When Our (Zen) Teachers Fall Short

Dear friend,

Thank you for the courage to reach out for another’s thoughts on this situation.

But what to say?

As you appear to already know I am a great admirer of all the teachers you’ve named. I think each presents the Dharma in clear and accurate ways that have helped me on my path and which I deeply feel has helped many others, as well…

And now there is this terrible split within their sangha with recriminations, particularly in the form of the senior teacher’s public rebukes of Dharma heirs, but, sadly, not only from the teacher.

So, what’s our take away? First, I want to assert and underscore the essential healthfulness of the Dharma itself. While I sit at the “liberal” end of the Buddhist spectrum having publicly expressed modernest understandings of “karma”and “rebirth,” together with Buddhists of all stripes, I find this path we walk does indeed take us on a journey through a direct insight into who and what we are to a place of healing and essential healthiness. This way is all about our individual identity with sunyata, emptiness, or as I prefer, boundlessness. Our direct insight into this truth is the source of healing and I believe of a course for life in this world.

But it doesn’t transmute our bodies into something other than what they are. And with our bodies our brains and therefore our minds, fleshy things, subject to sickness, old age and death. We, you and I are complex compilations of many things, bits of string, sticks, feathers, piles of muck, and so on. They are you. They are me. All tenuous, all dynamic. And whatever that compilation is, that’s what we deal with. So, if we’re like me, somewhat on the graspy side, awakening doesn’t keep me from struggling with eating too much, and for years more losing the struggle than winning. With another person the issue might be anger or paranoia or who knows? The list is long. But that grasping and anger and various forms of certainty, while no doubt demons; cannot be expunged, they’re each part of what we are. And, weirdly, they are the stuff of our awakening. Our path, I find, also lessens their stranglehold, mostly. But the path is endless, the struggle continues, and always the stuff of our awakening is that stuff.

Regarding this and the constant examples of our and our teachers failures, I personally take comfort in the old Zen saw that even the Buddha himself is still practicing. So, a teacher can be clear as glass and think people are out to get her or him, now this, now that. Our job, I really, really feel, is to take the lessons, both good and ill, and make them our own. Again, as the Buddha is said to have said, we need to not put another’s head on top of our own. Ultimately, and even relatively, our practice is ours, never someone else’s. So you, like me, need to take what we can from our teachers, and then always, always, turn it back to ourselves.

Who am I here? What am I thinking here? What is my feeling here? Notice, and let go. Not in the sense of giving up a critical mind. But in the sense of not letting one thought or feeling take over.

What I really like about your sangha is their acknowledgment that our training is endless, and that we, whether “student” or “teacher” are really all students, all unsui, clouds and water people, endlessly beginners on the great way. So, I’m grateful for all teachers. And I also think for myself. And, most important, I continue my own way, heartened and chastened as appropriate.

My two cents, off the top of my head.

Yrs in the Dharma,

James