Vince Fakhoury Horn lays out three ways to prepare a dharma talk for teachers-in-training, exploring how detailed notes can polish a talk into dead words, why speaking with no preparation depends on being prepared not to be prepared, and whether minimal preparation is really the middle way between the previous two, or just the approach he happens to prefer.

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💬 Transcript

Vince: The dharma talk. It’s a public talk in a way, but it’s a unique kind of public talk, because you’re talking about something of such deep importance and intimacy, and yet something that can be easily misunderstood or misconstrued.

So there’s some need to be precise at times in the dharma talk, right, to say things in a way that are easily understood and not easily misconstrued. And at the same time, there’s, I think, a recognition, right, as dharma students, that sometimes, like after you’ve heard the same story 10,000 times from your favorite teacher, or whatever, it starts to sound kind of like dull, or like it lacks the same kind of aliveness that it used to have.

Part of the reason could be because it is actually in fact dull and just kind of like old hat and rehearsed to death. And so as a dharma teacher, we want to talk in a way that’s alive and fresh and relevant to the moment and to who we’re speaking with, that is enacting that ideal of skillful means that’s so important here in the Second Turning. How do we do that in reality? And here I want to present a model of preparation for the dharma talk in which there are three positions that I’ll throw out there. One is the detailed preparation approach. This is the position in which you spend a good amount of time preparing your dharma talk.

And you get what’s basically like a close to script level detail. You almost could read the dharma talk from your notes. It’s that detailed. It may not be completely script, but it’s close enough that you can gather all of the relevant information directly from your notes. And it has a very clear and planned out structure, and logical flow from one thing to another, perhaps building on a point, or presenting a list and going very methodically from one point to another subpoint of the list, the overall list you’re teaching, or whatever it might be. There’s some very clear and planned out structure. So that’s the detailed preparation.

On the other end, the other side here is no preparation. So this is where you do little to no upfront preparation, aside from trusting your practice and trusting all the preparation you’ve already done. You’re really responding to the moment as it’s arising and changing, who’s present. Maybe you have kind of a theme or title to work with, or maybe you’re just responding to questions in the moment. Maybe there’s some very minimal structure, but there’s within that a lot of formlessness in terms of your preparation. So that’s the no-prep dharma talk. And then if you imagine these as two existing on a spectrum, right? Detailed preparation, no preparation. Then I want to present an apex position here called minimal preparation.

In the minimal preparation mode, there is a core structure, that you can see an overall flow or logic to the talk, but there are as few bullet points needed as possible to describe and detail out the subject matter that you’re getting into. In fact, within minimal preparation notes, for me, I wouldn’t expect to see any quotes. I would have a separate page, maybe just one page for quotes, if I have stuff I want to share that I can’t, you know, remember all the specifics from. But within my actual just minimal prep thing, it’s just bullet points, some basic subject headlines and some basic points.

Just something to remind me of what it is I’m talking about. And then within that minimal structure, there’s a lot of space for improvisation and for flow. So I want to talk about each of these a little bit more, and the relative upsides and downsides, and then just open it up for conversation.

So in terms of the detailed preparation mode, this is kind of how I started teaching, in which you spend a lot of time, painstaking effort, in getting your presentation prepared. And so there’s a lot of upside to this.

You have a lot of control over what you end up saying. And if you get good at using these detailed notes, you’re not going to make a lot of flubs, verbally, linguistically. You’re not going to sound like you’re all over the place. It’ll actually sound pretty logical, and it’ll be easier to follow, more cognitively coherent.

There’s a way in which over time, you’re constantly editing your notes from dharma talk to dharma talk. So you give the same dharma talk over and over again, and you kind of get to perfect it.

That’s one thing I really noticed at IMS and Spirit Rock. The Insight Meditation tradition teachers is like, some of them had these dharma talks that they’d been perfecting for decades, and like, they were brilliant. Like, they were like a really well-performed comedy act that had been refined to the nth degree. And the only reason it would be no longer relevant anymore is it just has been around long enough that culture changes and times change. You know, in terms of the form of it, it’s perfect, perfect as you can get for the relative world. But there are downsides to this approach, and I’m sure you’re aware of at least some of them just thinking about them now, right? I mean, for one thing, it’s hard to change that much. You know, you could change things, but if you change things a lot, it’s a lot of work. So this kind of form of really detailed notes are kind of hard to adapt. They can be a little rigid. Can be hard to edit, since everything is so detailed and refers to everything else.

You know, if you change one thing, you have to change five, 10 other things. Whereas with, you know, the minimal preparation approach, for instance, you might just change one bullet point, and then over here, another bullet point. Because of the increased detail, there’s more maintenance to maintain the style of notes.

The other thing, I think the main downside with these kind of notes, is if we get disconnected from the deeper spirit of what we’re saying and we start to just sound rehearsed, then this comes across as—in the Zen tradition, they call this dead words. We start sounding like we’re just saying some dead words.

And I shared this experience with many of you before, but I had the ultimate detailed-note, dead-word teaching experience with Kenneth Folk one day on retreat, when I was teaching on Dongshan’s Five Ranks. And it was so sad to me too, because I had taught on this in a previous retreat, and had really been alive and very much live words.

And so because I was trying to look good in front of my teacher and be, you know, I guess like, validated, I ended up making the mistake of just too much reliance on the words, and got lost in words. And I think that’s what can happen. We get lost in these kind of concepts, and we’re just throwing around words and trying to make this beautiful word salad. And it’s like, no, it’s a salad. It’s a word salad. There’s something missing underneath it. You know, there’s some sustenance and some substance that’s lacking. So that’s the dead word challenge. Now, no preparation can respond to that challenge, right? If you come in without any preparation, if you come in and you’re just like, “Okay, here we go. Uh, what’s the topic? What’s the question? Go.” Then there is this potential for more flow and more spontaneity. And if you really have done some training, and you’ve learned some stuff, and you have access to it, then it’ll come—at least some of it will. And so you can kind of trust that these words will be alive.

I have some notes here. I’m using the minimal preparation method for this presentation. Here, the upside of the no preparation is you can learn how to trust your intuitive wisdom. You can start to kind of get a sense for what you need to say, what’s appropriate.

You might also find that you need less words to do that in than you did before with the detailed mode. This is one of the potential upsides, is you can be more succinct, if you learn how to express the essence of what needs to be said. And obviously it takes less time to prepare. That’s a huge upside.

You can come in completely just ready to go.

Now, the downsides are also pretty epic. Epic upside and downsides here, because for those who are really not getting it right and are just babbling, you end up getting this kind of sloppy, circular, hard to understand, self-referential, baloney kind of performative thing that can happen, you know, where someone is just kind of like bullshitting, you know?

And it’s like, there’s a fine line between intuitive wisdom flowing from the source and bullshit flowing out someone’s pie hole. It can be easy to fall into bullshitting, because when we don’t have a structure, something to fall back onto, we can suddenly get scared because we don’t know, and then instead of just resting or being in the not knowing as part of our presentation, we start to grasp onto concepts and use them to try to stabilize ourselves. So we can do that in the no preparation mode. If we’re not prepared to not be prepared, we can start to grasp onto concepts, onto rafts.

It can become, as I said, performative and kind of egocentric.

It’s hard to also know, if you’re very rationally oriented or you tend to be more thinking type person, sometimes it’s hard to notice the difference between a wise, intuitive, no-preparation dharma talk and just some nonsensical BS. And I remember being confused about this when I first started working with Trudy Goodman, my teacher, because on the one hand, I couldn’t understand anything she was saying, and it sounded like kind of nonsense. And on the other hand, it left me feeling like a good movie would, or something, where I was inspired and kind of questioning and considering the nonsense that I couldn’t understand.

And I was like, wow, this is really weird. And it took years, but over some years I realized just how much wisdom there was in the way that she was communicating. It was very off the cuff, very Zen, as was her training. And she would make points and then circle around and then circle back in ways that were kind of shocking.

You know, and it was like all this sort of thing that I didn’t understand, a dance that I hadn’t learned the choreography for. It was very fascinating.

Zulu: Mm-hmm.

Vince: Okay, now I’m presenting the apex position, which—I know in framing this, I said these are just a few different positions, but now actually I’m presenting this as a superior one. Why? Because this is the way that I do it. More like, this is something that I’ve learned through doing it the other two ways and found to be a nice middle way, between and beyond them.

But it’s not that it doesn’t have upsides and downsides. So the upsides and downsides are in relation to the other extremes. So here, with minimal preparation, there is less prep time than the detailed preparation. So that’s an upside. But there’s more than the no prep. So that’s a downside.

There’s more structure and logic to the minimal preparation approach than the no preparation, which can really save your ass at times. But on the other hand, there’s less structure and logic than the detailed prep. There’s less detailed content to pull from. So that can sometimes also be challenging.

You gotta trust your—what you know.

I think one of the upsides of this approach is it’s easier to evolve your notes with each iteration than it is with the detailed notes. It should be mentioned, with no preparation you can’t evolve your notes if you don’t have any. It doesn’t require any, but you don’t have any either.

What I love about the minimal preparation approach is it includes both space for rational and intuitive elements. You can both have a structure and some points and details that you can be reminded of and help you stay on track, and you have lots of space, if you keep those to a minimum, to really improvise and to share around, to be kind of in a natural flow for the words to be alive.

I think one downside I’ve noticed of the minimal preparation approach is that it can easily devolve into the no preparation approach, or it can—evolve is not where—like, it can kind of tighten itself into a more detailed preparation than is necessary.

So finding that real fine balance, where you’re really only doing the minimum amount of preparation—to me, that’s like bullet points, like nested bullets. It’s pretty simple.

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