Why Teacher-Student Relationships Often Get Wacky

Power. That’s one big reason. Or more specifically, often when teacher-student relationships go south, the power relationships have either been uncleanly defined, or there is a change necessary due to whatever is happening in a person’s practice (the “teacher” being one of those people) and the other won’t/can’t/don’t want to go where they’d have to go to keep the relationship alive. That isn’t bad. Each person’s true freedom is the important thing.

I have a lot to say about this and I’m wondering if it is too much for the blog medium … but I’ll throw it out there and see if anybody has anything to throw back. What I’ve got to say here can also be applied to Zen organizations but I’m focussed on the dyad of the teacher-student mostly today.

Power is one of the reasons I don’t want to talk about Zen organization at the upcoming teacher conference – power relationships are usually unspoken and yet are among the most important factors in organizations as well as in relationships but Zen folk often tend not to want to talk about power. It isn’t considered polite.

A few years ago I began meeting with a consultant about power. I’d been teaching for more than ten years and had at least my share of priests who ordained and then bailed out as well as other senior students who came to a certain point in their practice and that was it.

And that’s another big reason that the teacher-student relationship gets wacky at some point. Most people who start Zen don’t continue until dharma transmission but teachers are human and sometimes want people to continue together and feel an “investment” in the student and maybe some “obligation” that oughta be there, etc. And expectations and disappointments and disillusionments come up for the student, of course, and this is important.

It is a major piece of a teacher’s and a community’s work to mature to the point where they don’t try to manipulate people into staying (or coming) and get traumatized and full of self judgment when somebody leaves. Or all puffed up when the membership swells. Also, maturity comes more slowly in isolated settings like the Midwest where we don’t have much first hand knowledge of similar dynamics unfolding in the communities around town.

But I want to talk about power in this post. What follows is a summary of the conceptual background that my consultant and I used as we reflected on various teacher-student relationships I’d had.

Bottom line: We’re in the midst of a major cultural transformation in regards to power and our spiritual relationships would be well served if they evolved to meet the challenges, like the man said,

Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’..

Michel Focault studied power extensively and found three types that I’ll borrow and paraphrase from the work of David White (the Narrative therapist not any of the other ones) for the Zen context. I’m going to post my rough reflections on the first form of power today and then the other two in succeeding posts.

The first is traditional power. This is the old feudal model carried into modern life. It is where Zen power relationships have been for a long time. Everything is really clear and some people respond well to that. For a while.

I trained in Japan at a monastery that used this type of power almost exclusively and expressly. It was like living with my grandfather. Or with my football coach. It was his place and that was that. Complaint, suggestions, feedback … were all so utterly silly that no one bothered. But there isn’t here, of course….

Traditional power establishes social control through a system of institutionalized moral judgments that is exercised largely by the Zen teacher and senior people, maybe including the Zen center board. Traditional power instills in people the aspiration to achieve the sanction of enlightenment (however that is defined in that tradition). However, “enlightenment” is located at a defined center and is taken up and expressed according to the particular and unitary interests of those who try to appropriate and monopolize it, however “universal” it is spun. Traditional power is characterized by symbols of influence – “including pomp, ceremony, public punishment, and awe inspiring edifices”– and mechanisms of surveillance and structures for the policing of people’s practice and understanding.

If you don’t believe it, go to a Japanese monastery. And then look around at the more subtle ways it happens close to home.

Although traditional power can produce great clarity and energy in pursuit of practice and enlightenment, when the practitioner is not living closely with the teacher, well … the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. The defined practices can so easily get twisted into a person’s defense system rather than expressing awakening, while the responsibility for the effects of the maligned practices are assigned to the teacher. And we have the recipe for projected distortions, blame and shame.

Also, recent history has pretty much convinced everybody that the emperor has no clothes. Or at least The Teacher (The Roshi) is more or less a Bozo on the bus of life like everybody else. The teacher might know a lot about Zen, talk a good line, and be really settled in their own life but that doesn’t mean he/she can give good relationship, parenting, financial advice, or what have you. So although we can pretend to enter the traditional power relationship, almost nobody believes the paradigm deep down. Maybe when there is a big age difference it is easier to pretend but a traditional power relationship is built on a kind of spiritual masquerade. When the going gets rough, the paradigm is pitched out the window. Then what?

Hasta la vista, baby.

Most Zen teachers who trained with a Japanese teacher experienced traditional power first hand and frequently, particularly if they became priests. I certainly did with Katagiri-roshi. After I was ordained, for instance, he told me a lot about what he thought I should do with my life from the details of practice to suggesting that I buy a house and have other Zen students live in it. He expected me to do what he said. Somehow that surprised me.

Another issue is how the form of power relates to the central practice. If a person is doing koan study, probably a good measure of traditional power is necessary in the dokusan/sanzen room and the issue becomes how that power if worked out in other areas like fund raising and other organizational activities.

If the central practice is shikantaza and the “forms” then it can get even murkier and there is even greater need for quiet reflection and open talk on the power relationships.

Another stray thought (before I jump into some paid work) is how old forms have a way of reasserting themselves, sometimes under the surface of awareness or justified in some kind of parent/child way. Traditional power keeps reasserting itself like a dysfunctional family pattern.

One other stray thought is how this form of power is VERY male and now lots of teachers and practitioners are female and the old dogma of the five obstructions may be pretty well smashed. So now what?

Okay, like I said, I’ll develop this more in days to come and see if anybody wants to play with these issues at the conference next week. Your thoughts welcome.