What it is
The fifth great field is the one the other nine were said to serve: the science of the inner, adhyātmavidyā, the study of the mind itself. What is a mind? What are its parts? Why does it suffer, and how can it be trained not to? In the classical list this is Buddhist philosophy proper, the sūtras and the treatises on them, and it is the field in which Tibet produced its largest literature by far.
On Genla the field is called Heart & Mind, and it is taught as the tradition’s psychology and ethics rather than as religion. That is a choice the Foundation has made with care, and it should be said plainly: the tradition itself does not draw that line, and its texts are named here for what they are.
Where it comes from
The canon arrived from India through three centuries of translation: the Kangyur, the words of the Buddha, and the Tengyur, the treatises of the Indian masters, together more than three hundred volumes. From the Abhidharma comes the map of mind and mental factors, the fifty-one sems byung that name the ways a mind can be occupied: attention, feeling, intention, faith, anger, regret. From the logicians comes the classification of cognitions, the blo rigs, which sorts what a mind does into direct perception, inference, doubt, wrong view and the rest. From the Kadampa teachers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries comes mind training, lojong, a literature of short, memorisable texts for turning the ordinary business of a day into practice: Langri Thangpa’s Eight Verses, Chekawa’s Seven Points. Around all of it stand the philosophical schools, the grub mtha’, and beside the Buddhist tradition the Bön tradition, with its own canon and its own account of the mind.
In the twenty-first century the Fourteenth Dalai Lama proposed that the ethics at the heart of this material could be taught to anyone, of any faith or none, as secular ethics. From that proposal came SEE Learning, developed at Emory University and launched in 2019, and from that comes the curriculum Genla already carries: eighty-one lessons for schools, from the first year to the eighth, on attention, compassion, resilience and the common humanity of everyone in the room.
What is at stake
The texts are safe; they have been printed many times. The training is not. Reading these works in the original takes years of instruction that fewer and fewer laypeople receive, and the practical disciplines, the mind training that made the tradition a way of life rather than a library, are held in monasteries and in families, both of which are thinner every decade. A civilisation’s account of its own inner life is not a small thing to lose.
On Genla
Inner Science holds the Heart & Mind curriculum, mind and mental factors, the types of cognition, mind training, the canon, the philosophical schools, and Bön.