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The perspective I’m exploring today is multiple teachers and slightly intermingled teachings. It’s not new, but maybe saying it out loud (or writing it in pixels for all to see) is. It has always been done but seldom advised. I’m not advising it for those new to their chosen spiritual discipline. It requires experience on the path, honest self-knowledge, and reflection. Let’s use the story of Siddhartha Gautama’s life as an example.
Most of us know the basic story. Siddhartha spent his first 29 years in the confines of his father’s palace in the foothills of the Himalayas, near the present-day border between Nepal and India. He married and had a son. Here’s how Rick Fields in Tricycle magazines describes what came next:
Something—something as persistent as his own shadow—drew him into the world beyond the castle walls. There, in the streets of Kapilavastu, he encountered three simple things: a sick man, an old man, and a corpse being carried to the burning grounds. Nothing in his life of ease had prepared him for this experience. When his charioteer told him that all beings are subject to sickness, old age, and death, he could not rest.
As he returned to the palace, he passed a wandering ascetic walking peacefully along the road, wearing the robe and carrying the single bowl of a sadhu. He then resolved to leave the palace in search of the answer to the problem of suffering. After bidding his wife and child a silent farewell without waking them, he rode to the edge of the forest. There, he cut his long hair with his sword and exchanged his fine clothes for the simple robes of an ascetic.
The Buddha said little or nothing about his early life in his teachings, so all we know is the story that others have told about it over the centuries. It would be six more years before Siddhartha sat under the bodhi tree and became the Buddha.
It was an era rich in spiritual teachings, many of which are the Vedic roots of today’s Hinduism. We can only imagine the conversations he had with other spiritual seekers as he wandered through the forests and towns of the region. Eventually, they pointed him toward Arada Kalama, from whom Siddhartha quickly learned the meditation of nothingness. He realized that wasn’t enough and went on to another teacher, Udraka Ramaputra, who taught him additional modes of meditation, but again, Siddhartha felt the need for more.
He found five companions, and together, they became what today we might call a peer group of wanderers practicing asceticism and concentration. When, near death, Siddhartha decided to give up the severe asceticism, his companions left him. A woman in a village fed him milk and honey, and with restored strength, he decided to meditate under the bodhi tree until he found enlightenment. Fields in Tricycle picks up the story:
He sat, having listened to all the teachers, studied all the sacred texts and tried all the methods. Now there was nothing to rely on, no one to turn to, nowhere to go. He sat solid and unmoving and determined as a mountain, until finally, after six days, his eye opened on the rising morning star, so it is said, and he realized that what he had been looking for had never been lost, neither to him nor to anyone else. Therefore there was nothing to attain, and no longer any struggle to attain it.
That’s how Siddhartha became the Buddha, the awakened one. Although he experienced his teachers and the phases of his spiritual experience individually, they all came together under the bodhi tree and gave rise to what we now call Buddhism. I’m sure the Buddha continued to learn as he taught until he passed into parinirvana 45 years later.
The story of Naropa, a critical 11th-century figure in Vajrayana Buddhism, involves more devotion to a single teacher. He left his Buddhist studies after a passing old woman (or dakini in human form) told him of a teacher named Tilopa. He diligently searched for Tilopa, passed many tests Tilopa put him through, learned from and devoted his life to his teacher, and spread the teachings that would soon reach Tibet.
The Buddha and Naropa lived 15 or 16 centuries apart but had at least two things in common. They lived in eras and regions rich in spiritual teachers and teachings, and neither had access to YouTube, Zoom, or the Worldwide Web.
We live in a much more secular and materialistic world than they did. I know that, in my first seven decades, I spent much more time thinking and talking about what to eat, what to watch on television, what movies to see, what music to listen to, what brand of toothpaste to buy, and how to earn my pay than I did pondering the meaning of life and discussing that with others. That was true even in the three decades I spent practicing a mindfulness-oriented form of Buddhism.
Few of us have the opportunity for face-to-face spiritual discussions with friends or teachers, and we don’t have a friendly local shaman to visit. Some in the West have access to a minister1 of an Abrahamic faith, but generally only if we belong to a religious institution, and teachers of Eastern spirituality are harder to find.
We look for teachers where we can find them, a subject we dealt with here:
I explained some of my Buddhist history in that post. For 30 years, I would have said my teacher was Thich Nhat Hanh (along with Anh-Huong Nguyen), but that didn’t feel like enough. I supplemented his teachings with exposure to temples and monasteries in Laotian, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Vietnamese traditions, with a dab of Pure Land added to the mix.
So, I had a rounded Buddhist base when my attention turned from a secular to a spiritual focus in 2015-16. I found a home in the Vajrayana tradition with Lama Surya Das.2 After three years, I added Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche as a teacher, then Anam Thubten Rinpoche, and eventually Andrew Holecek.
I’ve benefited considerably from Holecek’s books and a retreat of his I attended virtually, but I consider Surya, Mingyur, and Thubten my primary teachers. Surya and Thubten teach primary in the Dzogchen tradition and Mingyur in Mahamudra. They are simply slightly different approaches within Vajrayana Buddhism.
It needn’t take you 30 years to get a solid base in the fundamental forms of Buddhism, as it did me. But they’re an essential element of Vajrayana. I also needed my three years with Lama Surya to appreciate other teachers.
As I said at the start of this post, multiple teachers and slightly intermingled teachings are OK as long as one has experience on the path, honest self-knowledge, and reflection.
Remember: Whatever path you’re on is the right one.
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With deep gratitude for my gurus’ sense of humor, here’s Luther Vandross’s guidance about Buddhist teachers.
I’m including priests, imams, rabbis, pastors, and others who minister to a congregation or community of faith.
On September 8, Lama Surya announced that his center and foundation would be phased out at the end of 2024. He will then enter a period of writing and retreat, with teaching possibly after that.