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Atiśa returned to India. Once back, the increasingly knowledgeable monk received much attention for his teachings and skills in debate and philosophy. On three separate occasions, the monk Atiśa was acclaimed for defeating non-Buddhist extremists in debate.
Atiśa Dīpaṃkara (T. ཨ་ཏི་ཤ་དཱི་པཾ་ཀ་ར།) (982 - 1054 CE), a.k.a. Atīśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna, was an Indian Buddhist scholar who is revered by Tibetan Buddhists as a leading teacher in the later dissemination of Buddhism in Tibet.
The Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment. This short text, Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna's most famous and important work, served to establish lamrim, the 'graduated path', as a genre of Tibetan literature and to introduce the three types of being ( skyes bu gsum) as a significant typology.
Often referred to in Tibetan simply by the epithet of “Lord” (Tib. jo bo rje ), Atiśa is the individual most associated with the eleventh-century revival of Buddhism in Tibet, which followed the tumultuous era of fragmentation ( sil bu’i dus) that began with the 842 collapse of the Tibetan Empire.
Texts by and about the great Indian master Atiśa Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna (982–1054), also known as Jowo Jé Palden Atisha (jo bo rje dpal ldan a ti sha):
(c.980–1055).The short name of Atiśa Dīpaṃkāra Śrījñāna. Born in Bengal into a royal family, he was a renowned Buddhist scholar and monk who later became one of the leading teachers at the university monastery of Vikramaśīla.
Atiśa resided in Tolung for three years, giving teachings that gave birth to his masterpiece, the Bodhipathapradīpa, or Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment. The short text, in sixty-seven verses, lays out the entire Buddhist path in terms of the three vehicles: Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna, and became the model for subsequent texts ...
