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

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2005-08-09 at 15:57 -0400, curt wrote:

> 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.

After the Second World War. Several years ago I read a book on the
dumbing down of American culture. (Being a modern idiot, I can't even
remember its damn title, but I think it was High Brow Meets Low Brow.)
This book claimed that throughout the 19th century just about every
American alive could recite most of the Bible and most of the plays of
Shakespeare. It was the dread of every actor to forget a line in some
small town in Idaho, only to have every miner and lumberjack in the
audience boisterously supply the missing lines. The point of the book
was that Shakespeare was so commonly known that there was nothing
special in knowing him, but in the 20th century even a passing
acquaintance with Shakespeare became the mark of an educated "high-brow"
person. 

Both of my grandfathers, born in the 1880s, could recite volumes of
poetry, and the speeches of famous men, and bits of Americana such as
the Declaration of Independence and most of the Constitution, until
someone begged them to stop. By the time I was in grade school (the
1950s), the art of memorization was rapidly fading. Like most kids, I
hated memorizing things, but now I'm glad I had to do at least some of
it and wish I had had to do a lot more.

> 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. 

Yes, I think this is an excellent observation. A friend of mine from
India says that no one can claim to know what a text means until she had
memorized it and replayed the memory hundreds of times.

> 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.

I memorized the better part of an entire telephone number a few years
ago. The effort was so intense it nearly led to hospitalization. These
damn computers we're all using now have done to our minds what driving
cars has done to our legs. We have become a culture of intellectual
cockroaches and physical jellyfish.

Incidentally, another really backwards notion that we moderns have is
that only retarded people move their lips when they read. In fact,
reading aloud is an excellent practice. It forces one to interpret as
one goes and helps one retain a text. I read aloud so much (or at least
whisper as I read) that the sight of someone reading silently looks very
odd to me. It always seems as though they're not really paying attention
to what they're doing.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes