Enhancing the power of understanding

Power of understanding is a rewarding cognitive capacity required for all of us from early childhood to the highest level of intellectual settings. Among other things, the concept of understanding plays a vital role in education. When I was a second-year undergraduate, I was so curious to know why some of my colleagues could understand subjects much faster than the others, and this curiosity compelled me to research on how understanding manifests in our minds. My literature review revealed that the ultimate happiness/truth stated in Buddhism is a matter of understanding the world differently from the way we do it generally. Literature also showed that many people in Buddha’s time understood the ultimate truth while listening to the discourse of the Buddha. Those who could not understand a matter then and there had to develop certain cognitive skills through various cognitive tasks such as further listening, discussing, thinking, and meditating. This is equally applicable to our educational settings as well because some students understand the subject matter during the lecture itself, while the others need involve in additional reading activities, discussions, tutorial work, and so on.