Tsongkhapa’s Illumination of the Thought – his extensive commentary on Chandrakirti’s Madhyamakavatara – has an outline that has more than 20 nesting levels… To keep an overview of the structure of this text nonetheless, a visual outline can be helpful.

detail from the visual outline

overview of the complete visual outline

Download:

• complete diagram as PDF file
• complete diagram as PNG file
• complete diagram as postscript file
• complete diagram as graphviz file (this file can be nicely viewed and navigated around in with ZGRViewer)

Printable Versions (PDF format):

There are two a printable version of the diagram thatcan be glued together. Note that these will be several meters in size:

• PDF File with smaller font size (150x80cm, Some parts on the right of the diagram are empty. If you don’t want to waste paper, then it is enough to only print pages 1-5 and 9-22 (18 pages altogether))
• PDF File with larger font size (200x100cm, Some parts on the right of the diagram are empty. If you don’t want to waste paper, then it is enough to only print pages 1-7, 12-34 and 37-42 (36 pages altogether))

The PDFs are prepared in a way that it can be easily printed as separate pages and then glued together. All pages have markers that make it easy to cut them correctly. There is a bit of overlap (i.e. each page repeats a small bit fromthe neighboring pages) so that one does not have to cut perfectly. All pages contain an indication, where they belong: “grid(1,1)” is the bottom left corner,”grid(1,2)” is the second sheet from the left on the bottom row and so forth. “Grid(2,1)” is the left-most sheet in second row from the bottom, “grid(2,2)” the second of that row and so on.

Online version (Flash required for viewing!)

• View a zoomable version of the visual outline

Technical information

The outline was generated with custom shellscripts and some perl and most importantly graphviz. The resultant diagram was then made printable onto normal A4 pages with poster.