My stated goal for maintaining this website “is to help remember the goals and the causes made and lessons learned.”  My memory has never been good. In college I needed to transcribe my notes soon after a class in order to create study material needed to pass my tests. At 74 my memory is basically shot. Why did I enter this room?

I was amused in reading in Chinese Master Hsuan Hua’s commentary on the Lotus Sutra his explanation of how he studied as a new monk. He had a natural talent and because it was so effortless he was puzzled at why others struggled.

During the first summer session, I said to one of my disciples, “We meditate and we study.” In most monasteries, they either focus on meditation and don’t study sūtras or focus on studying sūtras and don’t meditate. In other monasteries, cultivators meditate in the winter and study sūtras in the summer. They lecture on the sūtras in the summer, but only for two hours a day. The remaining hours are often wasted. Those who are self-motivated may learn some Dharma on their own. Those who aren’t go to sleep after the sūtra lecture, or they run off to enjoy the scenery of the mountains and rivers. This reminds me of myself. …

Whenever any Dharma master lectured on the sūtras, I came to listen. When the lecture was over, I ran off to the mountains to enjoy the scenery: the water, hills, flowers, and trees. I had a lot of fun. My fellow students watched me pretty closely. I never said a word all day long, so nobody knew what I was up to. When the time came for the daily review, most of the students read from their notes. I recited the whole thing from memory. I repeated everything the Dharma master had said without missing or adding a single word. If I’d added something, I would’ve added my own opinion; if I’d missed something, I would’ve been forgetful. So, I didn’t add or omit a single word.

At that time there were more than thirty of us studying the sūtras. Some had studied for over ten years, some for seven or eight, and some five or six. I was in my first year – three months into my first year, to be exact. They thought my ability was very strange. They asked me, “How can you repeat the lecture word for word like that? How can you remember it so clearly?”

Can you guess what my reply was? I told them, “I’ve studied it before.” To say nothing of studying it, I hadn’t even seen the books before. I said I’d studied it because I remembered it immediately when I heard it. So I figured that I must’ve studied it somewhere before.

They said, “Oh, you studied the sūtras before?”

“Right,” I said. “I’ve been studying them for a long time.”

When I studied the Buddhadharma, I was very naughty in some respects, but I did follow the rules. I wasn’t like you; you’re very well-behaved and don’t fool around, but when you’re quizzed, you forget everything you’ve learned. For example, I expected you to be able to recite from memory for today’s visitors what I taught last Saturday, since only four days have passed. How embarrassing that nobody remembered anything! This is the opposite of my experience as a student. I didn’t pay attention to how other people learned. I thought everyone learned the same way as me, mastering the principles yet being completely unattached to them.

I said I was enjoying the scenery of the mountains and rivers, but actually I wasn’t paying attention to the scenery. Then what was I doing? I would enter the “samadhi of studying.” I was up in the mountains, looking at the mountains – but my mind wasn’t focused on the mountains, it was focused on the Buddhadharma. I was down by the water, but my mind was still studying the Buddhadharma, reflecting on what the Dharma master had said during the lecture and investigating it very thoroughly. By the time of the review session, I could perfectly articulate the material. My method of learning the Buddhadharma was very different from yours.

You Americans study the Buddhadharma American style – open-book Buddhadharma, notebook Buddhadharma. This isn’t very effective. If you can’t remember what you learn without the book, it won’t be of any use. When you study the Dharma, you should review it every night and make sure you grasp what you’ve learned during the day. That’s the right way to study the Buddhadharma.

“I don’t have the time,” you complain.

When you don’t have the time, you have to find the time to study. If you’ve got lots of time, that doesn’t count as studying the Buddhadharma.

In your busiest hours, you should pick up the Buddhadharma and then afterward put it aside. Picking it up means you remember it very clearly. Putting it aside doesn’t mean forgetting it, forgetting what you learned last month or last year. Rather, it means storing it in your tathāgatagarbha. Then when the time comes, you have direct access to what you learned. Your tathāgatagarbha can accommodate an infinite amount of knowledge, and you’ll always be able to access what’s stored there. That’s considered learning the Buddhadharma.