Sunday, May 25, 2014

The Teacher, the Text and the Inner Teacher



A great old Tibetan lama used to repeat an old Tibetan saying, that went something like, “first you rely on the lama, then you rely on the texts, and you rely on your inner lama.” This is one of the many things he would say that would baffle me.

Now, on the face of it, that does not seem like a weird thing to say. Why did it baffled me?  Because this lama was the epitome of someone who relied on his teacher throughout his entire life. Devotion to his teachers was his middle name. At the same time, he was also the epitome of someone who relied on texts. He read Dzogchen texts continuously. He relied on the Lonchenpa’s Cho Ying Dzod (Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena) so heavily, that I believe one could “read” him, and it wasn’t any different than reading that book. I’m sure he would have said the same about his teachers. I certainly would.

Scenes from the movie Fahrenheit 451 pop in to my mind’s eye when I write that. People strolling slowly about, alone, talking out loud—continually refreshing their remembrance of banned books they have memorized. It wasn’t like that! 

On the other hand, in some way, perhaps it was. The guys from his home center in southern Tibet, who trained directly under tutelage of one of the greatest lamas of the 20th century, are gone now. It is as though the scent of that rich tradition permeated him, and was still exuding from him when he came here to the U.S., and was commanded to teach.

So, we could read him as a “book” of the tradition, embodying it’s powerful methods for training students in various ways according to their individual capacity, and the essential meaning of Dzogchen.

So, there you have it, the third element. He came to rely on his “inner lama,” that wisdom that embued him, and was so palpable.

He moved from directly serving his lama for decades, to living at some distance, to then being asked to teach himself and moving to another country.  When he visit his lama he would bring focused questions, clarifying difficulty points in a text, or key points of his to train others.

So, it seems to be a matter of subtle shifting degrees of reliance, from teacher, to texts, to inner wisdom.

Here’s a recommendation. I highly recommend the movie Amongst White Clouds. It’s from a Chinese tradition of Buddhist hermits, but it reflects my experience as an in-depth (ha!) practitioner better than any movie about Tibetan Buddhism. In it, you can see practitioners at these various stages—a group retreat in which students received close guidance from an old teacher, a few hermits who relied on the great texts of Chan, and a great old practitioner who had internalized all that.

1 comment:

Susan said...

Great documentary - and the hermit at the end.......one can just be with him.