Internalizing the seeker and the teacher

When we go to a good university, we assume that our teachers are top notch.  We can trust them to be on the cutting-edge, so to speak.  Eventually, many of us find out that our teachers were not so smart.  Their main advantage over us, when we first began our class, is they've read a lot more books on the subject than we have.  These same teachers were also, at the time, better at explaining the subject.

When Buddhists say they have a 'teacher' they are assuming a great deal, perhaps too much.  When I first began to study Zen with my teacher, like a tyro (which I was!) I made huge assumptions about his knowledge of Zen.  He wasn't even the Buddhist equivalent of a Christian seminary graduate.  What he did know is how to conduct Japanese funerals and do rituals.

Why, as beginners, we are credulous probably has more than one answer—in fact, many answers.  In a way, being credulous is not a positive path to learning.  It is almost being downright block headed.  The only way to overcome this—and I know it sounds a bit strange—we, ourselves, have to internalize the role of teacher and student.  One has to be a seeker, and a teacher who has the ability to find the adequate answer and know also what the inadequate answer is.  Again, it may sound strange to say this, but we also need to cultivate our non-knowledge of Buddhism so as to ask the right questions, hopefully, to find the adequate answer.  In this respect, an external teacher is of limited help.  Some can point the Way, others are not so good at it.

The only advantage with having a teacher (and it's really no long term advantage), we can defer our lack of wisdom to our teacher.  He alone knows everything about Buddhism; we know nothing.  This is a dangerous position to fall into.  One can easily become a Zen center Buddhist who has reverence for the teacher but much less reverence for the Buddha's words even though the Buddha is supposed to be the supreme teacher.  This situation easily becomes  a cult.

It really means nothing to have a Buddhist teacher if all one can manage to do is sit on a zafu, do a ritual or two, and have little or no background knowledge in the Buddha's discourses which includes the Nikayas, the Agamas, and also Mahayana Sutras.  Following and defering our ignorance of Buddhism to a teacher, really not learning anything of what the Buddha actually taught, leads inevitably to failure.

 

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