What is Kadampa?
Kadampa is the Tibetan Buddhist school founded in the eleventh century by Dromtönpa, the principal Tibetan disciple of Atisha Dīpaṃkara. It transmitted Atiśa's Bodhipathapradīpa and the [lojong](lexicon:lojong) mind-training literature. The school dissolved as an independent institution by the fifteenth century, but its [lam rim](lexicon:lamrim) curriculum became the shared scaffold of all four surviving Tibetan Buddhist schools.
Kadampa, Geluk, and the New Kadampa Tradition
Kadampa is commonly confused with two later entities. The Geluk school founded by Tsongkhapa in 1409 is the Kadampa's direct institutional heir, even called informally the New Kadampa. But it is a distinct school with its own founders, monasteries, and doctrinal character. The modern New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), founded in the 1990s by Kelsang Gyatso, took the historical name but is not in institutional continuity with either the original Kadampa or the Geluk. The NKT is not recognised by the Dalai Lama or the mainstream Geluk institutions.
Atiśa and Dromtönpa
The Kadampa school traces to the eleventh-century arrival in Tibet of the Bengali master Atisha Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (982–1054), invited from the great Vikramaśīla monastic university by the western Tibetan king Yeshe-Ö and his nephew Jangchub Ö to consolidate the second wave of Buddhist transmission. Atiśa arrived in 1042, taught for thirteen years across western and central Tibet, and died at Nyethang outside Lhasa in 1054. His principal Tibetan disciple was *Dromtönpa Gyalwai Jungne (1004–1064), a layman whose work consolidating Atiśa's transmission led to the founding of Reting Monastery in 1056–7, the institutional seat from which the Kadampa school took its form. The Tibetan compound bka' gdams pa, meaning those of the oral instruction, names the school's organising commitment: the entire scriptural inheritance is to be read as practical instruction for the practitioner in front of the teacher, with no part of the canon left as scholarship divorced from cultivation. The translation conventionally rendered as bound by the word* preserves the same emphasis.
What the school carried
The Kadampa transmission centred on three texts and a curriculum. The first text is Atisha's sixty-eight-verse Bodhipathapradīpa, the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, composed in 1042 at the request of Jangchub Ö. It seeded the [lam rim](lexicon:lamrim) genre by laying out the three-scope architecture under which the entire Buddhist curriculum is organised. The second is the Jewel Garland of the Bodhisattva, a shorter Atiśa text on the practical conduct of the *bodhicitta* path. The third, and distinctive to the Kadampa, is the [lojong](lexicon:lojong) (mind training) literature, descended from the teachings Atiśa received from his teacher Serlingpa in Sumatra and codified two centuries later by *Chekawa Yeshe Dorje (1101–1175) as the Seven Points of Mind Training. The curriculum the school produced is the architecture the four surviving Tibetan schools all operate inside: foundational reflections on precious human birth, impermanence, [karma](lexicon:karma) and [saṃsāra](lexicon:samsara) at the bottom; the personal-liberation curriculum and the [Eightfold Path](lexicon:eightfold-path) at the middle; the [bodhicitta*](lexicon:bodhicitta) cultivation and emptiness view at the top. The Kadampa innovation was less doctrinal than curricular: the school presented the entire Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna inheritance as a single graded path organised by the practitioner's scope rather than as a library of separate texts.
The 'New Kadampa' and the four schools
The Kadampa school as an independent institution did not survive past the early fifteenth century. Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), trained in the Kadampa lineage and across the wider Tibetan curriculum, founded Ganden Monastery in 1409 and codified the reformed school that came to be called Gelukpa, meaning the virtuous tradition, and informally the New Kadampa (bka' gdams gsar pa). The codification absorbed the older Kadampa monasteries into the new institutional shape; Reting, Sangphu, Narthang and the other Kadampa seats are continuous with the Geluk institutional life that took form around them. The school's influence on the other three schools is direct as well. Gampopa (1079–1153), the principal student of Milarepa and the figure through whom the Kagyu school took its institutional shape, was trained in Kadampa monastic curriculum at Phenyul before he met Milarepa. He brought the lam rim architecture into the Kagyu synthesis; his twelfth-century Jewel Ornament of Liberation is the Kagyu version of the Kadampa-derived three-scope path. The Sakya and Nyingma schools also drew on Kadampa scholastic methods in their formal curricula. The institution dissolved; the curriculum became the shared scaffold the entire Tibetan synthesis operates on.
Where the lineage appears in the index
Tenzin Gyatso's *The Art of Happiness* carries the lineage's working temperament into Western trade press. The Dalai Lama is the institutional head of the Geluk order, the New Kadampa, and the book operates inside the Kadampa-derived [lam rim](lexicon:lamrim) architecture without burdening lay readers with the technical vocabulary. The single text the current Dalai Lama transmits most often in formal teachings is the Padmakara translation of *The Way of the Bodhisattva*, Śāntideva's eighth-century poem on *bodhicitta*. The Kadampa-derived curriculum treats it as the practical hinge between the lesser-scope and greater-scope sections. The *lojong* mind-training literature the school produced travels in Western teaching most visibly through the Kagyu-shaped lineage of Chögyam Trungpa and Pema Chödrön: her course on awakening compassion walks the Atiśa-Chekawa slogans the foundation rests on, *When Things Fall Apart* is the practical companion, and her reflection on uncertainty as the practice extends the same material into the contemporary lay register. Trungpa's *Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism* takes the Kadampa-derived ethical structure as the background diagnosis of how Western practice goes wrong when the foundations are skipped. Junjirō Takakusu's *Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy* is the scholarly survey that maps the wider East Asian context against which the Kadampa-to-Geluk synthesis is most legible.
What the school isn't
The Kadampa is not a currently living institution under that name. The school dissolved as an independent body by the fifteenth century, and what survives is its absorption into the four schools that followed rather than a separate continuing transmission. The modern New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) founded by Kelsang Gyatso in the 1990s is a distinct, doctrinally heterodox movement that took the historical name. It is not in communion with the Dalai Lama or with the Geluk-school institutions the original New Kadampa, Tsongkhapa's reformed lineage, flowed into. The Kadampa is also not coextensive with the Geluk; the Geluk is the most direct institutional descendant, not the only one. The school's lasting contribution is not a sectarian doctrine the four schools disagree about. It is the architecture, the [lam rim](lexicon:lamrim) sequence and the [lojong](lexicon:lojong) mind-training literature, that all four schools operate inside.
