Curriculum

The Milinda curriculum is based on the Tibetan Buddhist shedra tradition, which is mainly based on the Nalanda tradition from India. The curriculum offers contemporary teachers a good foundation in classical Buddhist teachings and helps them translate these concepts for a modern audience in an authentic way.

The curriculum is a work in progress. It is being developed by the current participants, in dialogue with our teachers and advisors, under the overall guidance of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.

The Sutrayana elements of the curriculum cover five main areas: Abhidharma, Pramana, Prajnaparamita, Madhyamaka, and the Three Vows.

The Sarvastivada Abhidarma systematizes the teachings of a vast collection of sutras and offers a basic dharma vocabulary and an overview of the foundational teachings. The influential treatise Abhidharmakosha teaches the dharmas that produce bondage in samsara and the dharmas that should be cultivated to attain liberation.

Pramana offers tools to engage rationally with the Dharma: showing how to analyze logically and assess the validity of the two means of knowing—perception and inference. Pramana was developed in dialogue between Buddhist and other Indian schools, which offers an example of how to critically engage with contemporary schools of thought.

In the Abhisamayalankara, the Bodhisattva Maitreya presents the Prajnaparamita teachings as an overview of the path of the bodhisattva, and describes the stages of insight that lead to complete enlightenment. 

Madhyamaka presents the Prajnaparamita teachings from the perspective of the object to be realized: emptiness free from all conceptual elaborations. It shows the illusory character of all phenomena, and the futility of all attempts to create a final view of reality. These teachings guide practitioners to direct non-conceptual realization through study, reflection, and meditation.

The Three Vows is a Tibetan systematization of the Sutra and Tantra teachings that give clear guidance about how to put the dharma into practice. It offers an integrated view of the levels of discipline that anyone aspiring to practice the Vajrayana should engage in: the pratimoksha vows, bodhisattva vows, and tantric vows.

After cultivating these five main topics of Sutrayana, participants will engage with the Buddha Nature teachings in the Uttaratantrashastra as a bridge to Vajrayana, which will be the topic of the last years of the program.