Der werte Maik, der im Wat Sacca hilft und sich um Ajahn Piyadhammo kümmert, hat mir Infos zum "M-Program", dem Suttenstudien-Programm des ehrwürdigen Piyadhammo zukommen lassen.
Das Studienprogramm besteht aus drei Runden, wobei in jeder Runde die Majjhima Nikaya vollständig von vorn bis hinten gelesen wird. Es ist als sehr intensiver Kurs konzipiert, um ein gutes Textverständnis und gute Kenntnis der Zusammenhänge zu entwickeln, wobei an verschiedenen Punkten, besonders während der gesamten dritten Runde, Rückmeldung und Austausch mit dem Lehrer (Ajahn Piyadhammo) von entscheidender Wichtigkeit ist. Dabei wird sehr auf individuelle Entwicklung des Verständnisses der einzelnen Person der Schwerpunkt gelegt. Es ist also, wie ich es verstehe, eigentlich weniger ein Gruppenprogramm, und daher im Ganzen wohl doch weniger geeignet, um hier allgemeines Feedback nach außen zu erzeugen. Aber ich bin mir nicht ganz sicher.
Wie auch immer, klingt das Konzept sehr tief durchdacht und mit sehr viel Hingabe von Seiten des ehrw. Piyadhammo, seinen Schülern klares Verständnis und Eigenständigkeit im Umgang mit den Texten zu vermitteln und dabei ihre individuelle Entwicklung sorgsam zu betreuen.
Für ein "Massenlernprogramm" ist es also sicher nicht ausgelegt. Aber für Interessierte besteht hier bestimmt die Möglichkeit, sehr viel und tiefgründig zu lernen und eine Beziehung zu den Texten aufzubauen, die von langem Nutzen sein kann und der fragmentarischen Informationseinverleibung und gedanklichen Zersplitterung vorbeugt und entgegenwirkt. Man lernt, die Dinge einzuordnen, und sich daran zu erinnern, baut langsam und systematisch eine Beziehung zu den Geschehnissen wie auch Inhalten der Lehre auf, so dass man immer wieder darauf zugreifen kann.
Der Aufbau ist so, dass man im ersten Durchgang das gesamte Majjhima Nikaya schnell durchliest, wobei man einen groben Eindruck und Gesamtbild gewinnen soll und auch schon einmal zu allem einen Kontext gewinnt, dadurch dass man alles liest. Dabei geht man noch nicht zu sehr auf einzelne Dinge ein, sondern soll es ähnlich erleben, wie vielleicht jemand, der mal zur Zeit des Buddha mit ins Kloster genommen wird, und dann nach und nach so langsam einen Eindruck gewinnt und im Hintergrund ohne zuhört.
In der zweiten Runde markiert man Textstellen als wichtig oder unwichtig empfunden, persönlich wichtig und ansprechend, oder theoretisch als wichtig gedacht. Gleichzeitig ordnet man die Lehrreden der persönlichen Wichtigkeit oder Empfindung nach Stück für Stück in eine persönliche Rangfolge: erst die ersten zehn Sutten, dann die zweiten zehn Sutten, dann ordnet man diese Listen zusammen an, und so weiter, Schritt für Schritt, bis man zum Ende alle der Reihe nach eigenem Gefühl der Wichtigkeit nach angeordnet hat. Dabei erinnert man sich immer wieder an die vorangegangenen Lehren und lernt langsam immer mehr, Bezüge zu knüpfen.
In der dritten Runde kommt dann die genaueste Auseinandersetzung, wo man langsam und sorgfältig jede einzelne Lehrrede nacheinander liest, und man erhält nach jeder Lesung Fragen von Ajahn Piyadhammo zu beantworten, die den Inhalt genau ergründen. Dabei wird insbesondere sehr viel Wert auf das gegenwärtige Verständnis gelegt, über das der Lehrer nach und nach im Austausch ein Bild gewonnen hat, und er versucht, es weiter auszubauen und nach individueller Neigung und Fähigkeit passend zu fördern.
So in etwa mein Eindruck aus der Beschreibung, wie sie hier in diesem Talk auf Englisch zu hören ist:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1xdp9fi4l2j0s4y/MProgram.mp3In der Anlage ist auch noch eine Audio-Datei auf Deutsch, bezogen nur auf die erste Runde.
Ich habe die englische Rede auch als Text abgetippt, was vielleicht für den einen oder anderen leichter aufzunehmen ist, der sich dafür interessiert.
Ich danke dem ehrwürdigen Piyadhammo und Maik für diese Informationen zur Weitergabe, die sicher einen guten Einblick geben in ein sehr durchdacht entwickeltes Programm, das vielleicht noch manch einem von gutem Nutzen und Interesse sein kann, solange die Möglichkeit besteht, und der die Zeit aufbringen kann, sich darin mit Interesse und genug Geduld zu investieren:
* Moritz möchte noch anmerken, dass die Angabe mit den drei Jahren wohl glaube ich ein Fehler von mir war. Es sind drei Runden. So war das wohl in meinem Kopf entstanden. Wie die Dauer insgesamt ausgelegt ist, kann ich nicht sagen. Im ersten Schnelldurchgang war im deutschen Talk von 10 Sutten am Tag die Rede. Danach wird es dann langsamer mit genauerer Beschäftigung, bis zu einem Tag pro Sutta im dritten Durchgang. So ist es also dennoch ein sehr intensiver Kurs, der ausgiebige individuelle Betreuung und entsprechendes Engagement erfordert, und sicher sehr viel Hingabe von Seiten des Lehrers. Zu den Bedenken wegen Online-Teilnahme muss ich noch sagen, dass das keine generelle Ablehnung war, sondern nur begründete Bedenken aus Erfahrung. Und sicher ist es nicht leicht, aus der Ferne jemanden so intensiv zu betreuen.
M Program
The study program that I'm doing with some people is designed to give the student some independence to navigate within the suttas, so to make reading, working with them, more enjoyable and to get them a way of finding things out for themselves, and that in turn is meant to give them the ability to ask better questions, and to use teachers much better to their advantage, and to feel at home in an environment, in a community of people who are interested in and dedicated to the suttas. So the body of texts selected to facilitate this is the Majjhima Nikaya because of its representativeness, and the idea to study a whole Nikaya rather than an isolated sutta or a theme or a selection or anthology of suttas is to give the student an idea of what the breadth and range of the Buddha's teaching was. So the problem that we have sometimes in teachers teaching selected teachings that they feel are particularly important or particularly meaningful to them. The teachers may know how much other material is out there, and the context in which the teachings occur. But for the student the impression is that there are only those teachings, or they do not learn them in the context.
So with the M program we encourage them to, in the first, - it's three rounds going through the whole Majjhima Nikaya, and in each of the three phases there is a different emphasis, - so in the first round we want them to just get a setting, a feel for the setting, and a sense of the tone and the things that are important, that come up a lot. Who are the players, who are the kind of people that came to the Buddha. Basically emulating the experience that somebody would have at the time of the Buddha who would be living in Savatthi or Rajgir and would be taken by somebody to the monastery. At first one stays a little bit in the back and listens and looks and sees how the people behave, and what are they interested in, and what do they emphasize, and how do they communicate with each other, what is the format of their exchange? So that's all we want in that first stage: an overview and a feeling for the themes, and a feeling for the atmosphere.
At that point we don't want them to take notes, to write down questions, to ask questions. If they do come up and they are important, one can customize to that, but that's customization, another thing. The idea: They can skim or speedread through, not skip suttas, but read very quickly through the text, and if something catches their attention, they may linger or..., but it's not meant to find out much about content. So that can happen quite quickly, depending on the reading speed of the student.
The second round is already a whole lot more demanding. The idea is that in a lot of reading the mind becomes somewhat complacent in its reading, so when one reads the suttas one has a feeling that one knows this already, or that it's not important, or one has some sort of loose commitment to it, but essentially there is not enough bite to a lot of reading, so that people cannot remember very well the details of this, they've heard this in the teachings, but they cannot recollect the teachings well enough to make an argument, to make a discussion, to formulate a question or a position with that. So the second round is about a way to enhance the quality of the reading. It's very little about the type to evaluate the judgement of the students, but it's meant to force the student to reflect: what does every single passage in every single sutta mean to him or her. And it's based on the first round where the student already has an impression what it's roughly about and how often things occur and how interesting or difficult or also boring some suttas are. So in the second round we want them for every paragraph to make a little note in the margin, how relevant it is in the system. And we use an M program that could be modified, if somebody felt like that, as a PR system, where P means personally relevant. (could be modified, if somebody felt like that? Bedeutet das, diese P- und R-Markierungen sind nur eine optionale Modifikation? Oder ist das der Standard und könnte modifiziert werden? This is something that one feels is important, and there's an emotional relation to that, it's inspiring or could be a little bit frightening, but it is something that emotionally engages the reader, so where he feels personally addressed. So P1 as a very powerful statement that one powerfully relates to. P2 a little bit lesser, so perhaps some little thing that one finds kind of curious or interesting, interesting curiosity for a particular kind of discussion. R means relevant. That means something in this group, things that are important. One feels that: I should note this. But they do not actually grab the emotional side so much. So that could be, like, the definition of citta in the Satipatthana sutta, or the way the earth element is defined, maybe the student may feel that this is important, or the sequence of paticca-samuppada, but there may be no emotional inspired sense of: I want to develop this. It's more that there is a sense that: If I want to understand Buddhism, if I want to understand the suttas I should know about this. So R1 is something that is very relevant, very important. R2 is something that is lesser so, more curiosity of some sort. But also, if a passage is felt to be meaningless that should be noted. So that the end result is that the student reads very intensely, because he or she has to commit to what it actually means to them. So that's very different from reading a little bit before falling asleep or reading and drifting off, or reading in any kind of casual way, although this is not meant to be right or wrong, and there is nobody who's checking this, and it can be changed later on, it's simply a way to make a statement about every single thing that occurs in the Majjhima Nikaya. Every paragraph, paragraph by paragraph: What does this mean for me? And I think that's an extremely important thing to bring to the student again and again, that this is not knowledge to learn to show off, or to belong to some sort of group or be able to talk with people. It's knowledge to transform. That's why the Buddha gave these discourses, and this exercise is meant to heighten that sense, and to heighten the intensity of the reading, one is, as it were, hanging on the lips of the Buddha.
There's a second part to this in this second round. Every vagga of usually ten suttas is meant to be put into a top ten, a kind of hit parade, as it were, of favourites system, so that if one reads the first vagga and then maybe the sutta that one likes the best is maybe the Sabbasava Sutta, so that goes to the top, number 1, maybe the Sutta that is second most popular: Akakeyya Sutta, and so forth, and it's not meant to be the deepest or the most important sutta, but it's the one that one personally relates to, so in other words, if one could memorize only one sutta, or if one were to go off to a lonely island and one could take only one sutta, then that should be number 1, if one could take two that should be number 2. The purpose, again, is to commit to, say: What does this mean? How important is this to me? Rather than finding: What are the most famous suttas, or... ? To get a personal relationship to that. And so that's, ten suttas, not so long. One can read that in one or two or three days, depending on how fast one reads, and how thorough one has been. It's again meant not to be too detailed, but one has usually an overview over what the last ten suttas were, and one can put them in a top ten quite easily. There is a more difficult thing, and this is when the second top ten has been compiled after one has read up to Majjhima number 20, then the two rows are meant to be merged. And this is an extremely useful exercise to train the ability to overview, to view suttas in a context. So in this exercise the student will find it very quickly necessary to check back: What was M7, or, what was the Satipatthana sutta really? And how much did I really like it in comparison to what is my number 5 in the third vagga, or ..., and so he didn't have to necessarily read the whole sutta, but just seeing it: Ah, okay that was that story: Hmm. How much did I like it? Well, not as much as this one.
So what the student at this point gets introduced to slowly and is an extremely important thing that we started rudimentarily in the first round is that the suttas are delivered in a context. The people who come to listen to the Buddha usually know already a little, or they know a lot, or they have preconceived ideas that are reflected in the interaction and responded to by the Buddha, and others also have similar views. And so the student learns to evaluate each sutta on its own for his own usage, but at the same time to see them in their context, see them, compare them and align them: Ah, this sutta is similar to that, or... But the important part is really the subjective relationship, that: This is somehting for me. That is where the Buddha addresses me. And sometimes I advise students to heighten that by imagining that somebody would say to them: "Okay, you have been listening to one or several of the suttas in the Majjhima Nikaya, and it made a very powerful impression on you, of course, to be in the presence of the Buddha. Now you cannot remember that, but read them and you will find them, there will be a response that 'this is extremely meaningful to me'." And I take that from things that I have actually heard people say. There, Ajahn Jagaro had been told by Dipankara that he had been the son of Visakha, and he wasn't very much into these kinds of stories. But he said that that verse in the Dhammapada where the Buddha talks to Visakha after her graddaughter has died: "From loved ones springs grief. From love springs fear" which was, then Ajahn Jagaro being Visakha's son, so that was her (?) daughter, I mean ( (?) 17:29 ... nicht sicher ganz richtig gehört. Scheint nicht viel Sinn zu geben: "her daughter" - Ajahn Jagaro's; und dann... (I mean?) ... Dipankara) Dipankara, that that verse always had very very powerful effect on him. And, so I think for many people that should be true and..., but true or not: Of course it makes it extremely intense, more intense and more real, and more alive to read these suttas. Another way to do that is for the student to think: Some of these people in there used to be very close relatives of mine. My brother, my best friend, my teacher. Who are they? Where are they? What kind of people can one really relate to and feels a kind of kinship? And all these things are meant to break through the format of the sutta that is a little bit repetitve and formalized, and structured for memorization, for it's structured for memorization rather than prose, rather than for a hundred-percent accurate representation of what the Buddha said, or was replied to, and it's also not meant to be entertaining that a novel or prose tends to be in general.
There is a third thing to this second round, which is quite demanding to do, but doesn't necessarily have to take so long, because all the things that need to be done can be done quite quickly, to say: Oh this is relevant, or this is not relevant, put them in an order, one to ten, check back where they are. It doesn't take a lot of time. But it trains the mind, and it's very, it should be a lot of fun, and it's a really intersting, playful thing to do. But there is a third thing that is very good to do at the same time, and that is to remember the names and numbers of the suttas. And so we have these quite advanced computer programs to help that. In my experience people who do not use good systems often don't know the numbers of the suttas. And some of them manage to learn some of them, but with these computer programs, Test Engine, and now the one that Chris is developing, Slipstream, even faster, I've worked with them and developed them quite a lot, looking also what is commercially available, and this is pretty much high-end. This is, I'm not aware of, there are very many programs that do similar things, but not to the same quality. So it's a very good program, and it's quick to learn. And it's tremendously useful for the student to know the number and the Pali name of a sutta and have a little image of what it's about, not know everything but just have an idea where it is, because it makes it possible to very quickly look things up, and looked-up knowledge tends to be better retained, because it answers to a vacuum, and so this kind of knowledge, the knowledge of where suttas are, where passages are, allows students a very quick random access to texts. So things can be very quickly checked, think the ten right speeches as M 122. Just by the fact that one knows it's M122 it's already very clear where it is in the book. People who remember the name of the sutta, it may still take them ten minutes to find it. People who remember the page number, that will only be good for one edition. People who know the name of the sutta, and the vagga, all that is extremely complicated. They can never compete with somebody who knows the numbers. And also it has a number of other benefits: It's very easy to write. If one has to write the whole name of the sutta and all that it's too tedious to quote a whole lot, and to ask questions a whole lot with that format. But just M15 is so quick, is almost like an icon. And there's also something else. And that is, at that point we don't want the student to know too much about the sutta, just have a little image of what it's about. Can be very fragmented, just some sort of impression. But when the student later reads or hears something about that sutta, that knowledge goes somewhere. When to the normal student that is just a piece of information thrown into an attic of stuff where there's so much stuff already. Impossible to retrieve, so they, even students who have been with Buddhism for many years, and they have been reading suttas and they like them, they often cannot make good arguments. They cannot exactly say what it says, they don't know stories, mix with and interflow with each other. They don't know: Was this in that sutta, or..., and they can't look it up, because it would take too long to do it rigorously.
If the student does that in parallel with this hit parade type thing: judging, one to ten, one to ten, merging the two, get a top twenty, while they are working themselves up to the top 152, then they can learn, they can pick that up quite playfully as they go along, because they are doing that anyway, so with a computer program, just ten minutes here and there, learn the names, because they already have to check back while they're reading it. And so that's a demanding round, but it's all worth it. The student is permanently well-oriented in working with suttas in a quality way, namely cross-referencing, looking up, always relating it to personal experience, making a personal statement: I like this, this is meaningful, this is not so meaningful or I don't understand it.
And there's also one more important thing to that: I have the student then send me their hierarchy, their charts. And from that, I, and so this is just a list, that says, M2, M5, M10, M20, M17, and because these things, I know of course which sutta they are, then I can see what kind of suttas are extremely meaningful for the student, what kind of suttas are inspiring him or her, and I can also see which suttas they don't like, and sometimes that helps to understand what it is where the student may be overlooking something. I know that he or she was interested in this or that particular kind of theme or sutta, and then a sutta that would actually tie in with that may be pretty low, and then thinking, maybe, if I were to point them out that causality, they may change their mind. The idea is very much that: This is not right or wrong or good or bad. But I sometimes want to know why they have that preference, so I quiz them quite a lot about that. And it helps me to understand, to read their mind as it were, and also to understand how I can support them. And that will become a little bit more important in a moment. So now the student already is quite involved with the, has kind of playfully grown into quite a serious work and committment, work with and commitment to the suttas.
The third round is something that many teachers in rudimentary form do first. I'm very big one for foundations and testing foundations and so forth. This is a mastery learning concept in education that increases the yields, increases the returns for time invested, in spectacular ways, it's almost, so a student with mastery learning tends to in the sigma-2 problem: how can one emulate two third instruction in mastery learning. The student who gets mastery learning, very strong foundation, they tend to score in the, I think it's in the eightieth, it's maybe even eightynine, eighty-five, eighty-nine percent tier of students that are not, who receive normal classroom instruction. (?)
So in this third round, what I do is: I send the student six questions for each sutta. And there are reads the sutta is only one a day. Now, cause it's getting slower, it's getting more demanding, and reads the sutta, M 1, start with the beginning, and then gets by e-mail, or in any other way, six questions to answer. And these questions are fairly demanding. And they are designed as a review, but also to heighten the student's reading ability, and to school the student's reading ability again, to heighten it, because they know they are going to be tested, and they are going to be sending the result to somebody to have a look at. And to school it is, the things that are asked in these questions are never trick questions or things like: What's the name of the person who gave the discourse, or trivia, just sort of things that are not important. They are always important things. And so one set is the main categories, another one is an emphasis on, like, little details that elude the untrained reader of suttas, but that are very very useful for a student to know, like sequences of qualities that look like all the same if one reads, but they have a very meaningful structure to them, or details of a simile, that can be awakaned to life to very profitably generate a very much stronger perception of what the Buddha wants to communicate, if one knows the details and if one knows how to awaken them to life. So it's pointing the student to these kind of little treasures within there. It's always six questions. And the student should first guess them, and then look them up, and then send in the results. And then the student gets a thirty-minute discourse on the sutta at hand, by email. And this discourse is not designed to impress the student with peculiarities of a Pali term, or curious cross-references of what the commentary has to say, and what other people think about that, and curious translation things like that, all that is almost toxic to this process. We really don't want that. What the idea of these talks is, is to show the student things that are already there in the sutta, that they themselves can see that are there for them to use without knowing any Pali, without knowing any cross-references, without knowing what that word means in other contexts, but just as the story stands in English language, there is a lot of little wisdom to the structure, and there are important things, what type of discourse is this, like, who is the audience, what can we know about the audience, what can we know from the discourse about their situation, their prior situation. What is it that the Buddha wants to communicate? What is the gist of what is going on, and how does that relate to a grander theme, or suttas meant to make distinctions between: this is a sutta that deals very globally with the entire path, or this sutta deals with an extremely specific situation. Or this is an ovada, an admonition of a difficult monk, or catering to some other very specific situation. And how can we, with the material that is there, the similes, the sequences, the things that are obvious, how can we get a very surprising amount of wisdom from this stuff that's already available to us, but we didn't see it. So this is very important, that at this point the student is not overwhelmed with all kinds of technical information. Because the purpose is to make the student independent and more self-confident, and if we are giving him or her a lot of information that it would take them years to be able to verify or appreciate the content they would take years to learn Pali to understand why this position of the commentary is inferior or superior, or why the Abhidhamma suggests this one, and what an historical context for that is. All these details will make the student weak and disempower them, and maybe they are impressed with their teacher, or maybe they are confused, but in either way they do not get an independence, a freedom and the joy of acquiring an ability, a reading ability to the sutta that makes them sort of little bit like a child. A small child conquers his or her world, experimenting, trying things out, and they are very happy when they can do things that people in the world can do, when they can eat with a spoon or when they can open the door, put on their clothes, these things make them independent, and in that way able to participate, and become a significant member of their community. So this is the point of this quite demanding third round the student has to really, this is really now a school of learning how to become a contemplative, how to contemplate these discourses. But the whole time it's important that the student always relates to the material as though what we are trying is to emulate the situation that the original audience would have. So somebody would go there and come to listen to Dhamma talks in the evening, maybe they are not a brahmin, maybe they don't have a very good education, maybe they only get there to hear a talk or go to the temple every few weeks or months, but they learn how to make that the environment and what they already know, it becomes a very meaningful support for their liberation from suffering, and the idea of M program is to emulate that, to create that personal relationship to these discourses, and the joy and freedom and development and growth that comes with that.
After that third round the idea is then to have a look at which were the suttas that were most meaningful to the student and to choose one, and ideally it's the first one, the number one favourite, but it does not have to be, it could be number two, or number three, if that's the sutta that lends itself more for exploration, but that is very much something that should be decided by or with the student to discuss the pro and cons. And then the idea is that the student memorizes this sutta in English language, and that in a very intensive emergent format the student is given the Pali terminology, not all the Pali, not so much the grammar, but the technical terms, like faith, that saddha is the Pali word, and what comes with that, what does it carry in innuendo, or what are similes from elsewhere. At this point the idea is to show the student the full power that is embedded in the suttas, and the ways to work a fairly advanced level with cross-referencing, and with contemplatively awakening themes, entire themes, and to find other passages that explain, qualify seemingly contradict challenge passages in that sutta, and so also with that comes a little bit the idea to teach the student how to use indices. Indices are very good to use, Bhikkhu Bodhi's indices are very good to use for students who know the numbers of suttas, because if a word like metta for example, it will give just the number of the suttas, so a student who knows that M118 is Anapanasati sutta, and who has an image of that sutta knows instantly: Ah, metta in the Anapanasati Sutta, that is only occuring in the beginning, when all the different meditation objects are listed, so that's not a very important reference. So the student can very effectively get extremely quickly an overview over a subject by using these indices with that referencing system. From then on, the student can really navigate on his own and can decide where he or she wants to go, research terminology, pick up a bit of Pali. But again, the Pali terminology here, that the student has to learn for this immersion program, the idea is that they actually learn the Pali word, but also a little bit of its story, its roots, how it's related, the etymology, for example. A word like kilesa is related to the English word glue. Well, it's a wonderful image, something to help contemplation. And the idea is to give the student a feeling that these words, they have a story to them. They have a whole, they have a life to them. They are things that one can feel passionate about, about words, like viriya, or saddha, or Buddha. And that is something that the student can learn to dig up, and to utilize in very many further contexts, contemplative contexts, contexts to develop questions, to develop problems, to clarify the teaching.
One thing that is maybe important to say at the end of this, now the student is fairly independent after having gone through this quite demanding, hopefully very joyful, playful program. In reality it will be always a little bit difficult to have it in this perfect form. So the practical side: the student for this program needs very close supervision, and usually needs a lot of customization. So for example when I did this with Jaine (?) then she did not have a lot of prior knowledge about Buddhism. So I was very concerned that in the third layer she would really understand this first, this approach very well. So the first ten suttas I did over the telephone. And I made sure that she really understood the contemplative suttas, and then I sent her only the thirty-minute talks. So the first discussions of M1 to 10 were very detailed. Also sometimes one finds that a student is not a good reader, not used to read a lot, then that needs to be taken into account. Or they have periods where they are ill, and then it needs to be customized. For example Jaine, another thing, we customized, she had a lot of questions at the beginning of the first section. Because she did not have a lot of prior knowledge. Then I tried to use that, so we made that into a little thing where all her questions, she had to group them into blocks, so quite similar questions into blocks. And then she had to say how important were these questions, and they couldn't have the same number. So which one is the most important block to solve? And then I also asked her to guess which ones I thought were, how important I thought they were. And the reason for that was that I wanted to see, I wanted to prevent that she put the questions at the top that she thought I would like to, I would think are very deep. I didn't want her to impress me, and this is something that school sometimes encourages: "So, has anybody any questions", and then: "Oh, this is a very good question." And so it suggests some kind of pretend good question. But it's not necessarily the question that is most meaningful to the student. And I try to alert them to that process by asking them to make a difference between how important is it to you, and make a guess what's important to me. To hold kind of up a mirror. But these are just examples. I think that the vast majority of students need customization. And so it's, part of M program also is that the student learns to understand: It's not important to be perfect in this and to have it in the perfect form, but to extract the wisdom and understand what it's for, what the final purpose is. It's not some perfect mastery of this very beautiful learning program, or to be very impressive in that, but to become enlightened. And so we can always customize a little bit, cut here, or, make things a little bit more demanding or challenging or interesting in questions, and so it's very important that the teacher questions the student quite a little bit about, not only content, but their experience of it, like, I'm very alert to checking that they don't have a what I call push-to-be-done kind of attitude that: Oh, only ten suttas left. I'm going to get really quickly, and then I have that round finished, or that they do it in a way that, if they don't enjoy it's not right, something must be changed, something must be modified within the program. And I would say, so far so good, seems to be enjoyable experience.
One thing I forgot: At the end of the question series of asking six questions and a thirty minute talk for each sutta there are twelve sets of three or four questions, they are really difficult, and they take six questions that are fairly advanced questions, but all about one subject, let's say right speech, or mindfulness, or something that is very meaningful and comes up often in the student's real practice. But the idea is that they should be able to solve this from the Majjhima Nikaya, and they can use the index, but the questions are such that it's not that easy to just look it up in the index. So that is then very much like a real life situation where we have questions, and then we try to see what the Buddha has to say about that, and we learn to solve problems to think in the way that the Buddha suggests in the suttas, rather than just coming up with something that we think ourselves, or from our environment or prior conditioning. So that's the basis of the M program. The idea is, one, to make the student independent, and to give them the joy of the word of the Buddha, and also to give them a way to explore other corners of the teachings, and they can do that basically on their own, once with this level of skill, they can then take the Digha Nikaya and do that on their own. And they can do that with the teacher, but the teacher can also step back quite a lot, and can say just: Okay, do the M program on the Digha Nikaya or on the Samyutta Nikaya. Just tell me what you are doing and how you are getting along every now and so often. But they have a whole system, a way of working with the suttas, and they can also do it with their friends, and they can use the material, what they have learnt to communicate it to others, and if they want they can modify it. It's not meant to be rigid in that sense. So the idea is to make essentially to make the word of the Buddha available as a very very powerful tool to aid awakening, that's the point of this M program.
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Topic: Ajahn Phillip Piyadhammo - Suttastudien (Read 5444 times)
