On Buddha, Speed Reading & Writing

Dear Writer,

At dawn, a rare mist draped the river Ganges. Winter arrived on a boat, and the city of Varanasi slept unconcerned, not quite ready to welcome this uninvited guest. I got up early, read Premchand for an hour and stood at the balcony of the hostel in Assi ghat with hajmola chai (tea boiled with powdered hajmola) in hand. At 6, I saw the sun beckoning from the horizon, after 12 hours of sleep, removing the blanket of river aside.  

 

Before the sun could clear up the fog, I decided that I cut through them. I took a bus to Sarnath, the place where Buddha gave his first sermon (the four noble truths of dharma) to five disciples post-enlightenment. Situated ten kilometers from Varanasi, Sarnath is a serene stopover in the early morning but becomes a hot tourist spot by the afternoon. Buddhists from the Southeast Asian countries viz. Cambodia, Thailand, Japan and China arrive in their comfy Volvos and swarm the place. Even the beggars speak their language. I heard Indian kids running bare feet behind the foreign visitors, asking for alms in Chinese and Japanese. Chants reverberated in the air, incense sticks burnt at ease and the unwelcome sun of the morning now felt like a respite. I looked at the tall stupas, the vast expanse and wondered what if I were one of the first disciples to listen to Buddha lay out the basics of dharma 2500 years ago — right here at Sarnath?

 

Considered one of the four holy spots by the Buddhists—other being Lumbini (Buddha’s birthplace), Kusinagara (where Buddha left his body) & Bodhgaya (Buddha’s place of enlightenment)—Sarnath was chosen by Buddha for the first sermon for a very specific reason. Buddha wanted to share his ideas at a place from where it could travel across the subcontinent, where it could enlighten fellow beings.

 

The city of Varanasi, since time immemorial, has been at the heart of India’s transportation network. Ancient India had two major highways — the Uttarapath, or northern road, and the Dakhshinapath, or southern road. These highways met just outside Varanasi at Sarnath. Incredibly, two of India’s most important highways still meet at Varanasi: NH2, which roughly follows the old Uttarapath, and NH7, which runs all the way down to Kanyakumari. A short distance away is Mughalsarai, the nerve centre of the country’s railway network.

 

Not too far from Bodhgaya in Bihar, Buddha walked the 250 kilometers stretch to Sarnath and discovered seekers of truth like him. He formed Sangha, a community of all his disciples (like YourQuote Family), in Sarnath and it kept on adding thousands of followers as his ideas spread. The members of the Sangha took his teachings across Asia, from far up in Ladakh and Tibet, to as south as Sri Lanka, from Arunachal and Sikkim to Southeast Asia and China. Sangha continued to spread the teachings of the enlightened master centuries after Buddha left his body. I’d have sacrificed everything to be a part of Sangha if I were born then. How I wish. I itched to read more about Buddha and decided to leave before the sun went from bearable to unbearable.

 

I returned to the hostel early, carrying a couple of books on Buddhism I bought outside Sarnath. I was welcomed in my room by a stack of Premchand’s works that lay strewn like chips on my bed, besides four to five books that I’m carrying for reference. It was an overwhelming sight. How to keep up with reading when one is travelling? Or how to read a lot in a little time? I have been asked that before by my fellow-travellers who are often stumped seeing so many books in an ascetic’s bag. My answer to that is: speed-reading. Speed-reading is a technique that lets you absorb more in lesser time. One of the biggest mistakes we do while reading is vocalization, or muttering the words with our tongue. The speed of your reading gets terribly dependent on the speed at which you can speak, reducing the number of lines you can grasp at once, making you hear yourself to understand. Try not to talk to yourself while reading. Read as it is written, let there be a picture instead of a voice in your mind.

 

The second important tip for speed-reading is to develop your peripheral vision. It can increase reading speed by over 300 percent. Untrained readers use up to one-half of their peripheral vision on margins by moving from the first word to last, spending 25-50 percent of their time “reading” margins with no content. To illustrate, let us take the hypothetical one line: “Once upon a time, students enjoyed reading four hours a day.” If you were able to begin your reading at “time” and finish the line at “four,” you would eliminate 6 of 11 words, more than doubling your reading speed. This concept is easy to implement. Try reading my next line like this. Or read this particular line with peripheral vision. You might not have needed to read it, did you?

 

Once you practice these two steps, I shall come back and teach you more tips to read faster and comprehend better. One quick tip is to find contextual meanings of the words that you don’t know. It’d be preposterous if you open a dictionary every time you find a word as foreign (to some) as preposterous. Your reading experience will be spoilt. Preposterous, if you haven’t heard of the word before, as it is in the above sentence might contextually mean troublesome or foolish. You have zeroed it down to two meanings. Not bad. As you start to read more and contextualize the meanings of words, you will encounter more usage. You will develop a mental dictionary of your own where you’ll have meanings to all these words you deciphered contextually, during reading. So the second time the word preposterous comes into the sentence, you won’t be preposterous enough to find if it means troublesome or foolish.

 

As I dive speedily into the books that call me, I urge you to talk about things that you do speedily. Some people talk fast, some walk fast, some eat fast, some sleep fast. Buddha attained enlightenment fast, in less than 50 days according to some texts. Which one of the fast are you? Post with #MyFastStory in the caption on YourQuote.

 

Before parting for the night, I leave you with a quote from the Buddha himself: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” If I may, I’d like to add for writers: “All that we are writing is the result of what we have read.”