I want to respond to Doug McFerran’s comment on my post "How this Jesuit became Buddhist.": Doug is an old friend whom I met through a group of former Jesuits. He said that it seemed to him that I always needed a teacher, and that he was the opposite. After I got over being defensive, I thought “good point: do we need a teacher and what for?” I had to give up feeling that I am just some weak ninny follower who needs a guru, but I can do that. There is almost universal insistence across all Buddhist schools that the transmission of the Buddha Dharma requires a student-teacher relationship. It’s not just a way of buying the teacher’s dinner, or maintaining a school’s stronghold on a student's mind and pocketbook. That’s just the way it is in Buddhism.
Buddhism is not a revealed religion. There is no deposit of faith that closed with the death of the last of Buddha's original disciples. Of course there are lots of texts, many more that actually probably should be considered than what comes to us as the gospel of Jesus; there is also a lot of history, teachers fighting with each other, sects, scandals and disputes, all the usual stuff of human interactions. But ultimately only our own experience shows us the path. That is all we got. When the Buddha died (if I can paraphrase and even if I am not allowed to, I will), he said, “You’re on your own. I’ve given you 40 years of training. I hope it actually did some good. Everything is always changing. You’ll have to hold up your experience carefully and examine it. Try not to take any wooden nickels.”*
The result is that although there is a huge body of textual material, we have an oral religious tradition. It’s been sliced and diced by thousands and thousands of monks over approximately 93 or 95 generations since the parinirvana of the Lord Buddha, but if you want to do Buddhism, you find a teacher. My cab driver in Bangkok, in the West we’d call him a pious man, said to me, “I have a lama.” He doesn’t just go to church. At the very core of his personal practice is a person we might recognize as a monk or teacher whom he talks to about his life. The Dalai Lama has teachers, the best that money can buy, but there are men who are his teachers. He’s supposedly an incarnate Bodhisattva but he has teachers. Go figure. Every monk and nun, every student, most pious laymen and women where I live in northern India also have teachers. They probably don’t talk to them on a regular basis as we do in zen, but at some point when they decided to practice their Buddhism, to “take refuge,” a teacher accepted them, and usually gave them a new name. I have a Tibetan name that Kalu Rinpoche, one of HH’s teachers, gave me in about 1976 and another Japanese name that Phil Whalen gave me when I took the Bodhisattva precepts as a layman in 1991.
In Catholicism we have confession and the other sacraments as a way of making the invisible world present, an outward sign of an inner grace. In Buddhism we meditate, we might take the precepts and we talk. If you’re lucky you will find someone whom you can really talk to. Stuff happens in meditation. It just does. I wouldn’t say that we “deal with it” or as we might say in the West, “handle it” by talking about it, but the actual conversations become part of the practice. It is difficult to explain. Let me tell a story. Father Eimyo LaSalle was the Jesuit priest most responsible for the extraordinary number of Jesuits who have been trained and authorized as Zen teachers in their own right. He is the root teacher of a new lineage of Christian Buddhists. He was never publicly recognized as a teacher in his own right, but I am quite sure that his teacher, Yamada Koun, recognized him. I am in this same lineage. My friend David Weinstein was also a student of Yamada Roshi. David tells the story of often seeing LaSalle, then well past 90, at the zendo in Kamakura doing formal interview with his teacher. One morning David was standing with Yamada as LaSalle was leaving. Yamada turned to David and said, “there is the man who taught me how to practice the koans in life.” Teacher/teaching is not as straightforward as the English word suggests.
A liturgical note: in every Buddhist temple I’ve gone for teaching, there is singing before and after. Inevitably there is a chant that lists all the ancestors, usually with a lot of words of gratitude. On September 6th of each year, there is a founder’s ceremony at Hartford Street, and the names of Issan’s teachers from Siddhartha Gautama through Indian, Chinese, Japanese and American teachers (in an abbreviated form--there are officially more than 90 generations of teachers) are chanted. And then we all ask that his teaching--Issan’s--go on forever. We are not saying that Issan was “the Buddha,” but we acknowledge that he was a vehicle for the teaching and that he made it his own.
When I first came to the Hartford Street Zen Center, every few months a group of monks, mostly from Japan but several Western Buddhists as well, would come by to visit the hospice. I would serve tea, maybe they stayed for zazen, they talked with Steve, Issan and Phil. They asked as many questions as they answered. They were not coming by to inquire after the health of Issan who at this point already had some notoriety as the former drag queen monk. They came to examine how the dharma met the real circumstances of the epidemic in that moment. They came to test Issan’s dharma.
I work with the koans. After more than a thousand years of koan practice, there are several “Koans for Dummies” books that Japanese monks use to cheat, pass and get a cushy assignment. They were usually hidden in the monastery toilets and a few translations are floating around Western centers in various places. (My days of seeking out a rich temple gig are long past, not to say that I haven’t picked up a clue or two from the manuals when I was stuck). What is also true is that teachers who have been authorized to teach are also given another book, “A thousand years of teacher’s notes,” including lots from the oral tradition--great responses, lines of inquiry, questions to ask, even gestures to look for. So when I decided to study the Blue Cliff Record, I went looking for someone who was authorized to teach it. My friend James Ismael Ford put me in touch with one of his senior students, Ed Oberholtzer. Ed and I have been working together every week for more than two years. Ed’s good. He encourages me. He never gives me an answer and when I want to peek at the precious marginalia, he will only talk about it after I have had some insight myself. Is this better than working on my own? Of course. Does this mean that neither of us go out check some juicy piece of modern Zen scholarship about a text, teacher, or sociology? We share it.
And now for the last question that I see at this point: Does anyone need any of this to be happy, or to get enlightened? As you might have guessed, several Buddhists have already considered the question and formulated an answer. Doug, you are an Arhat, a category and description for men and women who have gained their own enlightenment. They looked at the world of samsara and they got it. They found the key and unlocked the door, and achieved a high state of inner peace. They are also called Shravakas, but I think that refers more to the library/self-help stage. But tradition also says that they still haven’t really fully got it. At least in the Mahayana, they are still not bodhisattvas, that is beings who are dedicated to the enlightenment, the freedom of all beings. There’s still too much self there, and for the Mahayanist there is No Self. If you want to figure out what that means, you might need a teacher.
And one last knot in this thread: Having a teacher, at least in my experience, is still very rich. Times are changing. As I said I still work with a teacher. It’s part of Buddhist practice. Since I began to practice meditation, study the scripture and, most importantly, work with the koans, I have had several teachers. I do better than if I were working on my own. I know that from experience. I would describe it more like a mentor relationship, but that seems to describe a higher and lower position. Some of the people that I have talked with have less experience than I do. At this point they all are younger, but in the relationship I consider myself on equal footing. There is always something to learn.
* *Buddha gathered with his monks encouraging them to continue practicing everything he taught them long after he was gone. His words, translated into modern English: “I was only able to point the way for you.” He furthered: “All individual things pass away. Strive on with diligence.”
