A debate in a Gelug college has a fixed physical shape before it has any content. The challenger stands, the defender sits, and every question the challenger poses is punctuated by a clap and a stamp of the foot, a gesture Georges Dreyfus, who trained for fifteen years inside the system before writing about it as a scholar, describes as driving the argument forward and marking the exact moment the defender must respond. The defender's replies are drawn from a narrow, fixed vocabulary, I accept, I do not accept, or the reason is not established, each of which commits the defender to a specific next move rather than to open commentary. Whole afternoons are spent this way in the courtyards of monasteries like Drepung Loseling, and the exchanges are cumulative: a defender driven into asserting two things that cannot both be true has lost the round, regardless of how learned the ideas were on their own. The most senior monks pursuing the geshe degree, the closest equivalent to a doctorate the system has, are examined this way too, defending set theses against the whole assembly rather than submitting a written dissertation to a small committee. The most consequential debates historically took place not in a monastery's own courtyard but in Lhasa itself, during the Great Prayer Festival founded by Tsongkhapa in 1409, where the strongest debaters from each of the three great Gelug monasteries, Drepung, Sera and Ganden, met to examine candidates for the geshe lharampa degree, the highest of several ranks, before an audience drawn from across the tradition rather than their home college alone.