Gyaza Kongjo, or Wencheng Gongzhu, was a Tang Dynasty noblewoman who was married to the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo around the year 641. She is credited with bringing the Jowo Śākyamuni statue housed in the Lhasa Jokhang, and with inspiring the king to build a series of temples across the Tibetan Plateau in order to subjugate the realm and establish Buddhism there. She is considered by some to be an incarnation of White Tārā.

Gorub Lotsāwa Chokyi Sherab was a translator active in the eleventh century, during the Later Transmission of Buddhism to Tibet. Trained in central Tibet, he traveled to Kashmir, Nepal, and India and studied with multiple Buddhist teachers there, as well as with Rongzom Chokyi Zangpo later in his career. Dozens of translations in the Kangyur and Tengyur are credited to him.

Tsen Khawoche was an eleventh-century disciple of the Kashmiri paṇḍit Sajjana. He is credited by Tibetan historians for giving rise to the "meditative" tradition of exegesis of the Ratnagotravibhāga, a main source of buddha-nature theory in Tibet, which heavily influenced Mahāmudrā and the "other-emptiness" philosophical position.

Umapa Tsondru Sengge was a fourteenth century Geluk scholar from Kham whose visions and dreams of Mañjuśrī were an important early source for Tsongkhapa's understanding of emptiness. Tsongkhapa, Umapa's disciple, frequently asked Umapa to serve as a medium in order that he might speak with the bodhisattva. He appears to have earned his epithet "Umapa," meaning "holder of Madhyamaka," based on his visionary inquiries into the finer points of the doctrine.

The Fifth Lelung Jedrung, Lobzang Trinle was a classically-trained nonsectarian Geluk lama who played significant roles in mitigating the political violence of the first half of the eighteenth century. A student of the Nyingma treasure revealers Terdak Lingpa and Choje Lingpa, he was prophesied to be the dharma heir of Terdak Lingpa's treasures relating to a semi-wrathful form of Avalokiteśvara.