Theology

Tsongkhapa

1357 to 1419 CE, Amdo and central Tibet

The great reformer who rebuilt Tibetan Buddhism on a union of rigorous scholarship, ethical discipline, and the precise view that emptiness and dependent arising are one.

Start learning Tsongkhapa →

Lessons

The Great Reformer: Founding the Gelug

How Tsongkhapa rebuilt Tibetan Buddhism around a single conviction - that ethical discipline, rigorous study, and meditation are not rival paths but one path - and founded Ganden monastery, the Great Prayer Festival, an…

The Three Principal Aspects of the Path

Tsongkhapa’s famously concise distillation of the entire Buddhist path into three essentials - the determination to be free (renunciation), the awakening mind of compassion (bodhicitta), and the correct view (of emptine…

The Object of Negation: Hitting the Exact Target

Tsongkhapa’s precise and influential insistence that liberating insight requires identifying exactly what is being denied - intrinsic or inherent existence, and nothing more - because negating too much collapses into ni…

In Praise of Dependent Arising

Tsongkhapa’s thesis, poured into a hymn of devotion, that emptiness and cause-and-effect are perfectly compatible and even reinforce each other - so that dependent arising is itself the reason for emptiness - and his gr…

Sutra and Tantra United

Tsongkhapa’s mapping of the swift tantric path onto the sutra foundation in his Great Exposition of Secret Mantra , and his insistence that the whole soaring structure - sutra and tantra alike - must rest on the base of…

More in Theology

Ibn SinaThomas AquinasAl GhazaliMaimonidesNagarjunaAugustine of HippoThe BuddhaBuddhaghosa
← All thinkers

epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.