psychedelic orange garfield
What’s the point of learning something if you can’t remember it? If you can’t remember it, can you really say that you know something?
I’m going to share with you some ways to use mnemonic (memory) techniques to learn chants, suttas, and Buddhist teachings. These memory techniques can actually be used to easily memorise anything, but the real power of these techniques isn’t just in the ability to instantly recall whatever you want whenever you want it, or impress your kalyāna mitta by spontaneously rattling off a verse from the Dhammapada.
The real power is in the way that they unleash your creative potential and have you using your mind in ways that you never thought possible.
These techniques will change the way you learn and the way you understand the Dhamma. They will open up a new dimension to the suttas, as you see that the Buddha had a deep understanding of mnemonics when he structured the whole pitaka as a mnemonic fractal (more about that later).
If you learn how to use mnemonic devices and get familiar with oral recitation, bringing memory work into your practice, you’re aligning yourself with the teachings of the Buddha in the way the ancients used to learn it. It’s like a secret code hidden in plain sight.
Enough of the sales pitch. Let’s get into it.
I’m going to break this down into simple parts. I’ll be referencing a few techniques throughout and giving a little synopsis of each one as we go, with links to do further reading as you wish. The intention with this article is to give you a practical scaffolding by which to memorise a teaching, a chant, or whatever you want really.
I’ll share the memory techniques that I’ve found most beneficial, but there are many different ways to do this, so if you find yourself intrigued by a certain aspect of the work, I encourage you to go digging for different ways.
When you learn about memory, you’re actually learning about how the mind works, as memory is a product of the mind.
Here’s an exercise: close your eyes, and try and recall your first mobile phone number. Now close them again and try to recall a bedroom you used to have as a child, and maybe an object in that room. Which could you recall? I bet it was the room.
Why is that?
It’s because the mind naturally remembers images and spaces. This is built into our language too, when we say words like ‘image-inary’. The mind also likes sounds, as in music and phonetic sounds, which is why we love music and when we meditate we sometimes get a random song from the Beastie Boys suddenly popping into our head.
This means that we can remember images, spaces (as in landscapes or rooms), and certain sounds, much more easily than say, numbers, or words. We can remember a room from long ago, but not the name of a person we met two minutes ago.
There could be evolutionary reasons for this, such as the need for the human being to be able to recognise landmarks (images) as we walked through a landscape (space) and listened to our environment in order to scan for potential dangers (sounds). Whatever the reasons, this is how the mind is built, and knowing this means we can leverage that aspect of the mind to be able to remember things - we can work with how memory works, rather than against it.
In order to work with the memory, we use memory techniques. Memory techniques basically work by creating images associated with what you want to remember, and placing them in a space, because as we’ve seen above, the memory likes images and spaces. All memory techniques basically come down to these two things - generating images, and places those images in a space.
When we want to recall a piece of information, the mind will very quickly be able to access the image in the space - think of it as a kind of interior library that you can create in your own mind.
To walk you through how to do this, I’m going to use a simple example of a Buddhist teaching that we can learn together. I’ll be getting you to generate the images and placing them in a location as we go, so you can see how easy it is to do this, and how powerful it can be.
We’re going to learn the seven awakening factors, in both Pāli (the Indo-Aryan language used to preserve the early Buddhist texts) and English. The seven awakening factors are a classic list of qualities that are developed on the path to awakening. If you already know them, pick a small list of something else you want to learn instead.
Our Palace
Before we get started, one of the most important things to understand in using these techniques is that you don’t have to be some creative genius to be able to work with them. All we are really doing here is using existing memories of places, people, and objects that we already hold in memory. We associate the images to information that we want to remember, and then we place those images in a sequence thoughout a space as a journey that we can move through. That’s at the heart of all memory work.
The first thing we need is a space to put our images in. One such space is known as a memory palace. A memory palace is essentially a room, or a series of rooms in a building, or a landscape.
The good news is that there are endless amounts of spaces we can use, because we have been moving in and out of lots of buildings and landscapes all through our life. Anywhere you’ve visited is a potential palace. You can use other things for palaces too, like your body, or mandalas, or geometrical patterns. There are lots of possibilities.
For now, let’s just imagine a room. I’ll let you choose the room, but if you’re stuck, just use the childhood bedroom from earlier.
Close your eyes and take a moment to really visualise the room - pretend you are in it and try and get a feeling for the space - cast your mind’s eye across the walls, floor, and ceiling. Take note of the light, the textures, where the door and windows are. Use your senses and see if you can even smell the room, or hear any sounds associated with it. Take note of furniture or objects in the room, pick them up, run your hand over them and feel them. None of this needs to be perfect, just see what comes up.
Ok, that’s our first palace.
Our Images
We’re going to memorise the seven ‘awakening factors’ in both Pāli and English. While we’re at it, let’s memorise the word for ‘awakening factors’ as well.
Here’s the list:
bojjhaṅga (bo-jun-gah) - awakening factors:
sati (sah-ti) - mindfulness
dhammavicaya (dum-a-wi-cha-ya) - investigation of Dhamma
viriya (wi-ri-yah) - energy
pīti (pee-tee) - rapture
passaddha (pa-sah-dah) - tranquillity
samādhi (sa-mah-dee) - stillness
upekkhā (oo-pei-kah) - equanimity
I’ve include the phonetic sounds because they help us not only pronounce words correctly, but they can be used to generate images, as we will see shortly.
There are many ways to generate images. I’m going to show you a simple method called ‘association’. You can just stick with association, as once you get familiar with it, it’s lots of fun, but if you want to branch out, there are many other ways which you can experiment with here. I’ve used others like the Major system and the PAO method, which are cool too. I’ll show you how to make images shortly.
What makes a good image? A good image is something that we already know from real life, and something that we will remember. When coming up with associative images, try and think of something that is - funny, scary, shocking, risqué, taboo, weird, violent, naughty, supernatural… you get the idea. Make it interesting, and be as creative as you like. The more you do this, the more you’ll learn about what sticks in your mind.
When we create images we want all our senses to engage with the image. We want to not only imagine what the image looks like, but touch it, hear it, taste it, or smell it - feel it. The more senses we use in trying to connect with the object, the more it will sink into our neural network, and the more robust the memory. Use bright colours, strong smells and tastes, distinctive shapes and textures. Animate your images, connect emotionally to the image and feel what it is like to inhabit it in the first person. Play around.
OK, let’s create out first image. Let’s start with the name for the awakening factors themselves - bojjhaṅga.
When I say the word ‘bojjhaṅga’, the way it sounds, ‘bo-jun-gah’, reminds me of an African drummer I met at Bondi Beach. So I could use an African drummer beating a big drum, one beat for every syllable, chanting the word over and over, ‘bo-jun-gah, bo-jun-gah’. He might have colourful African tribal clothing. I can smell his sweat as he’s getting worked up drumming. I can imagine his sweat would be salty to taste, and he is slippery to the touch. I feel all this, and enter into what it would be like to be the drummer, drumming that beat. I could remember bojjhaṅga means ‘awakening’ in English by having his eyes open wide looking straight at me, like he is wide awake.
That’s all a bit weird isn’t it? Good. The mind remembers weird. Actually, we are just using our mind in new ways. These images are like little triggers for the mind to remember, we want them to stick. Place the drummer at the entrance to your room and see him there, almost like he is drumming you into entering into the room with a rolling drum beat.
First word done.
Let’s do one more word, and I’ll let you do the rest, as really the best images come from your memory. Next is sati, pronounced ‘sah-tee’, which means mindfulness in English. Does any image come to mind? You can use the word itself, sati, which kinda sounds like ‘sat’, and rhymes with ‘cat’. ‘Tee’ could be a t-shirt, or a cup of tea. Why not both? To remember that sati means ‘mindfulness’ we could use the image of a brain (or a heart if you associate the mind with the heart).
I love Garfield, so let’s make the second image a psychedelic orange Garfield cat wearing a t-shirt with the letter ‘T’ on the front, holding up a cup of tea. He can have the top of his head cut-off so you can see his brain throbbing. He’s sitting on the floor to the left of the door.
You see how this works? See if you can do the rest and place them around the room. You’ll have your own images that you find engaging, and the fun in all this is discovering what you like, and stretching your image-ination.
When you’re done, zoom around the room from beginning to end, and say the names in Pāli and English as you go - seeing, feeling, sensing the images as best you can.
That’s your first memory palace done.
Now, this may all seem like a lot of work. You may even feel a little zapped after doing your first palace. That’s totally normal. This is a faculty of your mind that you probably haven’t used much before and initially it will take effort to come up with these rooms, images, and associations.
At the start, this new way of learning may seem clunky and a little awkward, and you may find yourself spending more time than you like getting the hang of it, but that’s the same with any new thing that we learn though, no?
The best way to get good at this skill is to make it a habit. Carry some alphabetic flash cards with you and when you have a spare moment, whip out a letter and see if you can kinaesthetically recall any people that come to mind, or places for potential palaces that the letter triggers. You’ll amaze yourself with how much is stored away in your mind, and you’ll soon realise you have an endless supply of associations to work with. I’d recommend making a palace for each letter of the alphabet and then sticking any facts you want to remember about a topic in the palace based on alphabetical order. You can organise the topics spatially however you want, by room, or more palaces, it’s up to you. You now have your basic internal library. You can practice revising the material by using a Leitner box, which is a form of spaced repetition, so that the associations stick in long term memory for good.
The more you do it, the more fluid and seamless you will become. If you persist, it will be very natural to come up with images on the fly and weave them through palaces you already have, and you can apply this to all sorts of areas of your life, with anything you want to remember, whether it’s chanting, names of people and their family members, Pāli grammar, whatever.
We live in a false economy where we spend time reading stuff, only to forget it, and then having to look it up again, read it, forget it, and so on, never remembering what we are learning. We call this ‘convenience’ but to me it seems very inconvenient. It’s much more efficient to spend a little time creatively remembering something once so you don’t have to keep looking it up later. If you put in a little work with memory work, you’ll actually save yourself a lot of time, and have a lot of fun doing it too.
I learn chanting by memorising by rote a stanza, and then I stitch the stanzas together in a memory palace, using the first word of the stanza to trigger an image. This way each stanza is an image, and I never get lost in a chant ‘cos I know where I am in the room. If you want to get fancy, you can recite the chant in reverse order, or jump around the room and recite stanzas in random order, as this will embed the associations even deeper in your mind (and you can also flip people out by reciting the mettā sutta backwards).
This leads me to the last section. I want to touch on the powerful potential of these practices, in particular for a reflexive understanding of the Dhamma.
When I started to learn more about mnemonics, I was immediately struck by just how much of what I was learning was so obviously baked into the suttas. This makes total sense of course, as the Dhamma was preserved at first in an oral culture at the time of the Buddha. It would make sense that the practitioners of that time used certain mnemonic devices to remember and organise the teachings.
We can see this when we see the liberal use of numbers in the Dhamma. The Buddha makes lists of factors, and uses numbers to organise them. The Buddha also uses striking similes, which are essentially images, to highlight teachings, and which aid in memory. These similes are often associated with stock passages in the canon, which is another layer of embedded association. There is also a lot of repetition in the suttas, which would have been helpful in memorisation. The Pāli language itself is beautifully lyrical and lends well to assimilation and rhyme, and the cadence and rhythm of core passages have a lyrical and almost song-like quality to them, which of course connects to the mind’s love of sound.
The structure of the canon itself, could also be described as fractal. A fractal is a mathematically generated geometrical shape, like the Mandelbrot set. Most fractals have some sort of self-similarity, which means that you continue to see the same shapes and patterns as you continue to zoom in on any part of the shape. Check out an example here. This structure is very different from a Cartesian or linear model, and I suspect that it’s very intentional the Dhamma is structured this way, as it dovetails neatly with mnemonics, which can also be used in this way.
When you build memory palaces you will quickly find that you can link them together in any number of ways. Let’s say you make a memory palace called ‘eightfold path’. It’s a large building that you want to use to remember teachings for each factor of the eightfold path, and it has eight rooms, one for each factor.
The first room contains images associated with the first factor of the eightfold path - right view, which is otherwise known as the four noble truths. As you fill out the room with the images, you come to the last section in that room, the fourth noble truth, and realise you are looking at… the eightfold path.
Do you see what’s going on here? You’re in a memory palace which is a building for the eightfold path, in a room for the first factor of the eightfold path, right view, looking at… the eightfold path again! You’ve zoomed in to a part of the building only to realise that it’s recursive, like a fractal.
The whole pitaka is structured like this. This means that you can get creative and link different palaces and rooms and images within rooms together not in a linear way, but like a fractal.
To use our example above, maybe the last image in the first of our eight rooms of the ‘eightfold path’ palace, the right view / four truths room, is a doll house with eight rooms, to symbolise the eightfold path. As you lean over to look into the dollhouse you realise it’s a model of the very building you are standing in, the ‘eightfold path’ building. You look into the first room and see yourself looking into a dollhouse.
Trippy.
Or maybe you just want to skip to the eighth factor on samādhi and rather than move through the house you’re in, you just shrink down, and teleport into the eighth room of the dollhouse right in front of you and go from there.
The options are endless, and you’re only limited by your imagination. This way of learning is way more fun and engaging, and it makes the Dhamma come alive ‘cos now you’re not only working with how the mind remembers, you’re also working with how the Dhamma is structured for you to remember.
You’ll come up with all sorts of new associations through approaching the Dhamma this way, and I can’t help but feel that this is the point - to expand our mind to see and perceive the Dhamma in new ways. The way we engage with learning the Dhamma becomes as important as the content of the teachings themselves, and we can explore to our heart’s delight.
Have fun :)
- Peace.