Collected Topics
For six hundred years, Tibetan monasteries have opened a monk's philosophical training with something almost comically ordinary: colors and shapes. Before a student is trusted to reason about the mind, karma, or emptiness, they first have to prove — out loud, in front of peers who will happily catch them in a mistake — that they can tell the difference between a claim that's false and a claim that's true but doesn't prove what it's being used to prove.
That training system is called bsdus grwa — "Collected Topics," 攝類學 in Chinese. It's the doorway every Geluk monk walks through before they're ready for Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika (《釋量論》), the great treatise on valid reasoning. This course borrows that doorway for a different audience: English speakers with zero background in Buddhist philosophy, who want to build the same habit of rigorous thinking the monks build — minus the years of monastic Tibetan first.
A note on the text: this is not a translation of any single existing book. It's Luke Lin's original English adaptation of the traditional Collected Topics curriculum (in the lineage of Purbuchok Jampa Gyatso's textbook, as studied at Sera Je), rewritten from the ground up for readers meeting this material for the first time.
- Use the fixed reply vocabulary of Tibetan debate — "So...", "That's not true", "That doesn't prove it", "Yes, I agree" — to test any claim, not just a Buddhist one.
- Tell the difference between a false premise and a true premise that doesn't prove its conclusion — the single most useful move in the whole system.
- Explain, in your own words, why six centuries of monks decided the first lesson in philosophy should be about colors and shapes rather than the soul or the self.
- Work up through one and many, what a definition actually consists of, cause and effect, and negation — arriving, by Session 6, at the threshold of the Pramāṇavārttika itself.
Every session follows the same five-part rhythm.
Traditional sequence: concrete objects → logical relations → definitions → cause & effect → negation → kinds of mind. All six sessions are live — this pilot is complete and being refined with real students as it's used.
- Nothing to buy. Every session is free and self-contained on this page.
- No prior Buddhist studies. The whole point of Collected Topics is that it starts from zero.
- A willingness to be wrong out loud. Debate training only works if you commit to an answer before you know if it's right.