Kadam · Tibetan: bka' gdams

Kadam (Tibetan bka’ gdams) is the name of the Tibetan tradition that looks back to Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (c. 982–1054), the Indian master who came to teach in Tibet. Lotsawa House describes the Kadampa as the tradition “that he initiated”, and it was his Tibetan disciples who carried it on: his foremost disciple, Dromtönpa Gyalwé Jungné, founded the monastery of Reting (Redreng) in 1056–1057, after Atiśa’s death. A Kadam thangka described by Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö sets Atiśa at the centre, with Dromtönpa and Ngok Lotsāwa to his right and left.

Two bodies of teaching run back through the Kadam to Atiśa. The first is the graded path. Atiśa’s short Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, as Lotsawa House puts it, established lamrim, “the ‘graduated path’”, as a genre of Tibetan literature. The second is mind training, or lojong: Atiśa set out its core principles for his disciples in twenty-one short statements, recorded in the Miscellaneous Sayings of the Kadam Masters.

The Kadam did not last as a separate school. Study Buddhism’s glossary says that after its branches were merged and reformed, it “continued as the Gelug tradition”. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on Tsongkhapa, whose monastery of Ganden, founded in 1409, it calls the mother monastery of what would develop into his Geluk school, notes that as a student he spent time at Sangphu, a centre of learning associated with “Atiśa’s Kadam” school. His Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, completed in 1402, belongs to the lamrim genre that Atiśa’s Lamp began.