What it is
The second great field asks three questions. What makes an argument valid? What counts as knowledge, as opposed to belief or guess? And how does one mind test a claim against another? Its Sanskrit name, hetuvidyā, means the science of reasons, and its Tibetan name says the same. In practice it is the training in clear thinking that a Tibetan scholar receives before anything else, and the tool with which every other field is examined.
Where it comes from
The Indian foundations are the works of Dignāga in the sixth century and Dharmakīrti in the seventh, above all Dharmakīrti’s Commentary on Valid Cognition, the Pramāṇavārttika, which sets out the two sources of knowledge, direct perception and inference, and the conditions under which an inference is sound.
Tibet made something new of it. In the twelfth century Chapa Chökyi Sengé, at the college of Sangphu, devised a way of teaching logic through short, sharp exchanges on graded topics, beginning with colours, “white and red”, and moving through definitions, causes, negations and universals. The genre is called the Collected Topics, and it is still the first book a monastic student studies. From the same college came the form of debate: a standing challenger poses a thesis with a clap of the hands, a seated defender must answer with one of a few permitted replies, “I accept”, “the reason is not established”, “there is no pervasion”, and the exchange continues until one side has nowhere to go. In the thirteenth century Sakya Pandita wrote the Treasury of Reasoning, the first great Tibetan treatise on the subject, and the curriculum has stood since: Collected Topics, then the types of mind, then the types of reasons, then Dharmakīrti in full.
What is at stake
Debate is taught in the courtyards of the great monastic colleges, Sera, Drepung and Ganden and their counterparts in exile, and since 2016 in the nunneries that award the Geshema degree. It is an oral art, transmitted by doing, and almost nobody outside those courtyards has learned it. There is no other training quite like it anywhere: a method of thinking that is rigorous, fast, public and physical, and that a child can begin at ten.
On Genla
Logic holds the Collected Topics, the types of mind, the types of reasons, the practice of debate itself, and the theory of knowledge that underlies them. The first game in this field will be the one the tradition begins with: colours.