Atisha c. 980 – 1054

Atisha Dipankara Shrijnana was a Bengali Buddhist philosopher and monk, abbot of the great Indian monastic university of Vikramashila, who, late in life, accepted an invitation from the Tibetan king Yeshe-O to come to Tibet, where he spent his last twelve years restoring monastic discipline and the integrity of Buddhist teaching. His Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, a brief verse summary of the entire Buddhist path written in Tibet, became the model for the later Tibetan stages-of-the-path literature and exerted an enduring influence on every major Tibetan school. His emphasis on the joint cultivation of bodhicitta and the wisdom of emptiness shaped Tibetan Buddhism for the next nine hundred years.

Atiśa Dipankara Śrījñāna was born around 980 in the kingdom of Vikrampura in eastern Bengal, the second son of a royal family of the late Pala dynasty. After early studies with the tantric master Avadhutipa he was ordained at the Mahasamghika monastery of Odantapuri, took the higher ordination at twenty-nine, and trained at the great monastic universities of Nalanda and Vikramaśīla; on the advice of his teachers he made an arduous twelve-year voyage to Suvarṇadvīpa (Sumatra) to study the bodhicitta teachings of Dharmakīrti of Suvarṇadvīpa, then returned to Vikramaśīla as one of its leading abbots. After three years of refusal he accepted the urgent invitation of the Tibetan kings of Western Tibet, Yeshe-Ö and Jangchub-Ö, and in 1042, aged about sixty, crossed the Himalayas to spend the last thirteen years of his life in Tibet.

His works survive mostly in Tibetan translation; the most important are the short Bodhipathapradīpa (Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment) and his own commentary the Bodhimārgapradīpa-pañjikā, the Madhyamakopadeśa, and a wealth of tantric ritual and exegetical writings. His principal Tibetan disciple Dromtönpa founded after his master's death the Kadampa school.

Atiśa restored the integrity of monastic and tantric Buddhism in Tibet after the persecution of Langdarma, established the canonical sequence of practices for persons of three capacities that would later become the lamrim or 'stages of the path' genre, and through Tsongkhapa's reception of the Kadampa transmission shaped the entire Gelug tradition. He died at Nyethang in central Tibet in 1054.