Tsongkhapa and the Gelug School's Madhyamaka Synthesis

Je Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) was born in the Tsongkha region of Amdo, in northeastern Tibet, and, after early monastic training there, traveled to central Tibet as a young man to study under masters of virtually every existing Tibetan lineage, including Sakya, Kagyu, and Nyingma teachers, as well as scholars trained in the Kadam tradition descended from Atisha. This unusually broad, comprehensive education, combined with an exceptional reputation for both scholastic rigor in logic and epistemology and intensive tantric retreat practice, allowed Tsongkhapa to found, late in his life, a new reform-minded school that came to be called Gelug ("the virtuous ones" or "system of virtue"), sometimes also called the "Yellow Hat" school after the distinctive color of its ceremonial headgear, adapted from the earlier Kadam tradition's monastic dress. In 1409, Tsongkhapa founded Ganden Monastery southeast of Lhasa, which gave the later Gelug government its name (Ganden Phodrang), and in the same year inaugurated the Great Prayer Festival (Monlam Chenmo) at Lhasa's Jokhang temple, a large public ceremony that became a central institution of the Gelug calendar and of Lhasa's religious life more broadly. Tsongkhapa's own synthesis is often summarized as an integration of the "three principal aspects of the path" — renunciation (nges 'byung), bodhicitta, and the correct philosophical view of emptiness — a formulation he set out in a short, widely memorized verse text of that name.