Re: the title 'Sayadaw'

  Dear Jim,

There needs to be a balance between rote learning and, I don't know the
exact name but let's call it, investigative or solution learning.  The
education system in the West has gone to the extreme of investigative
learning, to the detriment of rote learning. I was told that in
Australia students are, or were, not even taught grammar in school any
more and therefore have troubles learning foreign languages.
The problem with the rote learning system, here in Sri Lanka at least,
is that the student often doesn't really understand what he has learnt
and when he gets asked a question which is unexpected and requires him
to think and investigate, he is at a complete loss in answering. New
university students here have great troubles doing assignments which
requires them to do something new and think for themselves. They are
used that the teacher does the thinking for them and they just repeat.

The Paacittiya rule number 4 does not prevent monks from teaching Dhamma
to laypeople, but it prevented them from teaching them suttas in the
chanting-rehearsing way that was used to transmit Suttas and other texts
to pupil monks, i.e. the teacher monk recites a pada, the pupil repeats
it or continues with the next part, etc.
Ajahn Thanissaro discusses the possible reasons why the monk is
forbidden to teach this way in his Buddhist Monastic Code:

"The origin story states that the Buddha forbade these methods of
training unordained people because they caused the lay students to feel
disrespect for the bhikkhus. The Vinaya Mukha explains this by noting
that if a teacher made a slip of the tongue while teaching in this way,
his students would look down on him for it. If this were the right
explanation, though, the no-offense clauses would have listed "proper"
ways of training novices and lay people to recite the Dhamma, but they
don't.

A more likely explanation is that at the time of the Buddha the duty of
memorizing and reciting the texts was considered the province of the
bhikkhus and bhikkhunis. Although some lay people memorized discourses
(Mv.III.5.9), and bhikkhus of course taught the Dhamma to lay people,
there was apparently the feeling that to teach non-ordainees to become
skilled reciters of the texts was not good for the relationship between
bhikkhus and laity. There are two possible reasons for this:

     1) People may have felt that the bhikkhus were shirking their
     responsibilities by trying to pass their duty off onto lay people.

     2) The Brahmans at the time were very strict in not allowing anyone
     outside their caste to memorize the Vedas, and their example may
     have led lay people to feel disrespect for bhikkhus who were not
     equally protective of their own tradition.

At present, the entire Canon is available in print, and even bhikkhus
rarely commit it to memory, although they do frequently memorize parts
of it, such as the Patimokkha, the major discourses, and other passages
chanted on ceremonial occasions. To train a lay person or novice to
become skilled in reciting such teachings by rote would entail the full
penalty under this rule."

Best wishes,
                       Bh Nt

> Thank-you very much for the information on the memorization and
> recitation of texts. I'm much in agreement with you on its importance.
> In the educational environment I grew up in, in the 50s and 60s in
> Canada, this way of learning a text seemed quite minimal. To find out
> how children are doing these days, I asked my cousin who was then a
> librarian-teacher at an elementary school if school children were
> required to memorize anything. She said "no". Sometime after, I heard
> in a CBC radio interview a professor of educational studies make the
> comment that by the time students finish high school they retain very
> little of what they were taught all through school.
>
> I would like to ask a question about the following Paacittiya IV rule:
>
> "Whatever monk should make one who is not ordained speak dhamma line
> by line, there is an offence of expiation." (Horner, p. 190)
>
> Doesn't this rule prevent a monk from teaching Pali to the unordained?
>
> Best wishes,
> Jim
>
>



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