A system for creative Dharma study
Over the past few months, I've been developing a new system for thinking about the Dharma. What began as a practical way of organising my notes has gradually turned into a creative extension of my Dharma practice.
In this article, I’m bringing together two things I care deeply about: Dharma reflection and personal knowledge management (PKM). Yes, I’m fully indulging my inner nerd—but there’s a more meaningful reason I want to share all this.
Personal knowledge management
Let’s start with PKM. What is it? You could see it as an umbrella term for all the ways we manage the information that matters to us. Even if you’ve never come across the term before, you already have your own PKM system. It might just mean that you keep all your emails in your inbox and all your documents on your desktop—it’s still a system, even if it’s not one you consciously chose! Maybe you carry a notebook, photograph passages from books you want to remember, or underline good quotes. All of these habits form part of what you could call a ‘personal knowledge management system’.
Perhaps your system is more considered. Maybe you read David Allen’s Getting Things Done back in 2001—“The mind is for having thoughts, not storing them.” Or perhaps you’ve been ‘Building a Second Brain’ with Tiago Forte—“Innovation and impact don’t happen by accident or chance. Creativity depends on a creative process.” There are plenty of resources out there, but in the end, it’s up to each of us to create a system that actually works for us. I’m going to share my own system here—it’s very much a work in progress.
This system is primarily for studying, reflecting on, and communicating the Dharma. It’s a method for digesting the Dharma, making it my own—and ultimately for realising these Dharmic truths in my own experience and finding creative ways to communicate them.
The three levels of wisdom
I’m going to talk about all this using the traditional framework of the three levels of wisdom:
Śruta mayī prajñā – wisdom based on hearing
Cintā mayī prajñā – wisdom based on reflection
Bhāvanā mayī prajñā – wisdom based on meditation
Rather than using the Sanskrit terms, I’ll follow the language U Tejaniya uses, which I came across in Vajradevi’s book Uncontrived Mindfulness. The three kinds of wisdom become: borrowed wisdom, intelligence, and insight.
Borrowed wisdom is what we take in from outside—we hear a teaching in a talk, see it on YouTube, or read it in a book. We might understand it, even feel inspired by it, but we haven’t yet made it our own. It’s as if we’ve only borrowed it.
Then comes intelligence—this refers to all the ways we engage with that teaching. We think about it, question it, reflect on it in our own experience. This is the process of digestion, of making the teaching our own.
Finally, there’s insight—you could call this wisdom in the truest sense. It’s when the realisation of the teaching lands in us, not just in the mind but in the heart. It becomes part of how we see and move through the world.
Thinking in the box
What does the system I’ve been creating actually consist of? At its heart, it’s a ‘box’. A box of notes that connect to one another—it’s known as a zettelkasten. My box lives in a digital app called Obsidian, but it could just as easily be a literal box, like the one Niklas Luhmann used to build his original zettelkasten (a zettel is a slip of paper or a note, and kasten means box).
Inside the box are roughly four kinds of notes. In the zettelkasten world, these notes are given different names depending on who’s writing about it. Personally, I like the terms Bob Dotto uses in A System of Writing—my favourite book on zettelkasten.
Here are the four types of notes I use:
Fleeting notes – quick jottings, back-of-the-envelope style.
Reference notes – notes taken while reading or listening, with the source clearly recorded.
Main notes – each contains a single idea, designed to be connected with other ideas.
Hub notes – like the hub of a wheel, these gather and connect related main notes around a central theme.
As we go through the system, I’ll draw out how each of these note types contributes to making the whole thing a creative Dharma practice in itself.
Using this Dharma Zettelkasten as a practice of working with the 3 levels of wisdom
Level one - Borrowed wisdom
The traditional term is śruta mayī prajñā—wisdom that we’ve received but haven’t yet made our own. In the context of this Dharma reflection system, this first level is represented by fleeting notes and reference notes.
A fleeting note is a temporary way of remembering something. Before phones, we used biros to write on our hands—remember that? Now there are all sorts of high- and low-tech ways to take a fleeting note. They might be in your journal, in a notes app on your phone, or scribbled on the back of an envelope.
A note might be:
A book recommendation
An idea for a retreat theme
A possible present for my brother
An idea I have while walking: "How could I contemplate the lakṣaṇas in direct experience?"
A fleeting note might be any number of things, but only a few of them are relevant to our new system. In this case, the last one.
The main thing you need is a system for transferring fleeting notes to somewhere more permanent. Here’s how it works for me:
At the end of each week, I do a short review, tidy things up, and plan the week ahead. One item on my checklist is to gather up my fleeting notes. Some are already in my ‘fleeting notes’ file in the zettelkasten. Others might be in a phone app, in my journal, or in a photo on my phone. Now I’ll do something more permanent with them:
The book recommendation goes onto my book list
The retreat theme goes into my planning system
The present idea onto my shopping list
The idea about the lakṣaṇas goes into the zettelkasten
(Some things you jot down won’t go anywhere—when you come back to them, they no longer seem interesting or relevant. Those go in the bin.)
Depending on how much time I have, I might just add the lakṣaṇas note to my digital ‘fleeting notes’ file as a reminder to return to it later. Or, I might take a bit of time to turn it into a main note. And that brings us to the next level of wisdom, where we begin to actively work with our ideas.
Dharmic threads can come to us at any time—often when we’re doing something else. That’s why it’s important to have systems for capturing them.
They might take the form of a question: What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘hidden in plain sight’? Is reality hidden in plain sight?
Or a line from something we’ve read: “Unreal imagination exists.”
Or a moment of realising we haven’t fully understood something: What’s the connection between nimitta and craving?
If we capture these as fleeting notes when they arise, we can come back and reflect on them more deeply later. So we now have a bunch of fleeting notes, looking something like this:
Click on the notes above to see them in full screen. When we get to the next level of wisdom—intelligence—we’ll start to work with these fleeting notes, turning them into something more useful.
Making reference notes
I like Bob Dotto’s definition of a reference note—notes that you take while reading (or watching or listening).
If I’m reading a book, I’ll make a single note where I reference interesting ideas. I’ll include the page number and a short phrase that will remind me of the idea. If it’s a podcast or a video, I’ll note the source and the timestamp for any ideas I want to revisit.
Here’s my reference note for Bob Dotto’s book:
Chances are, reference notes won’t start as digital notes. These notes might begin in my journal. Or if I’m reading a physical book that doesn’t belong to me, I’ll use an index card as a bookmark and make a note of interesting ideas on it. If it’s my own book, I’ll mark the passages directly in the book. Or if I’m reading on a Kindle, as I did with the book above, I’ll highlight the sections I want to make notes on.
The idea is to capture things we might want to turn into main notes. This is going to require quite a bit of work, so we have to be selective about what we save. Sometimes, I read a book that’s so good I want to underline everything! But the point isn’t to create a summary. I’m looking for particular things. Here are some of my guidelines:
I don’t write down what I already know. I already know it!
I don’t make notes on things that have no connection to the themes already in my zettelkasten. I’m clear about what I’m pursuing. I’m reading a great book on Ritual at the moment, but I’m making very few notes because it’s not a theme I’m focused on right now. I might return to it in the future.
Richard Feynman suggests having a dozen favourite problems—things that represent what you’re currently interested in.
I imagine I’m in an ongoing conversation with my zettelkasten. I want to bring in notes that are relevant to that conversation. They might veer off on a tangent, but they’re still connected.
Level two - Intelligence
The second level – cintā mayī prajñā – is wisdom based on thinking and reflecting. This is the process of absorbing, integrating, and digesting all the borrowed wisdom. We use our intelligence to work with the information we’ve gathered in our fleeting and reference notes. There are many ways to do this, but one key method is through writing. That’s where our next types of notes come in: main notes and hub notes.
Making Main Notes
With our main notes, we move from ‘taking notes’—a more passive process of borrowing other people’s wisdom—to making notes. Making notes means engaging creatively with the material, making the wisdom our own. We are using writing as a reflection process. When someone commented on how great it was that Richard Feynman kept a record of his thinking, he replied, “Notes aren’t a record of my thinking process, they are my thinking process.”
While everyone wants to think outside the box, the zettelkasten system means we’re doing our thinking in the box!
What goes into a main note? It starts with either a reference note or a fleeting note, or perhaps a combination of both, though not too many. Take my question, What’s the meaning of the phrase ‘hidden in plain sight’? Is reality hidden in plain sight? I’ll sit down and turn that into a main note.
A main note has three essential elements:
A title, I try to make the title a summary of the idea contained in the note
An explanation of the idea in your own words
At least one link to another note. Above, you can see the links to other notes at the bottom.
The main note can include other elements too. Starting from the top, you might also have:
An ID number for the note
Tags
A link to the source
A link to a hub note (we’ll come to hubs next)
When you sit down to write a main note, you can expect it to take anywhere from 15 minutes to 30-40 minutes. It’s a slow process—and that’s the point! We’re digesting the borrowed wisdom, and that takes time.
I work on the main note elements in this order:
Write about the idea in my own words.
Add tags and keywords to help me find this note later.
Think about how this note links to other ideas in my zettelkasten. Add those links at the bottom.
Decide on the ID—where will this note live? Below, you can see where it lives. It could also have gone in various other places!
Add the previous note as the first link—there should be a clear connection between them, which is why you’ve chosen this location.
The note ‘hidden in plain sight’ has a particular location, it lives between other notes that it is related to.
Adding these links takes time, but it’s one of the most creative parts of the process. How does this idea connect with my other ideas? Making those connections can bring something new to light. In Obsidian, and other similar apps, you can open up a graph view, where you can see all the links going into that note and all the links coming out of it.
Graph view can show you all the notes that this note is linked to, even though some of them live far away.
These main notes are sometimes referred to as ‘permanent notes’. The idea is that you’ll be working with these notes indefinitely—they are your treasure trove. Every time I use a note, I’ll try to improve it slightly: a little editing, a new link, another tag. The goal is to add value to the note as time goes by.
Making Hub Notes
You’ll notice that your notes begin to cluster around specific themes. When that happens, you can create a ‘hub note’. Here’s mine for the theme of ‘dukkha’. To add a note, you can simply drag it in or start typing the title, and it will pop up. Alternatively, you can add the hub as a property at the top of a main note, so that when you create the note, you can choose which hub to connect it to (see the ‘hidden in plain sight’ note above).
The beauty of these hubs is that notes can be simultaneously linked to different hubs. If we were using a more conventional folder system, we’d have to decide which folder a note goes into. Does it belong in the folder on ‘dukkha’ or the one on ‘perception’? And if I want it in both folders, do I have to duplicate it? I’ve used folders on my computer for years and ended up with lots of duplicated and reworked notes!
With this system, one note can be connected to many different themes, in various ways—through its address, its links, and the hubs it’s connected to.
Here’s the graph view of the ‘Dukkha Hub’.
Level three - Insight
“If I pointed out one corner of a matter and the student couldn’t come back with the other three, I would not repeat myself.”
The second level of wisdom, intelligence, means working with what we’ve received. And work is the operative word here—it’s an effort.
It’s all very well to read a brilliant book, but when you reach the end and put it back on the shelf, what do you actually carry away with you? The system I’m describing here is a lot of work, but that’s the point.
So, what then is the relationship between the 'work'—the effort we put into understanding the teachings—and the experience of insight, the third level of wisdom?
This seems to operate in a mysterious way. Chances are, those moments of insight don’t come while we’re sitting at the computer, making connections between our notes. They’re more likely to arise when we step away from all of that—perhaps when we take a walk or do the dishes.
Insight seems dependent on putting in the work, but it’s just as dependent on us putting down our tools and deeply relaxing—whether that’s through meditation or lying in the bath. We put in the work here and now, but the results often appear somewhere else in space and time. We might not even see the connection between the two.
Bhāvanā mayī prajñā, often called wisdom based on meditation, means the wisdom becomes part of us. The metaphor of nutrition works here: the second level might be the process of digestion, while at the third level, we have fully assimilated the teaching and it becomes wisdom proper.
“The culmination of wisdom is freedom from all views. You have nothing to say. When all the answers are in your being, you have no need to keep them in your head.”
Conclusion
I’ve been studying the Dharma for almost 40 years. I remember at the beginning of that journey having the feeling that I had finally found something I would never grow bored of—something so vast I would never reach the end. On the contrary, it just gets more and more interesting as the decades go by.
Living in the digital era, much of that learning is now stored on my computer. Until recently, all these fascinating ideas lived in documents—documents within folders, within other folders. For example, the idea of ‘hidden in plain sight’ as a metaphor for awakening was buried in the middle of a talk I gave in 2002. In that talk, it was connected to a few other ideas, but it wasn’t free to mingle with anything else.
This is what I love most about the zettelkasten system for Dharma study. All the ideas in it are completely free to interact with all the other ideas. Because of this, an endless number of new connections are possible.
As you can probably now imagine, the process of making notes takes time, but that process is the practice itself—it’s the practice of Dharma reflection.
As someone who teaches the Dharma, it’s also an investment. When it comes to putting together an article like this, planning a retreat, or even writing a book, I can simply go to the zettelkasten and it’s all there. In fact, if there aren’t enough notes clustered around a particular theme, it might not be the right time to communicate something about that theme. But when there are, it gets really exciting. For example, I’ve been noticing this whole cluster of notes around futility and nothingness!
In this article, I’ve shared how the zettelkasten system can help with Dharma study and reflection. It allows us to engage with the teachings more deeply, making them our own. Whether for teaching, writing, or personal practice, the zettelkasten can help us work with the Dharma in a more dynamic way.
I’d love to write more on how to actually create something from the zettelkasten, but I think this article is long enough as it is—maybe next time! If you have any questions, do leave them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them or write more on the topic sometime.
If you would be interested in learning to set up your own system for Dharma study, let me know. I’m wondering about creating a short course in the near future.
Resources
A System for Writing - Bob Dotto. This is by far the best book on setting up your own zettelkasten, beautifully clear and simple.
Obsidian - Is a free digital note taking app. It uses markdown files that live on your own computer.
