Reading Texts - Outlines, Part 1

When you start reading especially commentaries, you need to learn how the text is using outlines. Of some interesting reason the Tibetan lamas just loved outlines. They could sometimes be very, very, very nested. If you looked at examples in any translated book, sometimes they list the outlines, it's very intriguing. It's also sometimes just plain tough to make any translated headlines correspond too the outline, as some outlined level only has one sentence, for example.

Anyway, to start with it's easy to find the top level outlines, they are based on the numbering system. You should see a specific section telling what the level is, such as:

,gsum po, -- thirdly

Here's the list of 1 to 10:

dang po - first
gnyis po - 2nd
gsum po - 3rd
bzhi po - 4th
lnga po - 5th
drug po - 6th
bdun po - 7th
brgyad po - 8th
dgu po - 9th
bcu po - 10th

This is the top line of an outline, later we will look how to find the minor outlines in the text.