Reading the Pramāṇavārttika
Every Geluk monk who finishes Collected Topics walks straight into the same enormous text: Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika (《釋量論》), the great Indian treatise on what counts as valid knowledge. This course reads it the way The Buddha's Own Words reads the suttas — lecture notes, primary argument, discussion, assignment — rather than as a debate game. The four moves from Collected Topics don't disappear; they show up occasionally as a tool for testing an argument, the way a wrench shows up when you actually need to turn a bolt.
We start where the text itself starts: not with logic puzzles, but with a question every serious skeptic asks first. Why should anyone believe what the Buddha said about liberation, karma, or the nature of mind? Dharmakīrti's opening chapter — traditionally called Pramāṇasiddhi, "Establishing [the Buddha as] a Valid Authority" — is his answer, and it is far more careful and far less faith-based than most people, believers and skeptics alike, expect.
A note on the text: this is Luke Lin's original English exposition of Dharmakīrti's argument, not a verse-by-verse translation of the Pramāṇavārttika — no complete public-domain English translation of the text exists to build on, so each session is written from scratch based on the standard scholarly understanding of the chapter's structure and reasoning.
- Explain Dharmakīrti's core move: a teacher doesn't need to know everything to be worth trusting — they need to be reliable on the thing that actually matters.
- Walk through the four qualifications Dharmakīrti attributes to the Buddha, and explain why each one is doing real argumentative work, not just decoration.
- Defend this argument against its most obvious objection — and recognize where it genuinely has limits.
- Follow the text through its treatment of perception, inference-for-oneself, and inference-for-others — deepening everything Collected Topics introduced, and closing the loop from private reasoning to a proof someone else can actually check.
Same five-part rhythm as The Buddha's Own Words.
All five sessions are live — this pilot covers the traditional four-chapter foundation of the text in full: establishing the teacher's authority, perception, inference-for-oneself, and inference-for-others.
- Collected Topics, or comparable comfort with the four debate moves. This course leans on that vocabulary without re-teaching it.
- Nothing to buy. Every session is free and self-contained on this page.
- Patience with dense argument. This text is harder than Collected Topics on purpose — that's the whole point of graduating into it.