I often advise people who seem genuinely interested in Buddhism to find a dharma teacher. By this I don't mean that one must make a lifelong commitment to a guru (unless you want to, of course). Even if you only participate in an occasional short retreat led by a teacher, and practice solo most of the time, the short retreats can make a huge difference.
Occasionally I run into someone who says he will practice with a teacher as soon as he finds one who measures up to some ideal of perfection. And since none ever do, he'll get enlightened by himself, thank you very much.
Along these lines, Dosho Port has a post up about the ideal "true" teacher. Among western students, he says, this desire for an ideal "has led to a lot of inflation, projection, and intoxication by both teachers (speaking from experience) and students in our scene today."
Dosho quotes Norman Fisher --
"...the 'best' teachers are often the worst teachers; the more brilliant the teacher, the more exciting, the more enlightened, the worse it is for the student. The student ends up lusting after time with the teacher, hanging on her every word, and forgetting that this is about him or her, the student, not the teacher."
Dosho says of his own teacher, the late Dainin Katagiri Roshi, "I did put him on a pedestal for a while but fortunately he kept falling off and I finally got that he was a regular person like me."
I have been fortunate to have worked with Zen teachers who, in very different ways, refused to stand on the pedestals I wanted to prop under them. There are some Zen teachers out there who are less scrupulous, however.
I've been reading an advance copy of a book titled Nothing Is Hidden by Zen teacher Barry Magid -- not published yet; I'll let you know when it is -- and a lot of it deals with the idealization (and de- idealization) of teachers. For example, he says there is tragedy in the story of Zen in America. "The tragic elements of the story are real and reflect the complications that arose at a particular historical moment, when a culture sick of its own materialism was susceptible to uncritical reverence of anyone who held out a spiritual alternative."
Now that much of that uncritical reverence has been betrayed by scandals, where do we go from here?
We respond to the gap between the real and the ideal, so to speak, in all kinds of ways. There is compartmentalizing (his dharma is pure even if his behavior isn't) as well as denial. Some people, upon realizing their impossible ideal was a fantasy, flip to the other extreme and see Buddhism as a sham that must be exposed (see Michael Jerryson). And then there are those who refuse to take refuge in the sangha, preferring a solo practice in which the ideal teacher can remain an ideal. An abstract ideal, but an ideal nonetheless.
Why do we need teachers? I think the best definition of a dharma teacher is a person who stands outside your projected reality and guides you out of it. The biggest pitfall of a solo practice is that it nearly always becomes just an extension of your projected reality. Then we're like fish with no concept of water; we persuade ourselves that we're flying when we're really still swimming in the same old pond, albeit with the rocks re-arranged a bit.
This kind of student-teacher practice is a collaborative effort, something the teacher and student are doing together. This is not something you can get from books, even books by famous teachers. Needless to say, it's not something you can get from a solo practice.
I'm sure you've heard the phrase "When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." This refers to killing our preconceptions of what a Buddha is supposed to be. We might say the same thing about the almighty ideal teacher.
At Nyoho Zen, Koun Franz writes,
Beyond all those categories, there is the place where you actually practice; there is the teacher you actually know. There is what you want from the practice, and there is what your teacher is capable of giving.
As I said, we're making this up as we go along. But it's not just about these new shores, or about ordained versus lay. We've always been making this up as we go along. Where there are two individuals, it will always be new. It will always be an experiment. Any one of us could probably write volumes about what we think it should be -- I could. But it's not that. It's not that simple.
This is our beautiful mess. We make it. And we can never completely clean it up.
Don't let an ideal teacher get in the way.
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