Who Tsongkhapa was, and why this school argues so much

The Geluk tradition is named after a school he did not live to see established. He died in 1419, the year Sera was founded, and the monastery this site is written from is exactly as old as his absence.

A Mongolian father and a Tibetan mother

Born about 1357 in the walled town of Tsongkha in Amdo, now in Qinghai, into a nomadic family. His name simply means the man from Tsongkha. His ordained name was Losang Drakpa; the tradition mostly calls him Je Rinpoche.

A novice monk at six. At sixteen he went to Central Tibet, and did not come back.

He studied with everybody, and this is the point

The detail that gets lost when the Geluk is described as one school among four is that its founder trained in the others first, seriously, for decades.

He studied at Sangphu, with the Sakya tradition, and with the Drikung Kagyu, where he received Mahamudra and the Six Dharmas of Naropa from the Drikung patriarch himself. He took the three main Kadampa lineages. He studied under a Nyingma teacher, Lhodrag Namka Gyaltsen. He also studied Tibetan medicine.

His most important teacher, Rendawa, was a Sakya master.

So the reform, when it came, was not somebody rejecting traditions he did not know. It was somebody who had done all of them concluding that the discipline had loosened and the study had thinned.

What the reform actually was

Two things, and neither was a new doctrine. Discipline: he insisted on full monastic vinaya observance at a moment when it had loosened, which is the unglamorous half that gets omitted. And study: a fixed, sequenced, examinable curriculum, which is the machinery of the five great treatises, now set out by somebody who has finished them, at geshetashinyama.com.

He wrote the syllabus himself, in effect. The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path is the best known, and he also produced a middle-length and a short version of the same material, plus a parallel treatise on the stages of tantra. The graded path he set out follows the older Kadam structure of three scopes, and his presentation of the bodhisattva path turns on the six perfections.

Why debate became central

His philosophical position is a synthesis: the epistemology of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the mind-only analysis, and Nāgārjuna's madhyamaka, held together rather than ranked.

And underneath it, a claim about method that explains the noise in the courtyard. Meditation, on his account, has to be paired with rigorous reasoning in order to push the mind past where it would otherwise stop. Sitting quietly with a conclusion you have not earned does not move anything.

That is why this school argues. Not because it is argumentative, and not because debate is a teaching technique bolted on afterwards. Because on Tsongkhapa's account reasoning is part of the meditation, and a position you cannot defend is a position you do not hold.

1409, the year that built everything else

In 1409 he did three things. He renovated the Jokhang, the central temple in Lhasa. He founded Ganden, twenty-five miles to the north. And he established the fifteen-day Great Prayer Festival at the Jokhang.

Two of his students did the rest. Tashi Palden founded Drepung in 1416. Shakya Yeshe founded Sera in 1419. Those three became the largest monasteries in the world, and the institution this site describes is a direct continuation of the third.

Ganden Ngamchö

He died in 1419. The anniversary, the twenty-fifth day of the tenth Tibetan month, is Ganden Ngamchö, and it is kept with butter lamps in every window. In the Geluk year it is the great day that is not one of the four.

There is a symmetry worth noticing. The man who insisted that devotion without rigour is sentimental is commemorated with the least argumentative gesture available: putting a light in a window.

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Terms used here are defined in the Lexicon, which links from the first mention of each in the text above.