[5] Samding Dorje Phagmo Atiśa was born as Candragarbha in c. 982 CE as the second of three sons to a ruling family in Bengal in the city of Vikrampura.

[9] According to Tibetan sources, Atiśa was ordained into the Mahāsāṃghika lineage at the age of twenty-eight by the Abbot Śīlarakṣita in Bodh Gaya and studied almost all Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools of his time, including teachings from Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Tantric Hinduism and other practices.

Tibetan hagiographies on his life have a tendency to portray him as one of the greatest scholars to stay at Vikramashila who would be noted for his strict adherence to the ethics of Mahayana Buddhism.

According to the Blue Annals, a new king of Guge by the name of Yeshe-Ö sent his academic followers to learn and translate some of the Sanskrit Buddhist texts.

Travelling with Naktso and Gya Lōtsawa, Atiśa journeyed through Nepal on his way to Tolung, the capital of the Purang Kingdom.

He spent three years in Tolung and compiled his teachings into his most influential scholarly work, 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 in the genre of Lamrim (lam rim), or the Stages of the Path,[16] and was specifically the basis for Tsongkhapa's Lamrim writings.

[17] According to Jamgon Kongtrul, when Atiśa discovered the store of Sanskrit texts at Pekar Kordzoling, the library of Samye, "he said that the degree to which the Vajrayana had spread in Tibet was unparalleled, even in India.