Trying to study

I'm in a study group, a Dharma study group. I've been in this group for something like four or five years now and while the others slowly have been replaced over the years, I'm still here.

At the moment we're looking at the Dhammapada, an very early text which is part of the Pali Canon. The particular translation we're using (there's 50+ translations of the Dhammapada into English) is that by Sangharakshita, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order (which was until recently the Western Buddhist Order).

The way we run the group is that one of us volunteers to summarise a particular text or seminar, and on the evening he gives the summary as a short presentation. We usually pause the presentation every now and again to ask questions or to discuss the contents. The study leader might bring out further points for discussion that he thinks are important.

I'm doing the first summary this year, on Thursday this week. It's on a commentary on first few verses from the chapter called Buddhavagga, or The Enlightened One (chapter 14, verses 179-187). Currently I've got as far as reading the commentary and making a mind-map of the main points (using FreeMind, a quite good piece of mind-mapping software, IMHO). I now have to re-read the commentary a number of times to make sure I know the flow of the text and can talk freely about it without resorting to reading from it too much.

I'll leave it at that for tonight, blogging-wise I mean, I still have a lot of reading to do. I'll finish with a favourite quote from this material, Dhp 14:183 (in translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu),

The non-doing of any evil,
the performance of what's skillful,
the cleansing of one's own mind:
  this is the teaching
  of the Awakened.

Be well!

[Image adapted from original at WikiMedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tipitaka_scripture.jpg]