The Missing Ingredient

 

04.14.2023 THE MISSING INGREDIENT How much time do you spend studying Buddhist teachings? If you’re like me, it’s probably not as much as you’d like. Some teachers tell their students to re-read a book 108 times. Others suggest that you read a book at a rate of one-paragraph-per-day. Some teachers or traditions might recommend a list of books as long as your arm, which might pile up half-read on your bedside table if you’re not careful. Meanwhile, many teachers also caution against speeding through dharma books too quickly. How do you manage it? How do you even get started? Without some guidance, we can easily let study fall by the wayside; it can become our missing ingredient. Study is essential to Buddhist practice. Here are three particularly helpful resources I came across in our archives. I hope they help you on your journey, too. —Ross Nervig, Associate Editor, Lion’s Roar

How to Read Buddhist Teachings No matter where you begin, says Judy Lief, or whether you are an independent practitioner or affiliated with a particular tradition, all you have to do is to dive in. Some people love to practice and hate to study, and other people love to study and hate to practice. Which type of person are you? If studying comes easy for you, it is possible to confuse intellectual understanding with real understanding. If studying is more difficult for you and practice is easier, it is possible to hide out in a vague understanding of meditative experience and fail to challenge yourself intellectually or to develop a sophisticated understanding of the dharma. So before you launch into further study, study yourself.

Ask the Teachers: How Should I Balance Practice and Study? Narayan Helen Liebenson, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and the late Zenkei Blanche Hartman offer their wisdom on how to find the balance between meditation and reading. Geshe Tenzin Wangyal: Whatever meditation practice you commit to, your study should support that, so that in your practice you know what you are doing and you have a reference for your experiences. Your study guides your practice, and your practice validates your study. If you are practicing and don’t know where to refer your experiences, you can create unnecessary doubt. And studying without taking your reflections to your meditation cushion and allowing them to ripen as direct experience also sows seeds of doubt.

How Does Buddhism Speak to Us Today: An Interview with Stephen Batchelor Stephen Batchelor talks to Koun Franz about the importance of study in Buddhist practice and the relevance of the Buddha’s teachings to modern life. Stephen Batchelor: Study, for me, has always been an integral part of my practice. I find it hard to understand how someone could somehow dismiss it as irrelevant or missing the point. I hear people say things like, you know, “I don’t need to study, I want to practice.” The best response I’ve heard to that was when I was training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, 30 or 40 years ago. We were doing a course, which was extremely dry, on Buddhist logic and syllogisms with an old Mongolian Lama called Geshe Ngawang Nyima. And one of the students at the end of the class said, “Why do we have to do all this study? Why can’t we do more practice?” And he said, “If you really knew how to study, you would be practicing.” That, to me, has always been my point of reference with regard to this question. Study — developing and refining one’s critical faculty of reason — is an integral part for me of what it means to arrive at a fully rounded comprehension of a particular theme or topic or insight of the dharma.

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