The Tooth That Came Out of the Rubble

His body was destroyed by the Red Guards, and one tooth survived, and people made clay impressions of it and carried them away.

That is five hundred years after he died, and we will come back to it.

Tsongkhapa was born in 1357 in Amdo, in the far north-east of the Tibetan world. He became a novice at six, and at sixteen he went to central Tibet to study, and then he did something that sounds obvious and was not.

He studied with everybody.

Sakya, Kagyu, Jonang, Nyingma, he went to teachers of every school Tibet had, and took what each of them had to give. His most important teacher, Rendawa, was a Sakya.

This matters because Tibetan Buddhism at that time was not one thing. It was schools, with lineages and rivalries and monasteries, and a serious student normally belonged to one of them.

He belonged to all of them first, and then he built.