Atisha leaves Vikramashila for Tibet

Atisha, born in 982 into a noble family of Bengal, studied with many teachers in India and spent about twelve years in Suvarnadvipa — Sumatra, the realm of Srivijaya — with the master Dharmakirti, returning about the time of the Chola raid of 1025. He then became one of the leading scholars of Vikramashila, the monastery founded by the Pala king Dharmapala. After the break-up of the Tibetan empire in the 9th century the rulers of Guge in western Tibet — Yeshe-Ö and his successors — set out to restore Buddhism, sending young Tibetans to study in India and inviting Indian masters. Their envoy, the translator Nagtso, persuaded Atisha to come; the elders of Vikramashila let him go on condition that he would return within three years.

According to the Blue Annals of ’Gos lo-tsa-ba, Atisha left India in the Iron-Dragon year (1040), spent the following year in Nepal and reached Ngari in western Tibet in the Water-Horse year (1042); Alaka Chattopadhyaya accepted these dates and rejected the suggestion of S. C. Das that he set out only in 1042. At the monastery of Tholing Atisha wrote the Bodhipathapradipa, the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, a short text that became the model for the Tibetan literature on the ‘stages of the path’ (lamrim). About 1045, when after three years in Ngari he was preparing to return to India, he was met at Purang by Dromtön, his future chief disciple, who persuaded him to go on to central Tibet. He died at Nyethang near Lhasa in 1054, and in 1056 Dromtön settled at Reting, where he built the monastery that became the centre of the Kadam school; the Gelug school later absorbed its teachings and monasteries.