Tibetan masters have skillfully synthesized the teachings of the Buddha (as well as those of the great Indian Mahayana teachers) and presented them within a coherent framework that can be practiced by a single spiritual aspirant seeking to travel from the beginner’s stage to the final awakening of the buddha.

(1) Stages of the path (lamrim) – Tsongkhapa’s The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment

Three spiritual capacities are determined by the practitioner’s motivation:

a. Practitioners of the lowest capacity pursue spiritual activities out of a desire for rebirth in the higher, happier realms in the next lifetime—as a god (deva) or at the very least in a good human family.

b. Medium-capacity beings are driven by the wish to escape cyclic existence altogether and achieve nirvana’s cessation of suffering.

c. Finally, beings with the highest capacity strive not for their own welfare but for the happiness of all sentient beings—that is, they have the motivation of a bodhisattva.

(2) Stages of the doctrine (tenrim) – Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament of Liberation

a. ​The motivating cause for attaining highest awakening: the buddha nature (tathāgatagarbha)

b. ​The corporeal basis for achieving awakening: the precious human existence

c. ​The contributing condition that impels one to achieve it: the religious teacher

d. ​The means for achieving it: the instructions of the religious teacher

e. ​The fruit that is so achieved: the bodies (kāya) of buddhahood

f. ​The enlightened activities that follow the attainment of buddhahood, i.e., the spontaneous benefitting of living beings through buddha activities free from conceptual thought

Source: Dolpa. Stages of the Buddha’s Teachings: Three Key Texts (Library of Tibetan Classics Book 10). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.