Atisa

Atisa Dipankara Shrijnana (982-1054) was an Indian Buddhist master from the Bengal region, born at Vajrayogini in the Bikrampur area of present-day Bangladesh, who became one of the decisive figures in the revival of Buddhism in Tibet.

Highly trained across the Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools of his day and steeped in the teaching of bodhicitta, he was invited to Tibet after the persecution of the dharma under King Langdarma and spent the last twelve years of his life there, restoring the tradition and re-establishing the primacy of the awakening-mind.

His short text A Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment (Bodhipathapradipa) laid out the lamrim, the graduated stages of the path, and he systematized the practice of lojong, or “mind training,” transmitting a body of pithy slogans for transforming adversity into spiritual fuel.

For the mind-power lineage, Atisa is the great organizer: he took the deliberate cultivation of compassion and the reframing of one’s mental responses and forged them into a teachable, step-by-step discipline. His closest disciple Dromtonpa founded the Kadam school, whose mind-training teaching flowed into all later Tibetan traditions and, centuries on, into modern compassion practice in the West.