Lesson 10 from A Comprehensive Commentary on the Words of My Perfect Teacher covers the five wrong ways of remembering teachings.
The first is attending only to elegant phrasing while ignoring meaning — like a child picking flowers, finding pleasure in surface beauty but gaining no inner benefit. The second is the opposite: dismissing words as mere tools and attending only to meaning, forgetting that meaning cannot travel without language; as a Tibetan saying puts it, without the cane of words, the old man of meaning cannot walk. The third is holding both words and meaning without genuine understanding — failing to distinguish the Buddha's ultimate teachings from his expedient ones, and thus misreading passages that must not be taken literally. The fourth is studying out of sequence: taking advanced teachings before foundational ones, like trying to attend university without completing school. The fifth is misremembering the meaning entirely — as in the story of the man who understood emptiness to mean that nothing exists, and so butchered a goat while reciting Avalokiteshvara's mantra.
The lesson closes by urging practitioners to persevere through difficult texts without giving up, and never to dismiss simple ones as beneath their level.
