Paccitiya 4 of the vinaya forbid a monk from instructing a lay person to memorize the teachings word for word. Could anyone explain what is the reason for this? And if I remember correctly, there was a lay woman in the time of the Buddha who was chanting the Itivuttaka every morning. How is this possible if lay persons are not allowed to memorize the teachings?
This might be useful.
- The culture of writing is not so encouraged compared to oral tradition then.
- So the “job” of monastics is part of preservation of the teachings via memorization. Like monastics already are not working, so it seems like division of labour, food comes from lay people, and monastics are the container of the teachings.
- So teaching lay people to memorize seems like offloading the monastic responsibility onto people who work for a living already.
- Some lay people have good memory, so naturally they can memorize the teaching by just hearing it once, or they keep on going to different dhamma talks of the same topic, naturally something sticks.
- Monastics not allowed to teach lay people to memorize, doesn’t mean lay people are not allowed to memorize. Vinaya is for monastics, not for lay people. Lay people can very well learn from other lay people to memorize or from the anki decks that I made. Those anki decks also does not violate the rule because I didn’t force any lay people to memorize, I didn’t do one on one live teaching, the audio itself is not by me etc.
- Also from the origin story:
the monks from the group of six were instructing lay followers to memorize the Teaching.
Those lay followers became disrespectful, undeferential, and rude toward the monks.