How do you recognize an authentic spiritual teacher?

I had to be in question while responding to the question.

[…]

I was quietly choosing to have faith in the act of simultaneously accepting both my incapacity and my inescapable duty to respond with honesty to the genuine inquiry of another mind.

[…]

I continued, speaking exactly as my thoughts came to me, without weighing my words: “We want to know how to recognize a real teacher, but do we ever ask ourselves in what way we are searching for a teacher, in what way we are searching for truth? Could it be that we can only recognize a teacher when we are in a state of need, when real need pours through us and sensitizes our powers of perception?”

[…]

“Just as it is only the real Self that can see the real world behind the appearances, so it may be that it is only the real seeker who can recognize a genuine man or woman of wisdom.”

[…]

“But suppose we don’t have such a sense of need? Suppose it is too buried? What should we do? The question is still there—how can we know who to trust?”

“Can we stay with that?”

[…]

“I stay with my uncertainty, which is now sensed as a need. It is not only he or she about whom I now have a question; it is myself who is in question. Perhaps I see something else as well—an impatience, a kind of pressure inclining me to close the question, to get on with it all, to come to a judgment about this person before me. But if I stay with the truth of the situation, the truth that I don’t know …

[And THEN?]

—Jacob Needleman, in conversation with his students in a course on the nature of religious experience

Everything is a teacher. When we talk about the dharma we’re talking about the phenomenal universe, but we’re also talking about the teachings. The word dharma means teaching. But we likely don’t see it as teaching. That takes a certain degree of maturity. For years I studied with my teacher and then he transmitted to me, and I came and started this Monastery. Questions would come up, problems would come up, and I would either go visit with him, do sesshin with him, or call him up and we’d talk. So, even though I was finished with my training, I was still learning from him. Then came a point when he died, and I didn’t have him to turn to anymore. But it didn’t mean the teachings stopped. When a question came up, I would hear Roshi. Or something would appear before me that was a manifestation of Roshi’s teaching. In addition to that, I turned to my own students to help me solve the problems that I would have normally gone to my teacher for. So my students became my teacher, just like all things became my teacher. It continues that way.
John Daido Loori, speaking the truth, with thanks to whiskey river

Source: whiskeyriver.blogspot.com

Taking Refuge in the Three Treasures, by John Daido Loori, Roshi

Perhaps if we appreciate them deeply enough, we will realize what it means to take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha; to vow to save all sentient beings, to put an end to desires, to master the dharmas, and to accomplish the Way. Perhaps we will understand what it means to be one with this unwavering lineage of ancestors who have handed down this dharma from generation to generation, without holding anything back. They gave their lives to it; not three months, six months, a year, five or ten years, but their whole lives. They turned themselves inside out. They renounced everything else to make the Way clear. Why? So we can have it, here and now, served to us on a platter. It is ours for the taking. All we have to do is reach out.

What does it mean to reach out? It means to have exhaustively asked the questions: What is Buddha? What is Dharma? What is Sangha? What does it mean to take refuge? What does it mean to vow? What does it mean to be one with? What does it mean to commit? What does it mean to have a relationship with a teacher? The answers are all available. Nothing is hidden.

We can find it in books. We can find it in the sutras. We can find it by asking. And, most important, we can find it simply by looking into ourselves. Why do we practice? What is it that we seek? What is it that we want? What is it that we are prepared to do to get what we want? Are we willing to practice the edge, take a risk, unreservedly throw ourselves into practice? Or are we just being opportunistic and calculating, ready only to skim a little cream off the top to take care of the immediate problems, but not ready to go to the depths?

Gazing attentively

Over at Fernwood Zendo I mentioned Taigen Dan Leighton’s description of zazen (sitting meditation) as sitting upright and asking, “What are we doing here?”  And the point of such questioning, he writes, is “not to get an answer.”

What then, IS the point, you may wonder. Isn’t that what we’re taught, to answer questions and, even more so, to get the right answers? And if we don’t do that, why waste our time? Or if we don’t have an answer, simple google it. Being cool means knowing stuff. And if not know, at least pretend to. Anything but sit there and say “I don’t know.”

The deeper point of contemplating such questions as What am I doing here? and How do I contribute to this world? is, as the word’s Latin roots suggest, to “gaze attentively, to observe.” When faced with a dilemma or obstacle, we tend to jump from question to answer, from problem to solution. The missing step is that of contemplation, of getting to know the question and, more fundamentally, to learn about questioning.

As Rilke (1875-1926) wrote in his Letters to a young poet:

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”*

—Peter Renner, “gazing attentively”

* source: Mitchell, S. (1984) (trans.). Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a young poet. New York: Vintage, p. 34.

Source: heartmind.ca

Inquiry as practice

→Ask questions.

I’d like to say this is the first present I received when visiting the Gimme Presence site to partake in its creator Kristen’s challenge. But I can’t. When I hit upon this one, however, there was a definite resonance.

Earlier this year, as part of an Epiphany (“since Christmas was always a let down”) tradition that my friend has grown in her home, among family and friends, and in various parishes, I drew “the gift that I needed” for the year from a basket of paper rings or crowns, and it was curiosity. Smugly, admittedly, I was quite pleased with my gift—not recognizing that perhaps this meant I was lacking in said quality.

Curiosity, investigation, questioning: these are fundamental qualities for the spiritual life. From the unending question of  “Who am I?” or “What is consciousness?” (depending on your particular constitution) to the basic one of “What is this?”–when there’s a felt sense in the body of some unresolved emotion, or a more subtle defilement appearing in an unexpected way–these are incredible opportunities to welcome whatever we are experiencing, by wanting to understand, by being interested.

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