What it is
The third lesser field is metrics, chandas: the science of putting syllables in order. Every prayer, every song, every classical treatise in Tibetan is in verse, and verse is a matter of counting. A reader who can hear the metre reads faster, remembers more, and sees the shape of an argument before understanding a word of it.
Where it comes from
The Indian source is Ratnākaraśānti’s Mine of Jewels of Prosody, an eleventh-century treatise that catalogues the Sanskrit metres by their patterns of light and heavy syllables, and which was translated into Tibetan and studied by anyone learning to compose in the ornate style.
Tibetan verse itself works differently. The language does not weigh its syllables; it counts them. The tsheg, the dot that separates one syllable from the next, makes every syllable visible on the page, and a line is defined by how many it holds. Lines of seven and nine syllables are the common forms, read in pairs with a final foot of three, and lines of eleven, thirteen and fifteen appear in the learned register. Because the count is exact, a verse can be recognised by eye, and because the rhythm is regular, it can be memorised by the thousand, which is how the canon was carried before it was printed.
What is at stake
Metre is invisible to a reader who was never shown it, and a generation that reads Tibetan only in prose does not hear it. Without it, the literature reads as a wall of syllables; with it, every text opens into lines.
On Genla
Prosody holds syllables and metre, the verse forms, the Sanskrit metres in Tibetan, and a metre checker that shows a line’s structure.