The Basis for Imputation Versus the Referent Object of the Imputation

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The Need for Having a Strong Foundation for Studying This Text

After listening to teachings, in the end, don’t just make a mandala offering and go off and practice, not having understood anything. That is not the procedure. Whatever you haven’t understood, you should think about it, figure it out and then go off and practice. When you approach the study of a text, like this chapter, it is important to spend a great deal of time on the beginning portion and gain an extensive and stable good understanding of the framework of this text, particularly here with the presentation of the various schools of tenets. 

When you have a good understanding of these tenet systems, then when you go through the rest of the chapter and come to the refutations of the positions of the different tenet, you will be able to fill in the details and understand something from the very condensed discussions. If you just race through the chapter, without a firm understanding of the context within which it is being presented, you will get very little out of it. Therefore, it is important to build up this strength of deep understanding at the beginning. It would be like, even if a strong man were to come up and punch this building, still the building wouldn’t shake. Likewise, if you have a deep understanding of the framework at the beginning, then the subtle arguments later in the text will not throw you off balance. You’ll be able to understand them.

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