Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this four-minute overview, Amy Miller introduces the four main lineages of Tibetan Buddhism—Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug—which all arrived in Tibet through teachers like Padmasambhava in the eighth century and share the Mahāyāna aim of achieving enlightenment to benefit all beings. While the lineages differ in their specific practices and philosophical presentations, Miller emphasizes the dangers of sectarianism and the common ground underlying these traditions. She advises practitioners to explore multiple teachers, centers, and Buddhist schools before settling on a path, then introduces Lama Tsongkhapa, the great master who founded the Gelug tradition and synthesized Atisha’s teachings into the influential Lamrim texts, which will be explored in subsequent sessions.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1.23 The Four Tibetan Lineages – Copy.mp3
UUID: f267db66-7c2a-47e0-89c2-b012a34f72f3
Teacher: Amy Miller
Collection: Nutshell no details (Amy Miller)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~449
So Buddhism also, in the Tibetan tradition, has four lineages. So we went through a bit of how it spread throughout Asia with Hīnayāna countries and Mahāyāna countries. And it came to Tibet through a special saint, a Buddha named Padmasambhava, arrived around the eighth century. Guru Rinpoche is another name for him. And there were many also different teachers and students who moved into Tibet, spreading the Dharma there.
And the different lineages formed, the oldest being the Nyingma or Nyingmappa. There is the Kagyu or Kagyupa, the Sakya or Sakyapa, and the Gelug tradition or Gelugpa. These traditions are all Mahāyāna, and they all teach that you want to get yourself enlightened so you can be of the utmost benefit to all other living beings. However, they differ in their practices. In slightly different ways, they present their materials, their philosophy.
But there are many, many overlaps, complements, and they just have different teachers that are in the different lineages. For instance, His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is in the Gelug tradition. However, he always stresses basically a Rime tradition, a tradition that doesn’t separate necessarily one tradition from another. The very dangerous thing is sectarianism, that your tradition is better than somebody else’s and criticizing somebody else’s tradition. There’s really no benefit in that.
There are practices in all of these traditions that are beneficial for infinite beings. So it’s important if you move into a spiritual path or practice, it’s nice first to look around, visit other centers, read a variety of books. You can get tapes and CDs and order things on the Internet to thoroughly explore different types of spirituality, whether it’s Buddhist or not. But then it’s nice after a while to settle on one so you can go a bit more deeply. But it’s important to check out different teachers, see what their disciples are like, Visit different centers till you feel there’s something comfortable for you.
One of the great masters that founded the Gelug tradition that we’ll talk about more along with his teachings in subsequent sessions is Lama Tsongkhapa, a great master who lived from thirteen fifty seven to fourteen nineteen and founded Ganden Monastery in Tibet. He was originally from Amdo in eastern Tibet and was one of the most amazing practitioners, writing extensive commentaries on the Lamrim as well as other texts while doing a vast amount of practices at the same time. So we’ll comment on particularly Lama Tsongkhapa’s view of the Lamrim as he was one of the main people who took Atisha’s lamp for the path and further synthesized it into a shorter, a medium length, and a great treatise on the Lamrim.