The spread of the teaching of Gautama Buddha began in India over two thousand years ago and reached perhaps its highest peak in the hidden mountain kingdom of Tibet, five centuries before our time. The great illuminary of his renaissance of the religion of total peace was Tsongkapa (1357 - 1419). He inspired a movement that by the timeTibet was lost in 1959 saw nearly a million monks living in thousands of monasteries around the country.