Madhyamaka's Influence on Tibetan and East Asian Buddhism

Madhyamaka philosophy reached Tibet in two principal waves, corresponding to what Tibetan historiography calls the "earlier propagation" (snga dar) of Buddhism from roughly the 7th to 9th centuries CE, and the "later propagation" (phyi dar) beginning in the late 10th century. The Indian scholar-monk Santaraksita (c. 725–788 CE), who helped found Samye, the first Tibetan monastery, around 779 CE, and his student Kamalasila (c. 740–795 CE) transmitted a synthesis of Madhyamaka with Yogacara epistemology and logic sometimes labeled Yogacara-Svatantrika-Madhyamaka. Kamalasila's role at the semi-legendary Council of Lhasa (also called the Samye debate, traditionally dated to around 792–794 CE) — in which he reportedly defended a gradual, analytically structured path to enlightenment against the Chinese Chan monk Heshang Moheyan's advocacy of a more sudden, non-conceptual approach — became a foundational, if historically much-debated, episode in Tibetan Buddhism's self-understanding of its own distinctively Indian, rather than Chinese, philosophical lineage.