What is Geluk?
The Gelug (dge lugs, 'the virtuous tradition') is the youngest of the four major schools of Tibetan Vajrayāna Buddhism. Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) founded it in the early fifteenth century on the base of the earlier Kadam lineage. The school is defined by three features: a Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka reading of emptiness, strict monastic *vinaya*, and a long scholastic geshe curriculum that integrates sūtra study with tantric practice. The institution of the Dalai Lama belongs to this school.
The Kadam inheritance and Tsongkhapa's reform
Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) shaped the school by reforming the earlier Kadam tradition in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The Kadam (bka' gdams, 'the spoken instructions') was the lineage Atiśa established at Reting Monastery in the eleventh century, grounded in his Bodhipathapradīpa (Lamp for the Path to Awakening). That short text organised the Buddhist path into three levels of practitioner, a structure Tibetan curricula carried forward for nine centuries. The Kadam emphasised strict *vinaya*, the *lojong* mind-training slogans, and scholastic study of Indian Mahāyāna texts. Tsongkhapa's reform, initially called New Kadam, restored that discipline and added a Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka philosophical framework and a tantric curriculum integrated with sūtra study rather than kept separate from it. Ganden Monastery was founded in 1409 on Wangbur Mountain east of Lhasa. Drepung (1416) and Sera (1419) followed within a decade. The three together formed the centre of Geluk scholastic training for the next five centuries.
The geshe curriculum
The school's defining feature is the geshe curriculum: a long philosophical training that culminates in the Geshe Lharampa degree, typically pursued over roughly twenty years. Students work through five great topics: Pramāṇa (epistemology, from Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika), Prajñāpāramitā (from the Abhisamayālaṃkāra), *Madhyamaka* (from Candrakīrti's Madhyamakāvatāra and Tsongkhapa's Lhag mthong chen mo), *Abhidharma* (from Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakośa and Asaṅga's Abhidharmasamuccaya), and *Vinaya*. The teaching method is formal debate: the standing monk presents a position and the seated monk challenges it with sharp clapped-hand gestures. A doctrine counts as learned only when the student can defend it under hard questioning. After the geshe degree, monks move to one of the tantric colleges: the Upper Tantric College (Gyütö) or the Lower Tantric College (Gyüme), for training in unexcelled-yoga-tantra practices including deity yoga, completion-stage practices, and guru yoga. The Geluk treats long philosophical training followed by tantric practice as a single path. Neither half is complete without the other.
Where the lineage shows up in the index
The school's main presence in contemporary English runs through the Dalai Lama. Tenzin Gyatso's *The Art of Happiness*, co-authored with psychiatrist Howard Cutler, is the most widely read lay introduction to the Geluk curriculum's ethical and contemplative orientation. The text he teaches most often in formal transmissions is the Padmakara translation of *The Way of the Bodhisattva*, Śāntideva's eighth-century poem on *bodhicitta*, which Tsongkhapa absorbed from Atiśa's lineage and which the Lamrim curriculum places at the practical centre of the path. The *lojong* mind-training tradition the Geluk inherits from Atiśa travels in Western teaching most visibly through Pema Chödrön. Her course on awakening compassion walks the Atiśa slogans, *When Things Fall Apart* is the practical companion, and her reflection on uncertainty as practice extends the same material into a lay register. Trungpa's *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism* uses the Lamrim-derived ethical structure as its background framework. Junjirō Takakusu's *Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy* provides the wider East Asian context against which Tsongkhapa's Madhyamaka settlement is most legible.
Geluk and the other Tibetan schools
The Geluk is not a purely scholastic school. The geshe curriculum is paired with the tantric-college training, and monks who complete both work with the Cakrasaṃvara, Guhyasamāja, and Yamāntaka deity-yoga cycles in depth. The school is also not the same as the Tibetan state. The Sakya, Karma Kagyu, and Nyingma lineages had their own institutional centres, and the widespread conflation of 'Tibetan Buddhism' with 'Geluk' in early Western accounts is a flattening the Tibetan tradition itself has never made. Nor is the school a closed system. The nineteenth-century Rimé (non-sectarian) movement, led by Jamgön Kongtrül and Khyentse Wangpo in eastern Tibet, drew deliberately on Geluk and non-Geluk lineages together. The contemporary Dalai Lama carries that orientation forward, giving transmissions across school boundaries in his public teaching.
