Three Ways to Prepare a Dharma Talk

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.

If you find this helpful, consider our year-long meditation teacher training.

💬 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 lit