Do I need a teacher?

Do I need a teacher?

No.  One of my own old teachers, Russel Williams, was enlightened by a horse.  Seriously.

Uhhhh…was he on some wild acid trip?

Nope. He was an orphan barely scraping by and took a job looking after horses.  He had no background with the animals and was clueless how to manage them.  To solve this, he observed them free from commentary and interpretation.  Living with them 24/7 for months, his awareness sharpened until one early, frigid English morning, he saw the white breath of a horse for the first time.  He’d seen it a million times, but this was the first time he really saw it.  At that moment, the separation between him, the horses, and the English countryside dissolved. He was never the same since.

This happened pre-WWII days, long before Buddhism had made any inroads in England.  The next few years, Russel sought counsel. All that he found was perplexed Anglican priests. It wouldn’t be until he met the leader of London’s Buddhist Society that he could start to make sense of what happened to him and rule-out the nagging fear that he’d gone insane.

From there, he continued practicing and studying. In no time, he started leading his own little group in his hometown of Manchester and kept it up for the remaining 50 odd years of his life. My root teacher, Ajahn Sudhiro, confirmed his enlightenment.

Did your teacher actually say that Russell was enlightened?

No, but that’s also the monastic culture in Thailand.  It’s almost unthinkable for monks to say, “This guy’s really enlightened” or “That guy’s a charlatan,” or “This meditator can enter this level of meditation.”  Otherwise, students will use these pronouncements and titles in place of their own observation and discernment.  In all of my years with him, he never commented on senior teachers like that with me, nor did he bad mouth them behind their backs.

So how did you know that he was enlightened?

Ajahn Sudhiro placed Russel's hands on his head and invited him to sit with him on the dharma seat. This might seem like a small gesture for Westerners, but it’s a sign of respect for Thais. It said: this man is my superior. And Ajahn Sudhiro was right. By that point, Russel had led the Manchester Buddhist Society for decades. He was a quiet but towering figure in English Buddhism that had led the way in making enlightenment available and ordinary for thousands of Englishmen. Russel had also been living enlightenment for decades longer than the more junior Ajahn Sudhiro. Russel was his senior. He wasn’t a monk, but that’s irrelevant. Awake is awake.

But I hear so much about the teacher here and in other traditions.  In Hinduism, the guru’s supreme, second only to God.  In Catholicism, the tradition that raised me, having proper guidance on the scripture’s essential.

That’s the other side of things.  Ultimately, awakening is available to us all the time.  As Su Shi said:

The voices of the river valley are the [Buddha's] wide and long tongue,
The form of the mountains is nothing other than his pure body.
Through the night, eighty-four thousand verses.
On another day, how can I tell them to others?

A leaf, a pile of dog shit, a crusty plate left overnight in the sink.  This and everything else in the universe is preaching oneness endlessly, but can you hear their sermon?  99.9999% can’t.  And for the other .0001%, even after they hear it, that recognition is the beginning, not the end, of their spiritual path.  Russell himself spent years after his initial awakening to deepen and integrate it.
For all practical purposes, a teacher is necessary.  The wide availability of videos, online courses, translated works, and contemporary books lessens the need for a flesh-and-blood teacher, but like with any other craft, it’s quicker and better to practice with one than without.  Another important reason to have a living teacher: serious practice is hazardous.

Hazardous?

Yes and it frustrates the hell out of me when this is ignored.  Teachers have online meditation courses but don’t drive home the point that this stuff can destroy you if you’re not careful.  That’s not a good selling point, though.  Come to my week-long where you can relax, recharge, and reconnect to your truer self.  The fine print: derailing your life and/or suicide a possible side-effect.

Suicide?

Yes, suicide.

After a grueling retreat in Japan, one Western man had a massive breakthrough and was confident he finally got the big enlightenment. Life-and-death, a meaningless dream. Desire and fear, the passage of wind. His heart, an untrammeled ocean.  A few days later, he plunged head first down a 10 meter waterfall to prove that he had gone beyond all fear.  He died shortly thereafter.

That’s not suicide, though.

True. There are many other stories out there, like Megan Vogt’s. Prior to the retreat, she was a healthy, happy, adventurous 25 year old. That ended after one 10-day retreat. During the intensive, Vogt went into psychosis and spent 8 days following in a psych ward following it and could hardly function. Two days later, she threw herself off a bridge.

And did either of these people have teachers?

The first one, yes. The second one, not really.

In the first case, the meditator was so wrapped up in his delusions that even the teacher, one of the great Zen masters of the 20th century, couldn’t get through to him. In Vogt’s case, there was a resident teacher at the meditation center, but they had no relationship outside of a brief, daily interview during the retreat. Before and after that, there was no communication. She was desperate for help and emailing the place for guidance, but none came. If she’d had someone to look carefully after her before, during, and after, I suggest that her death and many others’ could’ve been avoided.

Having a teacher doesn’t mean disasters won’t strike.  Zen practice revolutionizes the way that you see yourself and the world.  And, like all strong medicines, it carries risks, especially when that medicine’s taken in high doses and without professional supervision.

I don’t want to gatekeep Zen practices, as not everyone has the chance to work directly with a teacher, but I also see that the doctor-prescription-patient analogy is apt here.  If you’re taking low doses of ibuprofen, the dosage and warnings on the bottle’s enough for most people.  There’s always going to be a risk of death from taking any medicine, but that’s life.  You risk death every time you drive anywhere or stay anywhere in your home.  Shit happens, but we’ve got to get on with life in the face of such risk.  The low-dose of ibuprofen is like the lady who sits daily for 30 minutes and reads a Zen book with her morning coffee.  This is low-risk over-the-counter Zen.

However, if you’re taking strong medicine, risks grow.  A doctor needs to evaluate other things going on in the patient’s life.  They need to look at the patient’s history and see how mentally fit they are.  After assessing the student, an experienced teacher can start a regiment using measured doses.  It might be intensive meditation for months without seeing another soul. A teacher might decide it’s best to avoid intensive practice and suggest light meditation practice and a lot of service work.

Diverting from the recommendations can be catastrophic.  Overdose.  Organ damage.  Death.  These are all on the table when dealing with potent medicine.  Same holds for intense Zen practice. Intense Zen practice includes intensive retreats to a daily practice of a few hours a day.  Intense practice should be done with professional supervision, otherwise it’s risky.  I’ve seen too many good people get messed up bad from intensive practice, almost always without supervision.
Another warning: for people with ongoing mental health problems, even mild forms of practice can be challenging.  It’s best to work directly with a teacher, if possible.  Not everyone can do that, however.  For some, no one’s nearby.  They don’t have the money. They need to hide it from their parents or partner. In some countries, it’s still illegal for non-Buddhists to practice Buddhism.  In which case, good luck but tread with caution. An ounce of prevention’s better than a pound of cure.

Besides averting disaster, what’s the plus of having a teacher?

It’s more efficient, just like with any skill.  If you want to learn how to play the guitar, for example, you can get books, watch videos online, and play around.  But there’ll also be certain things that it will be next-to-impossible for you to figure out for yourself.  The musical tradition’s accumulated a lot of wisdom over millennia through trial-and-error.  There’s not enough time for you to figure everything out by yourself.  Some lessons that you’ll pick-up on the first day when learning from a proper teacher, like how to strum the guitar without wearing out your wrist, are very counter intuitive.  Professionals learned how to hold the pick this way after playing for decades and seeing that their wrists were wearing out.  You’re not going to learn that until it’s too late.  Even if you do learn it later, it’s going to take you even longer because you not only have to learn how to do it, but you have to unlearn what you’ve been doing for a few years or decades even already.

If you’re out-of-tune or a bit slow, a teacher can point that out to you, show you how to improve, and monitor the progress.  As a beginner musician, it’s impossible to notice these finer points because you can’t hear that subtle lag or that slight out of pitch quality to your playing.  You can only see and hear, as a musician, at the level you’re at and a little beyond.  As you get better, your senses will sharpen and things that seemed beyond notice will be second nature.  A teacher accelerates that process.

The same holds for Zen practice.  Zen’s part of a living tradition with not just the wisdom of one person, but of millennia of practitioners passed down imperfectly from generation to generation.  A fraction of that you can get from books, but most of it is passed down in the specific, messy relationship between student and teacher.  Books, videos, all of that are always general.  They can never give you specific advice on where you’re at, what you need to improve on, precise instructions on how to do it, and monitor the progress.

Books also can never give you the living example of an enlightened teacher.  Just as it’s easier to learn how to play a new song when someone’s sitting right next to you going through the chords, it’s also easier to learn Zen with someone right in front of you. What does real love look like? What does tranquility look like? What does strength and courage look like? How does an enlightened person deal with a demanding student? How do they deal with one thing after another going wrong? Experiencing those answers directly is more valuable than reading a 100 books.
Bottom line: if you’re serious about this, get a teacher.