The importance of forgetting
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
It seems to me that the right way to read religious writings — Dhamma talks, discourses, books and so on — is to let them sink in, to absorb them and then to forget them almost immediately. In this way one learns the essence, one is changed by what one reads, without memorising, or calling to mind the specific words and trying to live by them.
It makes no sense to try and live by another’s exact words, you cannot imitate him or be him come again. Instead, be the unique expression of the universe you were meant to be. But you cannot stop changing or evolving, as long as you are alive change will be there. So it is with letting those changes teach you, alter you, shape you.
So learning means to absorb, which means to read slowly, deliberately, to let realisations which come from the words of a text arise and be considered. It is often good to pause and contemplate for a few seconds. But when you’re done, discard the words and carry on.
Memorising is a form of clinging. It is better to let the words go, and just let their essence stay with you, even if it means occasionally returning to texts you had read before, in order to see if a new appreciation arises. Even with quotes, which are meant to be memorable, it is good to just let them be and forget them for a while… if they are truly worth remembering they will stay with you. So I thought I would close this with a quote 
“The man of knowledge learns something new every day. The man of Tao forgets something every day.”
— Lao Tse
Comments
3 Perhaps.
Perhaps a practice heading towards suffering's cessation is not so much about learning or forgetting as it is about no longer feeding those impulses that habitually pattern knowledge into more fodder for our ego dream-making machinery.
Perhaps as long as one relates to knowledge as a potential self-related acquisition, that specific knowledge is likely to be as limited as it is intrinsically corrupted.
Perhaps, to the degree that an absence of attachment to knowledge is developed, a limitless gnosis arises wherever the self was formally obscuring it.
In philosophical terms there are a few types of knowledge, I can't remember the list. For this purpose though the two important types are a sort of explicit knowledge and a tacit or procedural knowledge. Explicit is the intellectual sort that one can memorize and recite back, procedural is more innate or experiential. Kind like the difference in knowledge of everyone who knows in their head that one day they will die and the type of knowledge about that someone gains who faces a life threatening accident or injury.
In the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism they're pretty scholarly and they do a practice called analytical meditation. Its something similar to metta type meditations where one contemplates certain aspects of the teachings such as impermanence or emptiness until some sort of related feeling state arises, like in metta where one says phrases and often an actual feeling of love will arise. At that point one stops the analytical aspect and concentrates on the arisen feeling until it dissipates, then returns to analysis, rinse and repeat.
Repeated absorption of this sort helps transform intellectual knowledge into a more embodied procedural knowing. Sort of like Mattieu Ricard says about meditation is like letting the water soak into the ground rather than dumping over the plant we just watered when certain realizations arise.
Maybe another way to think of it is like learning a new skill. First one has to go through a phase of a rote sort of learning, learning notes and scales, the tempo of a song. Then once that is learned the structure and detail is kind of forgotten in favor of a more spontaneous and expressive form of skill.
Perhaps intentionally trying to forget is a good thing when listening/reading about the Dharma...
As the saying goes.....What we resist persists ...
When listening to Dharma talks or reading Dharma books, at times I've been fortunate enough (karmically inclined) to have a "aha" moment which goes beyond thinking about what is heard or read, a flash of insight which leads to a deeper lasting experiential understanding/knowing...Where the mind acknowledges (in a sense the essence/a truth which had become obscured by accumulated mind junk AKA conditioning) and moves forward/on with knowledge mentally secured and at the ready so to speak....
Interesting. VERY interesting.
I suppose then, if memorization is clinging, then any sort of regular, repetitive practice would be clinging as well. Then you add in the Buddhist tradition of not finding an essence. .......
Do terms such as "Exercise In Futility" come to mind? Big headache? Yeah. Pretty much.
Fortunately (for me, anyway), and at the end of the day, so to speak, I don't believe that memorization = clinging.
The myriad of Enumerations employed in the teaching of the Dharma, tends to contradict the assertion that memorization = clinging. The Enumerations are meant to be an aid in remembering important bundles of teaching, such as the Four Truths Of the Noble Ones, the Eightfold Path of the Noble Ones, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Five Skandhas, etc. IOW, memorization.
I don’t see how that follows? Much of life is repetitive, one can’t avoid it. Chop wood, carry water from the well…
Which makes perfect sense in an environment of oral transmission, where the Dhamma had to be memorised. But we have long since left that behind.
OK! If you don't see my point, then I guess you don't see it. My bad, perhaps. It's early, and I'm still working on my first cuppa. Not quite yet the brilliant, towering intellect, I usually demonstrate. LOLz
Hoho I once aspired to being brilliant, but I had to give it up. I’m now aspiring to just Being. And anything I write here should be taken with a helping of salt. If it resonates, great, if it doesn’t, in the bin it goes. I’m a great believer in nonseriousness.
Enjoy your morning coffee, or tea…
Then memorization can be seen as practice. Take the 100 Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra as an example. This is memorized for purposes of practice. It's important in performing sadhanas, and yogas related to Vajrasattva. It's especially important to the practice of Ngondro, where the mantra is recited 111,111 times. Many practitioners memorize things like lineage supplications, and merit dedications. Many memorize the Heart Sutra.
So you could say, other people can give you these memorisation and repetition practices. A hundred thousand of this, a hundred thousand of that. But I don’t see how this helps?
At most you could say this dulls the mind, makes the intelligence less sharp, maybe hypnotises you. You even need prayer beads to count them. Does it bring you closer to enlightenment, awakening, whatever you choose to call it, though? It’s not a practice I would choose to do.
“The Wand chooses the Wizard” - Garrick Ollivander
In other muggle words, the experience dictates the practice. One example, Ngondro.
It is a magick wand that creates devotion to the 4 jewels (the usual 3) + the Guru/Lama/Rinpoche/Vajrayana Empowerment AND creates a resonance, preparation, healing of mind and body. It is an ascetic practice, goal orientated, inevitably trance inducing for some at times. Does it work?
Sure!
Good in the muggle beginning, good in the middle, good in the end.
‘You're a Buddhist 'arry’ - Bodhisattva Hagrid
In your particular case, it probably wouldn't help. Ngondro isn't for everyone. Those teachers who work with Vajrayana students, can be pretty selective about who is allowed to undertake the practice, and it's a prereq to Vajra practice. If you don't see the benefit of such practice, and there's nothing with that, chances are you wouldn't have your teacher's approval anyway.
Nope. If done correctly, none of that happens.
Any counting device will suffice.
Sure, but the real goal in Vajrayana is Buddhahood.
OK.
Choosing to work with a certain teacher is very much a process of careful selection in my opinion. In olden times it was traditional for prospective students to come before a master and ask their question, and according to the answer ask to become a disciple or not.
When you say “the real goal in Vajrayana is Buddhahood” what do you understand by that? To follow in the footsteps of the Buddha seems to me an impossibility — the Buddha was a unique individual, with great talents as a meditator and a teacher. Most people’s talents are much more limited…
That the goal of Vajrayana is you become a Buddha. Not just enlightened. Not just a Bodhisattva. A Buddha. A turn-the-wheel-of-Dharma kind of thing.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
— Oscar Wilde
To be a Buddha… I remember Osho would sit in his lecture hall and talk to the assembled crowd of ten thousand buddhas. If you really look at who the Buddha was, he was a man of his time and place, and to give his wheel of the dharma another turn seems a nigh-impossible task. But I wish you the best of luck.
I'm not talking about "the" Buddha, though. I'm talking about "a" Buddha. The next Buddha will not turn the previous Buddha's Wheel. By that time, Shakyamuni Buddha's Dharma will be completely forgotten and a new turning will take place. It won't be that Buddha's own wheel any more than the one turned by Shakyamuni was his.