Genju asks, "Which do you follow: the teacher or the teachings?" It's a good question. From reading comments here the past four years, I get the impression that some of you do follow one teacher pretty faithfully, and others of you are more focused on the teachings.
There's no "should" here, but there is something to be clarified. And re-clarified. And your answer might change as your practice changes, and that's fine.
I think it's common, for example, for people to begin practice drawn to a particular teacher. Something about this teacher stirs something in you, and you have to hear more of what you say. And then, over time, you may realize that it's not the teacher, but the teaching, that stirs you.
And again, it's common for people to be drawn to teachings, and do much studying on their own. But then they may find a teacher who illuminates the teaching for them in a powerful way.
One answer to the question is that the teacher is an embodiment of the teaching, and so following one is following the other. And that's not a bad answer. Of course teachers are also people, and it's a dangerous thing to put one on gilded pedestal labeled "Embodiment of the Dharma."
An interesting exercise -- turn the question around a bit and ask yourself, is this sangha about the teacher or the teaching? When the teacher is not around, do you talk about the teaching or what Master Says about the teaching? What happens when the teacher is challenged? Can you laugh about his flaws, or do you not see his flaws? Does he encourage students to trust him or to trust themselves? Is he generous with his time to all who approach him, or does he seem to save his best stuff for his favored inner circle?
And what does the teacher follow? The dharma or his own career?
Genju writes,
"... in various encounters, the rumble of territorial markings became audible. Â Well surely I couldn't have filtered out the human tendency to want, to crave, to feel unsafe and therefore to bare fangs, set boundaries, and draw lines. Â Apparently, I did. Â I do. Â This is where the practice of simply noting is a good one; it helps negotiate through the conversations that circle the marketing of the self and poorly masked rhetorical questions. Â I mean noting that in myself as well because certainly there were many, many times when I caught myself falling into being the product rather than the person."
Certainly there are dharma heirs with the proper "institutional cred" who are champion territorial markers. Dennis Merzel is an extreme example, although there are others. Nathan at Dangerous Harvests adds,
"The pressure to be a product is damn strong, so much so that even spiritual teachers are falling for it in droves. Being a person with some wisdom mixed with a bag full of delusion doesn't feel good enough. Being a person who takes a shit and can't quite wipe it all clean isn't sexy enough. Being a person who is articulate one minute, and has nothing helpful to say the next just doesn't cut it. And so, we end up with teachers with trademarks at the end of their names. Teachers who spew endless amounts of flowery, high fullutent language. Teachers who market themselves as healers, and then end up abusing the hell out of anyone who gets close to them."
Brad Warner has a post up called "Betrayal of the Spirit" about successful teachers and their lesser successors. So often when a successful founding teacher dies, the successor(s) tear the institution apart. And this happens even with great and selfless founding teachers; somehow, their heirs were less great and less selfless. There may be many different reasons for this. But it seems to usually come down to allowing a teacher to eclipse the teaching, somewhere along the line.
I have been wonderfully fortunate to have worked personally with skillful teachers who lived to teach the dharma. I would add that my teachers have been people who were and are deeply respectful of the tradition and our Asian dharma ancestors. They were not in a big toot to innovate or "westernize." Although being traditional is no guarantee of quality, genuine reverence for the tradition and the ancestors helps us to not get in the way, I think.
At some point I began to think that there are no teachers and students, but just practice, and practitioners who enable each others' practice in many ways. Sometimes one is a new student squirming through a meditation period. Sometimes one is a priest offering incense. Sometimes one is speaking to an assembly. Sometimes one is scrubbing pots in the kitchen or picking herbs in the garden. Sometimes one is a monk of ancient Gandhara, or a Tang Dynasty nun, or a Burmese novice on his first alms round, or a demon-conquering tantric master in old Tibet. And sometimes one is a layperson, and sometimes one is a westerner.
The practice reaches everywhere, throughout space and time. We are all students; we are all teachers.
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