Atisha (Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna)

Atisha was a Bengali Buddhist master and scholar-monk, born in the region of present-day Bangladesh, who became one of the most consequential figures in the transmission of Indian Buddhism to Tibet. After studying widely and serving at the great monastic university of Vikramashila, he was invited to Tibet in the eleventh century, where he spent his final years revitalizing the Dharma.

He is especially remembered for carrying the lojong (mind-training) teachings—including the practice of tonglen, “sending and taking”—which he had received from teachers such as Dharmarakshita and the master Serlingpa (Dharmakirti of Suvarnadvipa).

His root text, the Bodhipathapradīpa (Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment), organized the stages of practice and became foundational for the Kadampa school he inspired. Atisha’s place in this atlas is as the source of tonglen and the lojong slogans: a deliberate inner technique that inverts ordinary self-protection by breathing in others’ suffering and breathing out one’s own happiness and ease.

This makes him a key figure for the surrender-and-release dimension of the Atlas—the practice of opening the heart rather than defending it, and of using imagination and breath to dissolve the boundary between self and other.

His compassion-training methods feed directly into modern secular and therapeutic adaptations of tonglen, and they represent a distinctly relational, other-centered counterpoint to the self-directed, outcome-focused techniques elsewhere in the Atlas.