Sakyapa

One of the eight practice lineages of

Tibetan Vajrayana, the Sakya school
traces its lineage back to Virupa, one
of the Mahasiddhas. Virupa.
The school was named after the monastery
Grey Earth (Tib., sa-skya) in Southern
Tibet and also recalls one of their
foremost masters, Sakya Pandita Kunga
Gyeltsen (1182-1251).
The Sakyapa regard the Hevajra Tantra as
most precious and much of the teachings
are based on this text. Khon Konchog
Gyalpo (1034-1102), a student of Brogmi,
founded the Sakya head monastery in
1073. Other important adepts of this
lineage were 'Phags-pa (1235-1280) and
Buston (1290-1364), the well-known
scholar and founder of the later Zhalupa.
The Sakyapa, besides giving rise to two
sub-schools, have influenced other
schools by way of educating their
foremost individual masters: Taranatha
of the Jonangpa and Tsongkapa of the
Gelugpa.
Before the rise of the Gelugpa, the
Sakyapa (and the connected "Khon" clan)
had long been the actual rulers of
Tibet, and they often clashed with and
fought opponents such as the Kagyudpa.
Around 1350, the Sakyapa lost much of
their power and simultaneously developed
two sub-schools, the Zhalupa and the Ngorpa.
The Sakya-monks were especially involved
with preparing a systematic collection
of Buddhist and Tantric texts. Their
scientific objectivity, however, was
less than perfect and their main
encyclopedist Bu-ston excluded most
Nyingma and Dzogchen texts from the
official canon.