Why Tibetan Buddhism? Why the Gelug Branch?

Although Buddha-Dharma travelled far and wide in Asia, Tibet is just a hop over the Himalayas from its birthplace in Northern India. There was a 500-year transmission during its golden age of great monastic universities such as Nalanda. One finds many texts were translated not just word-for-word, but sometimes syllable-by-syllable.

Some claim that Tibetans just incorporated the dharma into their native shamanistic religion and made something different, as Confucianists and Taoist seem to have done. This is not the case. To this day, monks study the great books from Indian scholars and yogis using Tibetan commentaries. Tibetan Buddhism is really Indian Buddhism. Furthermore, Tibetans were yak-boys as much as Americans are cowboys: down-to-earth, practical and stubborn. Yet they dove in and arranged their whole world around these teachings. If it worked for them, it can work for us.

Specifically, I learned from the Gelukpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, founded by Je Tsongkapa, who lived 1357-1419 and was the teacher of His Holiness the First Dalai Lama. Why Je Tsongkapa? He wasn’t entirely happy with what he was being told as a young monk. He respected his teachers but some things didn’t add up and he wanted to know what the teachings really meant. He became a scholar of Sanskrit and analyzed the hell out of the teachings and commentaries. Using powerful tools from the logic teachings of the Buddha, he boiled it down until he got to something he, and we, could believe in, writing over 10,000 pages of commentary himself. Besides, look at the current Dalai Lama, Teacher to the World. I’ll have what he’s having.

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