Gampopa (1079–1153) was born Sönam Rinchen in the Nyal region of central Tibet, into a family of physicians. From childhood he trained in medicine and became a respected healer. He married and had children, living the life of a lay practitioner with a strong grounding in Buddhism — by his teens he had already studied Nyingma tantric cycles and Kadampa teachings. His lineage name, Gampopa, means “the man from Gampo,” after the mountain where he later founded his monastery; another common title, Dakpo Lhajé, means “the Physician of Dakpo.” He is counted as one of the “Five Founding Masters” of the Kagyu and as the patriarch who gave the lineage its monastic form.

When Gampopa was still in his twenties, an epidemic took his wife and two children. On her deathbed his wife asked him to devote himself wholly to the dharma. He ordained as a monk around age 26 in the Kadampa school — the monastic tradition descending from the Indian master Atiśa (982–1054) through his Tibetan disciple Dromtönpa — and immersed himself in the graduated path (lamrim) and Vinaya discipline. Yet biographies describe him as sensing that something essential still lay beyond textual study. At about age 32 he heard wandering beggars speak of a cotton-clad yogin named Milarepa in the mountains of western Tibet. He set out to find him, and what he received there transformed his life.

Milarepa (1052–1135) recognized Gampopa’s capacity and, after testing him, transmitted the experiential heart of the Mahamudra teachings and the Six Yogas of Naropa — above all the inner-heat (tummo) and the direct introduction to the nature of mind. Gampopa remained with Milarepa for roughly thirteen months, an astonishingly short period in which the entire lineage transmission was conferred. Milarepa is said to have declared that Gampopa was “like a second Buddha” and entrusted the lineage to him. This moment is the hinge of the Kagyu story: the unbroken “whispered lineage” of the yogins passed into the hands of a disciplined, learned monk who could carry it into institutions.

After Milarepa’s death Gampopa returned to central Tibet and, following a prophetic dream, founded Daklha Gampo monastery in 1121. There he did something no purely yogic teacher had done: he wove Milarepa’s Mahamudra realisation into the systematic, scripture-based framework of the Kadampa lamrim. The result was a path that honoured both —graduated study and vows on one side, direct contemplative transmission on the other. His masterwork, The Jewel Ornament of Liberation (Tib. dam chos yid bzhin nor bu thar pa rin po che’i rgyan), presents the entire Mahayana path from refuge to buddhahood in this integrated way, and remains a core Kagyu text. Gampopa thus became the bridge between the solitary mountain yogin and the monastic order.

Four of Gampopa’s principal disciples founded the four major Kagyu sub-schools — Karma Kagyu, Barom Kagyu, Phagdru Kagyu, and Tsalpa Kagyu — and from these branched the “four major and eight minor” lineages. His students included the First Karmapa, Düsum Khyenpa (1110–1193), and Pakmodrupa. Because every living Kagyu tradition descends through one of these branches, Gampopa is rightly called the structural root of the Kagyu. He is also revered as an emanation of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, linking the Kagyu’s protective and compassionate orientation to its founding figure. His synthesis — sutra and tantra as one path — defines the school to this day.