The founding project of a tradition is usually expressed in its early texts, but not always explicitly. What its authors say—especially in the passages in which they introduce the tradition—, what they omit and, above all, the way in which they communicate content (apart from its being true or untrue) reveals their inner concerns, their perception of the surrounding reality and the motivations, at least in part and aside from the ones given, that led them to write. The first steps taken in establishing traditions, and particularly their founding projects, are especially interesting for historical research, which does not merely record the facts but also explores their mystification and enquires into the reasons for this.

The Buddhist tantric system known as the Wheel of Time (Kālacakra), which spread through Northern India and Tibet around the beginning of the XI cent., is extremely interesting in this regard and has been studied relatively little according to the aforesaid perspective, which is the one I intend to explore here. Except for the premises necessary for my discourse (§ 1), I shall not reiterate the basic historical information on this system, for which I refer the reader to the contributions by John R. Newman.

It is possible to show that the system's authoritativeness was established by the early teachers of the Kālacakra and by the first Tibetan historiographers through a precise intellectual ‘operation’, which involved, among other things, the definition of the Scriptures and of the qualities that their interpreter should possess, the fixing of hermeneutical criteria and the choice of the main themes.