The principal educational tool used in all three of these great monastic universities was the technique of ‘Tsen-nyi’ or reflective enquiry, a highly disciplined form of debate applied for the purpose of penetrating into the deeper meanings of the subjects under study. Students would generally have two or three classes each day, and for many hours during the evening and following morning would debate the material that had been covered in order to analyze and experiment with it. Each month would see the “Night-Long Debate”, in which each class would get to demonstrate its talents and progress in front of the entire assembly; and each winter would witness the six-week Inter-monastery debate meet, in which the three universities would train and debate together, thus standardizing their programs.