Everybody needs a teacher, because we don't have enough time to do it alone.
We love the feeing of self sufficiency. But if we don't see that some things require help, we miss out. And some things, like meditative experience, are not to be missed.
I closed my previous article with these words:
We are students. We are one half of the experience. The other half is the teachers of the path.
This is important, because meditation is not only about your individual journey. It is about the very sacred, very profound, seemingly impossible existence of a path that supports your evolution, transforming you within the years of your single lifetime. The path is given to you by the previous generation1. That generation is represented by whoever teaches you the path you practice.
By valuing the teachers in your life, rather than valuing your own self-sufficiency (which won’t work very well) a neat thing happens: you build a small community into your life. You, your teacher(s), and the other students and teachers associated.
And if you are lucky, you may be able to connect to the teachers of your own teacher. Is there is an elegant term for that? “Grand-teacher” could work for now. It’s a person who your teacher trains with. Sometimes all three of you can be in the same room, and it’s awesome.
Many times I have taken a dozen of my own students with me to study with my teachers. That way they get to see who I learn from, how they teach, and understand how I reshape or interpret these teachings. Of course it could result in them leaving me for my own teachers, but that has happened only once or twice, and I’m happy for them.
Please support my writing with a free subscription.
Three generations, always
In every generation that enters the journey of dharma and meditation, three generations need to be present. Here are two ways that breaks down for most of us.
There is our teacher.
There is the person who taught them.
There is us.
I emphasize this first because there are so many people who never learned from a teacher presenting themselves as teachers. That may work in some things, but it does not work in meditation. Unless you like fake meditation, then go to town.
In the bigger picture, which puts us in the middle of a three-generation context, it looks like this:
First, it takes the person who was there before us, our teacher (we may have more than one). This would include all the teachers who came before them. This is usually called a lineage. They are the previous generation(s).
Second, it takes ourselves and our peers, those who will newly benefit from all that has been maintained for us and offered to us. We are the current generation. Notice the inclusion of peers here. It won’t work very well if it is just ourselves and a teacher. You really need peers to make this fit into your life. That deserves it’s own post, but that’s for later.
Third, it takes those who will benefit from all our efforts to deepen and grow. These are our students, the next generation. Most people don’t actually train to become teachers, but even if they don’t they can be powerful forces in the lives of the next generation of students. Even if they are just “older friends” this can be a life changer. For me, some of the most important people in my life are older-generation practitioners who didn’t become teachers. But they are examples, models, inspirations.
We help the next generation in many ways: as teachers who present the dharma teachings and practice, as family members or neighbors who introduce new practitioners to others like them or to those who can mentor them, and as colleagues, co-journeyers who share the ups and downs of the path. And we can all at least become models of meditative development.
The fresh face of the older generation
Meditation leads to transformations that nothing else leads to. Someone transformed by something else, like psychotherapy or climbing Denali or selling their company and getting into fitness is not transformed by meditation. If you want to see what meditation does, you have to look at long time meditators who have done it right.
That makes elder practitioners unlike their elder peers who aren’t practitioners. Elder meditators are not the same thing as elder artists, elder social activists, or elder community builders. All elders are valuable, and all are needed. But…
Elder dharma practitioners are very special types of human elders, because they have cultivated meditative wisdom. No one else has done this, it’s their raison d’être.
What we have available to us today has passed through the caring hands of 2500 years — about 100 generations. The path, along with its teachers, has been serving its function for thousands of years, providing instructions, knowledge, and encouragement.
Elders = generosity. This sets a good example.
Meditation traditions have evolved over the centuries. Some things have changed, but some haven’t. We’ll all hear over and over again that the fundamental understanding of meditation was set in place 2500 years and hasn’t shifted, because it was so well done all the way back then. That is true.
But one more thing has remained unchanged, and has always been part of learning the path: the welcoming faces from the older generation ready to give you the inheritance of methods and knowledge. They have always been there, kindly, taking you in.
Without them you’d have nothing but your ideas.
They are prepared to hand over everything they learned from their teachers. Everything their teachers learned from their own teachers and so on, long before the internet, long before electricity, long before the printing press. The tradition of meditation is said to be open handed, which means nothing is kept from you. It isn’t a closed-handed system, which would mean that teachers won’t share the juiciest stuff, just the pedestrian stuff. Some asian traditions suffer from the “closed hand of the teacher”. But meditation isn’t one of them.
Some things have benefitted from continual advances in technology, but lots of things really haven’t needed it: loving, singing, dancing, writing, guitar playing. All things I love to do, btw.
Dharma2 has not needed technology. It hasn’t even needed science, which says something about how deep dharma is. Generally, science has a lot to offer, but not everything benefits directly from science. Dharma is pre-scientific, and it will always have a respected place in the human legacy as something lasting and irreplaceable that began long before the modern age.
We discovered a path to profound awakening early in our recorded history. We didn’t have to wait for science. That’s pretty cool.
Looking into the faces of the teachers in our world, we see those who carry one of the wonders of the world. Don’t you feel lucky to have at least some things that don’t bend before the altar of progress and industry?
Overcoming stupid self-sufficiency
We live in a strange time where people assume they can and should do everything by themselves. We may feel disgruntled by expertise. Life is so complicated that we have to submit to a hundred people a year for our needs to be met and our life to work: health, finances, taxes, news, auto repair, plumbing. And usually, we have to pay them. So much of our experience of community has been touched by commerce.
And yet it isn’t our imagination: 21st century life requires specialists for parts of our everyday world to function. We may not always need to take our car to the shop or pay for a repair to our dishwasher. We might take satifaction in doing it with the help of a Youtube video.
But none of us would attempt to fill our own cavities or let a friend perform hip replacement surgery on us. We need our experts.
We recognize expertise in the extremes, but are quick to assume that most things are within our reach unaided.
Some things seem the fair domain of expertise, and we are familiar enough with them to know what we won’t be able to do ourselves. But when we don’t have familiarity with something, seems like half of us assume we need an expert and half assume they can do it all by themselves.
Where does meditation fall on that line:
Meditation is within our reach at the very, very beginning. We can learn to sit in the posture and tune into our breath.
But soon we move past our familiar world, and find ourselves in states of mind that are unusual, maybe confusing, and that is when we can make rapid, deep development, or where we can spiral into deeper, subtler layers of confusion. Meditation is only DIY up to that point.
At the point meditation takes us out of our normal operating environment, we’ll become anxious. We’ll look for familiar signs, landmarks, something to help us navigate to safety. But what is safety?
Our habits know very well that safety means go back to just exactly the way we’ve always been. And every internal voice will guide us back to familiar territory. But it won’t be guiding us into wisdom, it will simply reroute us back to our habitual mindset. The only voice that takes us out of confusion is the voice of wisdom, and we have not learned that voice yet. That’s where a teacher comes in.
Intuition is not wisdom
We might be very intuitive people, and navigate our life skillfully by relying on our intuition, our “gut instinct.”
But intuition is not wisdom. Intuition is not the same thing as dharma. Intuition is a survival intelligence rooted in our body and mind. It is not rooted in our awareness. Yes, it will help us navigate within samsara and avoid dangers, but it will not lead us out of samsara.
We will not escape fear and confusion following our intuition. Even with good intuition, we need a teacher.
the voice of wisdom
Dharma is what the voice of wisdom shares. Dharma is the body of knowledge that illuminates the way out of confusion and fear. But dharma is a body of knowledge without a mouth, so it doesn’t speak.
Dharma is given a voice through a person who speaks the language of dharma: the dharma teacher. There are lots of teachers of the dharma, and we are lucky in this way. But we only need one to begin.
You might think, I’ll start on my own and find a teacher later on. This can work, but it’s important to follow through with finding a teacher, if we push it off we can end up down a sidetrack without knowing it.
It is best to join with a teacher and fellow students from the very outset of meditation practice. The biggest enemy of genuine development in the meditation path is our own lack of maturity, and our stubbornness in trying to guide ourselves. That’s why we need a teacher’s perspective. We also need their patience, clarity, skill, and experience.
Spending time with a teacher usually means spending time with someone whose nervous system has been conditioned by 20,000 or 50,000 hours of correct practice. They aren’t just good at meditation, they have built it into their body and mind. They are meditation practice. You’ll pick up on that vibe.
Seeking a teacher who knows the path is the best way to begin. Doing so, we follow in the footsteps of every single generation before us. It worked for them, so it will work for us too.
Communities of practice
One of the greatest joys in the meditation path is connecting with a community of teachers and students. Some communities are vast, with dozens or hundreds of teachers circulating within them. Some communities are small, and form around one teacher. If we don’t have an accessible community nearby, we may have to travel to engage with one, which is quite common. Online communities are also available, they are a new thing to the world of meditation, but they work well.
If travel is out of the question, you can find communities online. Our community, Finding Ground Meditation, is an online community.
The path of meditation lasts our entire lifetime. Communities of meditators stay in touch across generations, so there are always elders and new people in your life.
When I train yearly with my teachers, I feel the continuity of a dozen generations and more. It stabilizes me. I look around at my fellow students, and we exchange the same glance, the one that says what a relief that such a wise community exists.
My teachers were all part of a system, so they taught and guided practitioners along the same path. Now, there is a global network of students from these teachers who stay connected. It works well and fosters community, because people who share a set of instructions also share the experiences of the path. This continuity makes the new generations of students much better supported. Continuity means there is a modern “history” and a modern culture for new practitioners to learn within.
Consistentcy makes things simpler
Continuity like this is really important for human health. Until the 20th century, this was something you could take for granted in meditation communities. It would be unlikely to encounter teachers of vastly different outlook without traveling to other parts of the world (and those who did were probably ready to expand their outlook). Most people could settle into a practice style and learn a set of dharma teachings that wouldn’t become mixed with other things, and live their entire lives in this single way of practice and learning.
There was nothing wrong with that, it worked for 2500 years.
But things are different now. Everything is available all at once, and in our bewilderment at the options, we fail to appreciate the important distinctions between things that really are what they seem, and things that only seem to be, but aren’t.
Some things really are dharma, and some things are very much not dharma. But anyone can call what they teach whatever they want, so we must be cautious.
In particular, in 2024, people don’t seem to recognize that not all “teachers of meditation” are teaching the same thing — or even similar things. Meditation is unregulated, and the only place you will find standards of practice are in the well established traditions that have a reputation and a generational heritage to uphold.
Training with multiple teachers
If you train under more than one teacher, just make sure they are from similar systems and have similar training. Mixing systems is a pathless journey. Every year I work with students who have spent 20 or 30 years hopping around, taking a little bit from various teachers and approaches. Sometimes they feel inspired, and at other times they feel lost. Eventually they all come to the conclusion that they should have chosen one approach and committed to it.
my advice from the heart
So my genuine advice: look carefully at anyone who teaches meditation. Make sure they have the training a teacher should have:
They should have done thousands and thousands of hours of meditation, and spent years under the guidance and oversight of teachers.
They should have a healthy relationship with other teachers.
Make sure they are joyful, and that they love people. Meditation brings joy forward, and fills people with love. Fake meditation builds competitiveness and desperation.
Students under a teacher should develop into clear headed, gentle people. If the older students seem petty, or far out and super spiritual — but not coherent, get the hell out of there.
If the teacher has problems with money, problems with intoxicants, or cultivates sexual relationships with their students as a general norm, get the hell out of there.
If any of these are out of place, you will be the one that pays the price.
examine your teachers, don’t settle
There are two things to watch out for in selecting a teacher: untrained or insufficiently trained.
untrained
Real teachers are parts of meditation communities, they aren’t isolated “gurus” who have no colleagues. If you can’t easily determine who a self-professed “teacher” trained under — if they seem vague or irritated at the question, that is all you need to see. Move on, you are dealing with someone who is not trained. Avoid.
insufficiently trained
This next thing must be said in the age of the internet: qualified teachers aren’t young. Qualified teachers spent their youth in training. When they are ready to step into the role of teaching, they aren’t young any more. Usually, they will be in their 40s.
Really.
Young traditional teachers (Tibetans used as an example)
Even in the Tibetan system, where people are selected to become teachers while still in their teens, very few complete the full training before they are 30. And even if someone is an excellent teacher at 30, they are still only 30, and they are probably sheltered from the problems most of us face in our everyday lives.
A well-trained 30 year old teacher will have spent 20 years of their life in constant supervision by elders: studying, going into retreat, and doing absolutely nothing that resembles your life. They are very often raised in monastic settings and deal with monastic situations, not in urban settings dealing with urban situations. They know nothing of life at that point.
The best ones will admit it. They usually tag along behind older teachers and gradually learn the role and responsibility of being a full teacher. It’s a big job, a big role, and has the capacity to harm every bit as much as it helps. It takes mentoring and time.
Stick with teachers who are visibly adults.
One of my teachers, a prodigy who was legitimately teaching in his 20s, told us that he is nothing more than a “dharma princess,”3 a privileged monk who has lived under the care of others his whole life and really shouldn’t be talking about anything other than meditation. We all laughed, but we knew he was telling the truth. In my tradition it is generally thought that the ideal age for a teacher is around 60.
I have four living teachers: one is 48, another 57, another 73, and the oldest among them 90. Another teacher passed away last year at 90. [Edit: both older teachers are now dead: Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso and Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche.]
Real teachers are unmistakeable. The best way to begin is by starting with a real teacher!
I’m not a great example of this rule of thumb. I was trained and “empowered” to teach in my early 30s, and given further authorizations regularly up into my 40s, up to the point where I was training and authorizing new teachers.
I think this was only because there was such a high demand for teachers who spoke English, and who understood the life of the West. From my earliest days as a teacher, my students were usually over 40 years old.
Sometimes I wince to think of what I must have been like as a 32-year old meditation teacher, but I must have been ok, because I avoided scandal and maintained relationships with students from all the way back. Still, I appreciate the training I got that kept me out of trouble. Now I am just about old enough to be a real teacher!
Series concluded.
Over this series we’ve been on a walk through the important concepts of meditation that every meditator should know from day one.
This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice
You can read the rest of the series by following these links:
To recap:
Meditation is the practice of working with mind to free ourselves from fear and confusion.
Mind is that which knows something other than itself (a thought, a visual object, etc.)
Mindfulness is a complex term that refers to the mind’s capacity to direct and sustain attention and avoid distraction.
Awareness is the pure knowing quality of consciousness. It can both know objects (via the mind and body, which it can see into) and it can know itself all on its own.
Path: The journey of meditation is progressive and sequential, and the process of unfolding takes place along a well-mapped path. The path and all the training within it is contained in the collected teachings known as the dharma.
Teacher: The journey of meditation begins when a person encounters the dharma through meeting a teacher. The teacher’s job is to pass along the dharma teachings, and to help a student along the path. Teachers are alwayspart of a larger system (a lineage), and it is the lineage that secures the resources of dharma and teachers for students. When a teacher dies, the lineage fills the gap with another teacher trained to the same standard.
Please support my writing with a free subscription.
Jeffrey
Buddhist communities are interesting in that seniority is measured not by how old someone is, but by how long they have been training in the path. One of my teachers is ten years younger than I am. Another is three years older. Most of my teachders have been 20-40 years older. But age doesn’t matter, training and maturity on the path is what matters.
Dharma was discussed in the previous part of this series, The Path. Dharma is a condensed way of referring to the collected knowledge of how to do the path, how to get out of confusion. The path of meditation is outlined in the body of knowledge called the dharma.
Yes, he used the term princess. He was just learning English, and meant to convey the idea of a sheltered person who has had everything handed to them. He didn’t mean any disrespect to women or princesses.