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

[curt]

Until westerners entered the fray, Buddhist scholarship has
historically been based on the practice of memorizing texts word
for word in their entirety. This was also part of the western
intellectual tradition up through at least the Renaissance - I'm
not sure when it became unfashionable. To memorize a text
would strike many people as being completely different from
what Richard (Nance) is here describing - the slow process of
actually understanding the text. But memorization could be a
great aid to this understanding - because it allows one to literally
"hold" the entire text in one's mind - and to go back and forth
from one part of it to another to another at will - at the speed of
thought. Or so it seems to me - I've never memorized a whole
book - I couldn't even memorize "The Raven" in fifth grade,
although I tried for about a week. Like most westerners I have
held "mere" memorization in low regard until recently. I started
changing my mind when I started reading "The Art of Memory"
by Frances Yates - I was struck by the fact that I had never heard
of "The Art of Memory", and that this was part of the western
intellectual tradition that has been completely lost. I never finished
the book, btw - its quite dense, at least for me. But its still on my
"to read" list.
- Curt

Richard Nance wrote:

>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.
>
>While I was at the University of Chicago, I participated for several
>years in a Wittgenstein reading group. It was started by Leonard
>Linsky; by the time I graduated, James Conant had come on board as
>well. In one of its early incarnations, the group met once a week, on
>Friday afternoons, for three hours. Our task was to read the
>*Philosophical Investigations*, taking the time to really work through
>what it was saying. After a year, we had completed the first ten pages
>of the book, and I had learned a great deal about what it takes to
>read philosophy. That's the most extreme case I know, but examples
>could be multiplied. A course on Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*
>covered approximately 100 pages; a course devoted Heidegger's *Being
>and Time* covered less than half the book; a course called "Readings
>in Yogaacaara Buddhism" covered the equivalent of perhaps fifteen
>pages of Sanskrit (and we were relying on translations). Each of these
>courses lasted ten weeks; each was paced very well.
>
>There's something to be said for reading widely and voraciously, and
>something else to be said for reading extremely carefully. It's my
>impression that in general, the latter is--and has historically
>been--privileged over the former within Buddhist tradition (though the
>former isn't entirely dispensed with). In the course of your reading,
>you might want to have a look at Georges Dreyfus' "The Sound of Two
>Hands Clapping," and Paul Griffiths' "Religious Reading" -- both offer
>a wealth of information on this topic.
>
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