The Debate Tradition in Tibetan Monastic Education

The great Gelug monastic universities of central Tibet — Ganden, Drepung, and Sera near Lhasa, joined in importance by Tashilhunpo in Tsang — organized their core curriculum around intensive, sequential study of five major bodies of Indian Buddhist literature, sometimes called the "five great treatises": Maitreya's Abhisamayalankara ("Ornament of Clear Realization"), studied as a systematic guide to the Prajnaparamita literature's path structure; Chandrakirti's Madhyamakavatara ("Introduction to the Middle Way"), the primary vehicle for Prasangika Madhyamaka philosophy; Dharmakirti's Pramanavarttika ("Commentary on Valid Cognition"), the foundational text of Buddhist epistemology and logic; Vasubandhu's Abhidharmakosha ("Treasury of Abhidharma"), covering cosmology, psychology, and the analysis of phenomena; and the Vinaya, the monastic disciplinary code. Progression through this curriculum, supplemented by monastery-specific textbooks (yig cha) composed by earlier teachers within each monastic college, traditionally required fifteen to twenty years or more of study before a monk could sit for the geshe (dge bshes, roughly "spiritual friend" or "doctor of philosophy") examinations, culminating, for the most accomplished candidates, in public examination before the assembled monastic community and, historically, before the Dalai Lama himself during the Lhasa Monlam festival, in the highest rank of Geshe Lharampa.