Jamyang Shayba won his geshe degree at the Gomang College of Drebung Monastery, and thus his verses, and Losang Gonchok’s commentary on them, surely reflect the traditions of oral debate at that college. Jamyang Shayba’s own commentary is replete with hypothetical debates, some of which may have been drawn from real debates in the Gomang courtyard, where he served as abbot for seven years.

Jamyang Shayba’s sixteen–folio root text is entitled Presentation of Tenets, Roar of the Five-Faced (Lion) Eradicating Error, Precious Lamp Illuminating the Genuine Path to Omniscience and was written in verse in 1689. (We have decided, however, not to present it as poetry.) The verses have a strange relationship with the Dalai Lamas. According to Geshe Tupden Gyatso, a twentieth-century Gomang College scholar, they were written at the behest of Jamyang Shayba’s student, Sanggyay Gyatso, while he was the regent of the great Fifth Dalai Lama. The request was made in the name of the Dalai Lama, who died in 1682 but whose death was concealed by Sanggyay Gyatso for fourteen years.

Jamyang Shayba’s own enormous commentary on the verse treatise (530 folios in the Drashikyil edition, probably four times the length of The Clear Crystal Mirror) was written ten years later. It is usually referred to as the Great Exposition of Tenets but its full title is the rather grand Explanation of “Tenets,” Sun of the Land of Samantabhadra Brilliantly Illuminating All of Our Own and Others’ Tenets and the Meaning of the Profound, Ocean of Scripture and Reasoning Fulfilling All Hopes of All Beings. It was published in 1699, the year before he became the abbot of Gomang.

Jamyang Shayba’s full name is Jamyang Shayba Dorjay Ngawang Dzöndrü. He was born in 1648 in lower Amdo, the easternmost region of Tibet (now in Qinghai Province of the People’s Republic of China), in the area of Ganggya Dingring. A serious student, he became a novice monk in his teens, traveling to Lhasa at the age of twenty-one to enter the Gomang College of Drebung Monastery. At age twenty-seven he became a fully ordained monk, and at twenty-nine he entered the Tantric College of Lower Lhasa, Gyumay. Among his teachers were the great Fifth Dalai Lama, Losang Gyatso, whom he met when as a boy His Holiness stopped in Amdo on his way to China. Jamyang Shayba was also taught by the first of the line of reincarnating Janggya lamas, Ngawang Chöden.

At the age of thirty-three he entered a two-year meditation retreat in a cave near Drebung, thereby attaining yogic powers. He wrote prolifically for the rest of his life. Among the dozens of texts collected in the fifteen volumes of his “Collected Works” are his famous monastic textbooks on the five “root” topics: Valid Cognition; the Perfection of Wisdom; the philosophy of the Madhyamika school; Abhidharma; and Monastic Discipline.

In 1709 Jamyang Shayba returned to Amdo at the invitation of the Dzungar Mongolians. In the following year he founded the Labrang Drashikyil Monastery (sometimes referred to as just Labrang), which grew into a major center of the Gelukba monastic order; a tantric college was also established there in 1717. Drashikyil’s first abbot was Ngawang Drashi, who, using Jamyang Shayba’s writings, authored the Collected Topics textbook still studied by those beginning the Gomang curriculum. Jamyang Shayba died at age seventy-three or -four in 1721 or 1722. His line has continued. The sixth Jamyang Shayba lama is currently building a new house at Labrang.