Joshua Hills recent posting about CD pujas inspired me to answer and I would like to offer a Venerable Gen Tharchin anecdote regarding memorization. I will use part of my answer to Joshuas posting: ...Good question you present.... 20 years ago when my first teacher, Venerable Gen Tharchin began teaching Buddhist basics in Toronto he encouraged us all to memorize everything, sadhanas, vows, outlines of books and books if possible. I never saw him teach with notes, ever. When he taught a course that he had taught previously we noticed that it was usually 2 hours of word-for-word teachings; often the jokes were predictable but we laughed just as much every time. I digress; sadhanas is what the subject is. 20 years ago Venerable Gen Tharchin strongly encouraged us to memorize our sadhanas, especially HYT (Quick Path initially); now my powers of memorization were non-existent (non-exercised) and I assumed this was way beyond me, but when I did a four month retreat at Tharpaland I decided to try and every day I added a few lines to what I knew. By the end of the retreat I was siting during the entire practice meditating, without needing a sadhana or tape or CD. Later I switched to Heruka and in retreat memorized the whole sadhana; when I left retreat and attended the summer festival I discovered that the Heruka sadhana had been partially rewritten; if you have ever had to unmemorize and then rememorize a two hour practice you will empathize with my predicament, but I did eventually accomplish this. I do occasionally listen to a cd puja and this is quite a delightful experience, partially because it is more uncommon for me. Someone told me once about a monk who was imprisoned by the Chinese for years. He was not given sadhanas (or CDs) but he did Heruka self-initiation every day because he had memorized it. Once I recently assisted Venerable Gen Tharchin in preparing for a teaching. He has perhaps a dozen binders full of course outlines (skeletons) which he modifies and rememorizes for teachings. One day a page of the outline was missing; we looked for it for hours and then he asked me to take out a piece of paper and he began dictating the missing page to me. Most of us use a 1000 gigabyte external hard drive for our backups, to protect against this kind of situation. Obviously Venerable Gen Tharchins backup for his fallible conventional reality storage systems is/was his mind. :) What a teaching!
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 08:16:47 +0000
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