#AtishaDipankara

“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.”

“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.”