[Buddha-l] Re: Facts, Values, and a book a year... [was Hindu Fundamentalism]

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 09:59 -0400, Richard Nance wrote:

> Good lord, Richard, you sound like Ayer!

What a terrible thing to say about Ayer! To give credit where credit is
due, however, I got my inspiration more from Charles Peirce, William
James, Karl Popper and Richard Rorty than from A.J Ayer.

> I think that what Richard means here, Stormy, is not that you
> shouldn't spend your days reading, but that you should take the time
> to think seriously and carefully about the implications of what you
> have read. That's almost impossible to do when one is aiming for
> quantity, and finishing things as quickly as possible.

Good commentary. When I was in training to be a dharma teacher (whatever
the hell THAT is), my former Zen master used to tell us to read no more
than one page a day and then to spend all day reflecting on that page.
When we became more advanced in this training, he raised his standards
to reading no more than one page a week. Quite seriously, I think this
was perhaps the most valuable practical thing I ever learned about how
to read something that is worth reading. It had a big impact on the way
I teach. While my colleagues tend to sign hundreds of pages of reading
every week, I rarely assign more than ten to twenty pages a week. But I
expect my students to have given a lot of thought to the pages they have
read. 

Of course, the acme of reading carefully for me is reading Sanskrit. At
University of Toronto there were two kinds of professor teaching
Sanskrit. One kind (exemplified by Jeff Masson and Tony Warder) urged us
to read dozens or even hundreds of pages a day, as they did. These
fellows were good at giving big overviews, but their work was incredibly
sloppy and inaccurate at the level of detail. Others (such as
Venkatacharya, Kobayashi and Katsura) might spend an entire year on five
or six pages and looking at every phrase in microscopic detail.

Some years ago I was attending a conference on biblical interpretation,
and one of the panelists quoted an old rabbinical dictum that scripture
should be read word by word rather than scroll by scroll.

> There's something to be said for reading widely and voraciously

There's a Jain saying "One cannot understand anything until one
understands everything, and one cannot understand everything until one
understands every thing." What this means to me is that one has to
converge on knowledge by flipping back and forth between paying enormous
attention to detail on a small number of things, and reading a lot of
background stuff pretty superficially. Although I believe that, I don't
practice it very well. In practice I tend to spend almost all my waking
hours doing very detailed work on things that maybe five people in the
world are interested in. While Wilber works on the Theory of Everything,
I work on an approximation of how Dharmakirti uses the word "svabhaava"
in the first ten pages of chapter one of the Pramaa.na-vaarttika-
svav.rtti.

-- 
Richard Hayes