Two routes by which Indian Buddhism became Himalayan, running in parallel. Atiśa left Vikramaśīla for Tibet in 1042 at the invitation of the kings of Guge and reformed the monastic order there; the Kagyu line worked the other way, with Marpa travelling from Tibet to Bengal and Bihar to find Naropa and bring the teaching back himself. One was a scholar exported, the other a student importing — and Bhutan's religion comes down the second.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Atisa”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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