Founder
Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna was said to have been born the second son of a royal house in eastern India, given the name Candragarbha at birth. His father was Kalyana the Good and his mother Prabhavati the Radiant. After experiencing a vision of Tārā at the age of eleven, on the eve of his marriage, he entered a religious path, initially practicing Hevajra in the company of taAtiśa was said to have studied with a number of the Indian Mahāsiddhas, including Jetari, Kāṇha, Avadhūtīpa, Ḍombipa, and Nāropa, and it is reported that he received the bodhisattva vow at Nālandā from Bodhibhadra.
He later dreamed that the Buddha himself urged him to ordain, and, at the age of twenty-nine, he did so, in a monastery in Bodhgaya. According to Tibetan hagiographies, for two years Atiśa studied at Odantipuri with Dharmarakṣita, the author of an important Lojong (blo sbyong) manual, The Wheel of Sharp Weapons (theg pa chen po’i blo sbyong mtshon cha ‘khor lo). Historians have called this into question, however.
He voyaged to Sumatra where he trained in bodhicitta with the monk Guru Suvarṇadvīpa, residing on the island for twelve years. Returning to India at age forty-five, he sequestered himself at the great monastery-university Vikramaśila.
The story of the Purang (pu hrangs) kings’ invitation to Atiśa is one of the great Buddhist legends of Tibet. According to the story, towards the end of the tenth century, the king of Purang, Lha Lama Yeshe Wo (lha bla ma ye shes ‘od, d.u.), a descendent of the Yarlung kings whose dynasty ended with the collapse of the Tibetan Empire in 842, was dismayed at the state of Buddhism in Tibet. Monasteries had closed, and tantric practices that had previously been tightly controlled by the state-sponsored religious institutions were proliferating among the Tibetan laity and merging with native practices.
