- Lived:
- 982–1054 · born at Vajrayoginī village, Vikramapura (in today's Munshiganj district, Bangladesh) → Bodh Gaya, Sumatra, Vikramaśīla, and, for the last twelve years, Tibet — where he died and where his relics remained for nine centuries
- Field:
- Buddhist scholarship and reform — senior master of Vikramaśīla, restorer of Tibetan Buddhism, founding author of the lamrim ("stages of the path") tradition
- The Big Idea:
- A path anyone can walk must be built in steps. Atiśa took the whole sprawling library of Indian Buddhism and arranged it as a single graded road — start where you actually are, ethics before mysticism, compassion before power — and Tibet has organized its religious life around that road ever since.
- In their words:
- "Those who long, through their own suffering, to bring an end to all the suffering of others — such persons are supreme." (Bodhipathapradīpa, verse 5, our rendering; Richard Sherburne's 1983 translation runs close)
- If you remember one thing:
- At fifty-seven, one of India's most senior scholars was offered a sack of gold to cross the Himalaya and repair a broken Buddhism, was warned — tradition says by a goddess — that going would cut twenty years off his life, and went anyway. He never came back, and every school of Tibetan Buddhism still traces a line to him.