Going to teachers

GOING TO TUTORS AND TEACHERS,
I VOW WITH ALL BEINGS,
TO SKILLFULLY SERVE MY TEACHERS
AND PRACTICE VIRTUOUS WAYS. [1]

We’ve entered a section of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra where the gāthās describe the process of making a commitment to practice. In the context of the sutra that commitment is ordination, but in North America, the path of lay practice has many of the same elements. We encounter the dharma, find a community and a teacher, do some discernment, decide that Buddhism is the right path for us, establish our practice, and make a commitment to live in Buddha’s way. We realize there’s only so much we can do on our own by reading books and watching videos. At some point, it’s time to do sustained body-and-mind practice in person with a sangha and a human teacher who has been engaged with this thing for some time, one who has received the training and credentials necessary to carry the tradition in a mature way and pass it on to others.

​We can have a lot of romanticized ideas about what the “teacher-student relationship” should look like. Maybe our models are the classroom teachers of our school days, our therapists, people with whom we’ve apprenticed, our parents, or the mystical ancestors we read about in kōan collections. A good many of us are resistant to the very idea of having a teacher, fearing being absorbed into some kind of authoritarian system that will crush our individuality or turn us into members of a cult of personality. It can be tough to navigate the middle way between teachings about the centrality of authentic face-to-face transmission and the teaching that no one can practice for us and we must be lamps unto ourselves.

Here at Sanshin, we don’t have a formal thing called a teacher-student relationship. At the center of our practice style is nonreliance, which is shorthand for realizing the self without relationship to others which includes everything. In developing our own practice, we’re not pushed or pulled along by teachers; they’re not responsible for us.[2] It’s up to us to get ourselves onto the cushion every day, watch and listen to teachers, notice where we’ve gone off the rails, ask questions and clarify our understanding. We’re relying on our own bodhicitta, not on someone else’s requirements, curricula, or evaluations. Teachers are doing their own practice, and everyone else is welcome to join them if they wish. If they don’t wish, that’s fine too. No one is going to go out and drag practitioners into the zendo by the scruff of the neck. If they’re waiting for someone to validate them and attend to their individual desires and expectations, they’re going to be waiting a long time.

For practitioners who want to be cared for in a personal way, this approach may seem cold or unwelcoming. They may yearn for a close personal relationship like the ones they read about in the old Chinese texts, where a magical teacher has a student attendant with whom he seems to communicate by intuition, knowing precisely when to say a wise and compassionate turning word that cracks open the student’s awareness. Sometimes practitioners fall in love with a teacher’s karmic attributes; apparently it used to happen to Kōdō Sawaki, and I’ve certainly seen it happen in modern North America. Overawed practitioners can become obsequious and insinuating, whether or not the teacher is actually encouraging this behavior. This is not skillfully serving teachers. This sort of thing is why dharma teachers need to be well versed in power dynamics and able to recognize and head off unhelpful attachments.

Skillfully serving teachers starts with understanding what teachers are there to do. Ideally, the focus is on neither the teacher nor the student, but on the dharma. Uchiyama Rōshi used to tell practitioners that he was not there to take care of them; he was simply walking toward Buddha on his own legs, and that they needed to do the same. At minimum, our job as students is to join that parade in a way that doesn’t disrupt the activity for the teacher or other participants. At best, we can play a meaningful part in supporting and upholding it so that everyone has the opportunity to practice and grow.

Dōgen says that a teacher is someone who you see and who sees you. In other words, real transmission of the dharma can only happen face to face, and not through books or over a distance. This is why we go to teachers, as the dharma gate says. We have to practice in a room together, pay close attention and experience the world of total dynamic functioning (jijuyu zammai) to really get what teachers are embodying and transmitting and to enter into a dialogue about the dharma. Dōgen was clear that while our tradition includes teachings about mind to mind transmission and “transmission outside of words and letters,” if we don’t explain the dharma to people, whether verbally or nonverbally, they can’t understand it.

We need to know what we’re looking for from teachers. While it’s good to be able to give skillful dharma talks and write meaningful essays, whether or not a teacher embodies and models practice every day in a way that encourages and inspires others to practice is more important. Rather than looking for guidance and inspiration from a magazine or website, watch how the teacher bows to Buddha, drinks a cup of coffee, folds a zagu, or handles a phone. It’s not that those activities are magical, and we need to guard against becoming precious about them, which is just another trap for our egos. It’s that we have in front of us at that moment someone who has vowed to live concretely smack dab in the middle of Buddha’s way and demonstrate for us how we can do it too. We may find it very helpful to read academic texts as part of our dharma study, but we would not look to those very accomplished scholars as models of practice. Sōtō Zen is not a philosophy or a belief system, it’s something we do.

It’s not uncommon that folks write to Sanshin wanting to become Okumura Rōshi’s students based on having read his books and maybe watched some videos. Maybe they attended a talk in person somewhere during the years when he was traveling to teach. They see a person who’s humble, soft-spoken, agreeable and able to do exegesis of Dōgen’s sometimes difficult writing, and they fall in love with his karmic attributes, wanting to receive personal mentoring and care. They know nothing about the firm adherence to the legacy of nonreliance that he inherited from our twentieth century ancestors and that underlies his actual practice. This is one reason we talk a lot about the practice vision and the real intention behind our style of practice. There’s a difference between being a fan and being a student.

Okumura Rōshi connected with his own teacher first by reading his book Jiko and then by actually going to Antaiji to practice with him as a young layperson. It was on the basis of his meeting and spending time with Uchiyama Rōshi that he knew he wanted to practice like this teacher, and he has spent the rest of his life transmitting his teacher’s practice. For him, serving his teacher and practicing virtuous ways meant leaving his home country and his teacher behind, coming to North America and serving as an example of wholehearted zazen, work, study and ritual for people who had never seen such a thing before. He explained, “In the beginning, the teacher asks the student to study everything that the teacher teaches, and the student follows the teacher’s method of practice. However, good teachers will expect students to go beyond them. While at first the teacher and his teaching are a protection, when the student becomes mature this protection becomes a hindrance, an obstruction to grow further. The student needs to break that protection or hindrance to become better than the teacher, to go beyond the teacher. At a certain time, the teacher kicks his student out. In my case, Uchiyama Rōshi kicked me out of Japan, and I came to this country when I was twenty-seven. It’s a tough teaching.”[3]

Dharma teachers’ vow is to uphold and transmit the dharma in some way.[4] We’ve taken some time, as part of our discernment, to formulate our individual intention for this, how we’re going to use our individual karmic circumstances both to develop our own understanding and to make that available to others with an aspiration to practice. It may be that serving teachers means materially helping them to carry out that individual vow. My own aspiration is to pick up the practice vision that my teacher has carried onto the bridge from Japan to North America and make sure it gets safely to the other side in a sustainable, tangible way. I’d like to make it possible for him to see his own aspiration come to fruition in a healthy, thriving, stable community of practitioners who both understand our practice and practice our understanding. My job is to keep our twentieth century ancestors’ teachings and practice accurately alive and available into the 21st century. Anyone who’s interested in helping with that is welcome to join me.

However, practicing virtuous ways is in itself serving teachers. Nothing makes me happier than seeing someone establish a zazen practice, hear some teachings, come to his/her/their own understanding, and then use that to act skillfully in the world with body, speech, and mind. While providing material support to teachers is a wonderful practice and much appreciated, the gift of a zendo full of sincere and engaged practitioners and seeing that we’re making a difference in a world on fire is tremendously encouraging and enables us to continue to lead. Giving and receiving the precepts is an acknowledgment that the sangha has seen the value of living an ethical and virtuous life according to Buddha’s teaching and are willing to make a long-term commitment to practice. Simply showing up regularly and wholeheartedly to practice, and doing our best to live by vow rather than by karma, is itself serving our teachers.

Next time:
Seeking initiation,
I vow with all beings
to reach the non-regressing state,
our minds without impediment.

[1] Translations are based upon Thomas Cleary’s translation of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and have been recast by Hoko in the form of standard Sōtōshū gāthās.
[2] The relationship between a teacher and an ordained novice does come with some responsibility for overseeing that novice’s development into a mature and capable teacher recognized and authorized by the denomination, with the appropriate skills and abilities for leading practice, running a temple, and carrying and passing on the Sōtō Zen tradition. However, this is not the situation of most practitioners in the dharma center. For more on ordaining as a novice, see this page.
[3] From page 16 of Facing the Wall, Facing Ourselves by Shohaku Okumura, forthcoming from the Dōgen Institute.
[4] For more on individual vows, see Okumura Rōshi’s essay “Original Vow and Personal Vow” in Boundless Vows, Endless Practice: Bodhisattva Vows in the 21st Century.

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