A Tibetan Buddhist story, to begin. A man was walking along the road and came across a sitza, resting in the dusty gravel. “Oh no!” he said to himself. “This should not be. A sacred sitza of red clay in the dust of the road?!” He picked it up and brought it to the closest roadside altar, where he placed it next to the gold figure of the Buddha. Then he went on his way. The next day, as it was raining, another man walked by the altar. He saw the sacred sitza of red clay, resting next to the Buddha in the falling rain. “Oh no!” he said. “This should not be. Rain falling on the sitza?!” So he searched the side of the road and found the sole of a sandal. He placed it over the sitza, protecting it from the falling rain. Then he went on his way. The next day, a third man walked along the road, coming upon the altar along the side of the road. “Oh no!” he said, “This should not be. A sacred sitza marred by a dirty sandal from the side of the road?!” So he removed the sandal from atop the sitza, and went upon his way.
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Traditions of all kinds note the fundamental significance of engaged companionship or spiritual friendship for a sustained life of practice and growth of maturity within the tradition. One of the most ancient—Judaism—names it with hevruta (study-partners) and rabbis with students. One of the most recent, Islam, describes the significance of brotherhood within the ummah or community of Muslims. Christianity arose out of fundamental commitment to the teacher, Jesus, of course, and the koinonia or communion of the gathered, the ecclesia known as his Body. Studies have been done within philosophical traditions too, noted for a secularity or freedom from association with religious practice. George Steiner traces the teacher-student relationship laced with unexpectedly erotic overtones (at least for philosophical discourse) in his Lessons of the Masters. One tradition with perhaps greatest longevity offers its wisdom for understanding the teacher-student relationship in relation to awakening or enlightenment, its horizon of ultimate value: Vajrayana Buddhism, a vehicle of Tibetan Buddhism with multiple lineages, i.e. Kagyu and Nyingma. I note this final tradition because stumbling across its teaching transformed my own understanding of the relationship with my teacher, Jesus, and my responsibilities as his student, graciously accountable and passionately devoted to him in all sentient beings. Encounter with this tradition also captivated me for years, slowly starving my own spirit and that of a companion on the path.
So how does a tradition’s wisdom unfold for life? How ought it to be received, and released, if it is to liberate? These reflections are offered to anyone who knows the force of devotion for spiritual practice, and who needs to know how it can become attachment, a root of suffering, a force of distraction and disillusionment. The wisdom teaching about spiritual friendship, about the significance in Buddhist lineages of the teacher-student relationship for awakening, remains. But its illegitimacy for awakening (perhaps for the Western mind?) must be considered as well.
I stumbled across this teaching in the form of a book whose title resonated strongly with me at the time—Dangerous Friend: The Teacher-Student Relationship in Vajrayana Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 2001). It was a most difficult time in my life, both professionally and personally. Friend drew me in because I was a new professor in an institution of higher education, which is a particular kind of community not as intentional about deeply interpersonal relationships as it might be. I was lonely. Simultaneously, a new friendship had blossomed with force and attraction I recognized as both holy and dangerous, in the sense of seductive, potentially fulfilling, promising of salve for my/our imagined and known wounds, our self-saturated emptiness. I read the book thoroughly. I felt its potential, explanatory power for what I was experiencing. I began to “practice the practice” it articulated, within what I knew as a “dangerous friendship.”
Without regret but with sadness, I now see that I—we—unintentionally disrespected this tradition. We attempted to control and conform such wisdom to our own needs, the neuroses or limitations of our “ordinary minds” facing a loss of grown children and a loneliness of previously unknown proportion. I say “without regret” because both my friend and I were doing the best we knew how in the face of our particular challenges and a spiritual-life experience for which neither of us was remotely prepared. It is with sadness, however, because while each of us was healed of the immediate obstacles to spiritual growth in our paths, each of us also wounded the other (perhaps) in this disrespect of ancient wisdom and its power.
So what was my/our disrespect? Not so long ago, this new friend appeared to be blossoming into her own, awakening to old regrets and new possibilities. She was beginning to teach as the primary learner she was. Not like we think of teachers today, with a classroom and listening students, but as a leading-learner, surrendering to a topic or wisdom greater than all, while requiring the gifts and graces of each. A wholeness and integrity began to exude all around her as she faced who she had been before, who she was invited to become next. I became aware of a persistent yearning to communicate this unfolding I could see in front of our very eyes. I stumbled into and read this book about teacher-student relationships in her newly professed tradition of practice. I heard and learned how Buddhist teachers are to be recognized. Pieces of how to proceed appeared in both symbolic and synchronicitous fashion. A ritual action, symbolic within her newly invitational path of her husband in Buddhist practice; words about a ministry to start, connected both to her path of origin, Protestant Christianity, and to this new Buddhist lineage. The details are mundane: one morning, I drove over to her home and offered her a kata, a ceremonial scarf one offers a teacher with the words, “Please be as you actually are” within Buddhist wisdom and “We must fulfill all righteousness” for the start of a ministry in Christ’s path. As envisioned in both my dreams and my waking reflections, I enacted these ‘tools’ of two traditions to signify the start of her exploration of being a new and different kind of teacher in the days and years to come.
Little was I prepared for what, in word and deed, unfolded. I underestimated completely the power of ritual action and the spoken word to push us, the unsuspecting, into deep ends of pools for which we/they are completely unprepared. I am not Buddhist, but felt in my bones the power of its traditional action. She was a fledgling Buddhist by that time, having taken refuge with a lama of the Dharma and a local sangha, but she knew little about her new tradition coming alongside her previous, Christian path. I had intended to honor the beautiful woman of faith I saw her becoming…a blossoming teacher who teaches by opening herself to learnings, however painful they may be. The world needs more teachers like that, after all. Those who know both surrender and authority, receptivity and risk, in equal proportion, without attachment. Yet what was intended for nourishment and beauty in vulnerable surrender became otherwise. Over a short time, we imprisoned one another, slowly, steadily, in a mirage of desiccating “grace.” This worded action—one that bound me to her and her to me in a sickly-secret intimacy—had consequences neither of us could have anticipated, for which both of us bear responsibility. Ultimately we became unable to sustain presence with one another, about which she concurred when we said good-bye that last time.
I have since returned to the text within which I learned of the Vajrayana wisdom for teacher-student relationship. Dangerous Friend was written to teach and transmit “the traditional role of the vajra master” as “the heart of all spiritual paths” (ix). It is to be “a reference work for anyone approaching the Vajrayana and making a serious commitment to a lama and a lineage.” (xiii) Its concern is to preserve an authentic Vajrayana in the west (xiv) and to confront the spiritual materialism and “political correctness” that hack at the root of what might be called a primary “relationship for awakening.” Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s substantial work (and authorship) named this primary relationship as a “dangerous friend,” oriented not to a religion or tradition, per se, but to the “crazy wisdom” that seeks and serves awakening of sentient beings at all costs. Dangerous Friend seeks to tradition its wisdom, the crucial role a root teacher-student relationship plays in the path of awakening unto enlightenment. Devotion, surrender, crazy wisdom, fidelity to a one who agrees all serve to show you your mind through its resistance.
To honor Rig’dzin Dorje, the text’s author, and his lineage teachers (at the very least, Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen, Kyabjé Künzang Dorje Rinpoche and Jomo Sam’phel, and those before them), I see now that we received this book-form teaching without concern for its intentions and in direct opposition to its teachings. I, at least, was not approaching the Vajrayana tradition nor looking to make a serious commitment to a lama in any of its lineages. The new friend whose blossoming I attempted to honor is not a lama within this lineage, nor steeped within the Kagyu lineage she had just joined. I was attempting to understand and live within an experience of a spiritual friendship that frightened me even as it soothed and protected me from a wounding I had received but could not redress (See “Absent Antecedents and Splinter Farewell”). In direct opposition to the book’s concern for an authentic Vajrayana, our actions disrespected it instead. We attempted to conform what we were learning into our own context, needs.
For clearer understanding, but without excuse, I now see there were several inexplicable things (at the time) that paved a path of dramatic-ritual disrespect. I was driving to my campus office and heard a word in my head I was unaware of intending or actively thinking: open. As I prayed it in the next couple days, I began to read Dangerous Friend whose first chapter is titled, “Opening.” This book was for me, I intuited. My new spiritual friend’s dream life showed her standing on a dusty road, at a gate. A tiger raced by her, whether it was a young one—a cub—or not. Chapter Two of the book read “Approaching the Tiger.” From that point on, for a period of about three years, she nicknamed me “tiger cub.” We agreed I had a tiger-nature, but then years later, we could no longer agree. Lastly, a force of devotion entered into my life at this time, a completely sensate but not sexual experience of affection and service of others. I’m sure there are biophysical and neurobiological rationales available for this time of life in a 30-something woman, but I was so drawn to Dangerous Friend because it was the first and only text I had ever read that seemed to name this experience so fully. My life was transformed—continued to be transformed—by this beautiful, frightening, wonderful force of Life that seemed to come from elsewhere even as it was irrepressibly intimate in body.[1]
That was one of the greatest gifts for me here, after all, though also source of new wounding. “Tantra is based on transmuting sensuality,” says Nga-la Rig’dzin Dorje, in the interview portion of the text. “That’s both its power and its danger” (82). This teaching-book showed me a practice-tradition approach to what I had experienced in years of clinical pastoral education. The most difficult and turbulent experiences of my life—mental and physical awarenesses, conscious and subconscious—are not to be neglected or repressed, but invited onto the path. They, when examined and listened to within the context of a primary relationship of care, are the fuel of the path. Tantra is something about which I know little, but this description made me think of the clinical path of transmuting sensuality into critical learnings of connection—to self, to others, to the world and Other. The sensate description of devotion cinched my interest, my attraction. The book’s teaching—the overwhelming and provocative force devotion is for the path of practice, wisdom—offered me something I knew or intuited but had not had confirmed or taught to me: without devotion, all becomes dead information; with it, awakening to interdependence and sustained compassion across all injury becomes possible to live into new and diverse form-emptiness. Too much of the teaching-life into which I have been ordained (in Protestant Christianity) and tenured (in higher theological education) neglects, or remains completely ignorant of, relational devotion, if not intellectual devotion (arguably not devotion at all, in Buddhist-traditional sense).
Vajrayana traditions yet contribute badly needed wisdom to the discernment necessary for all of us in choosing teachers for a path of growth or awakening. This decision can “make or break” your path, one might say, though I live within a tradition convinced that anything is possible for Life, for the One who can transform all for good in love. The Vajrayana ascribes greatest care for entering into vajra relationship or vajra commitment, because of the power it can have for both awakening and binding. A period of thirteen years is recommended as the outside temporal duration of discernment (29), but at least, a potential teacher’s realization can be assessed or discerned to have “the following qualities: he or she needs to be pure; learned; well-versed in the scriptures; generous; pleasantly spoken; able to teach according to the individual; acting as he or she teaches; skillful at caring for disciples; matured by empowerments from an unbroken lineage; having kept the samayas (vows); being calm and disciplined, with few disturbing negative thoughts; having completely mastered Vajrayana practice—base, path, and result; having received visions of meditational deities; being liberated and realized; full of compassion; with few preoccupations; a passion for the Dharma; and repugnance for samsara[2]” (24-25). This description is for the specific commitment to a vajra master, of course, which is quite distinct from all others. In other words, these characteristics are not necessary for a spiritual friend (named in Sutra traditions) or companion for the path or community of practice.
Were either of us candidates for vajra mastery in our relationship or combination of events? Within the book-teaching as offered here and intentions for authentic Vajrayana in the west? Clearly, no. Without judging the characteristics listed above—purity, learning, generous, being well-versed in scriptures, pleasantly spoken, and the like—we still arrive at “having completely mastered Vajrayana practice—base path, and result.” Neither of us, in any wildly interpretive generosity, has mastered Vajrayana practice. So, within these criteria, at least, an authentic Vajrayana lineage transmission seems unlikely.[3] Neither of us was or is (at this point) a candidate for Vajrayana mastery.
Then were either of us candidates for vajra studenthood? The potential is much higher here, though probably sooner for her as a professed Buddhist who has taken refuge than for me, a listening Christian theologian whose path seems to be at the intersections and peripheries of traditions. The text reads, “The most important factor for a student, in being a student, is that they develop a sense of openness. … One is only a student because one wishes to change. … The principle of respect for the teacher should be based on openness to the possibility of being confused.” As mentioned above, devotion is still the central force and fuel, lived in a holy surrender to being confused, awakened, receptive to insight unforeseen and (previously) unaware. Again, no definitive interpretation seems clear, except that each of us is no longer a student of the other. Neither of us could remain open to the other, could ‘see’ each other like we once had, were willing to enter into transformation of mind.
What seems patently obvious, at this point, is that the Vajrayana tradition we had used (and abused) to try to understand our experience(s) speaks of something irreconcilably different from what we used it for. If we had let the tradition speak clearly, precisely, we would have known that the vajra master-student relationship would only mislead our understanding and our future path of spiritual practice, either together or separately. We are no longer teachers of one another, nor students, let alone within a vajra commitment or relationship of that kind.
Having listened to the tradition in which actions were taken, how may we articulate the healings and woundings sustained? Myself, I was desperately hungry for an intimate, safe relationship in which I could live as a recovering Ohioan, theological academic, and nontraditional preacher’s wife who had recently moved into small-town Ohio—a difficult place for young women, professional women, liberal convictions. I had also carried a body-shame for decades. A relationship of transmuted sensuality and heightened devotion transformed this body-experience and for the first time I could remember, I felt no shame within my body. I felt like I had been healed, though I’m a critical realist-rationalist when it comes to such things. I began to teach of the crucial importance of radical relationship for sustained and sustaining theological wisdom unto an expressive delight able to companion the suffering of self and others.
Understanding all this within Vajrayana terms, however, led to a friendship in which attachment became all there was. Change was condemned, resisted, ignored—mine and hers. Growing into new challenges was misunderstood as betrayal of promises, which we had even described as a samaya so her husband could understand the sacred and distinctive character of our friendship. Shared practice disappeared and ability to listen for one’s spiritual growth (or that of the other) diminished. Neither of us could breathe. Though it had ceased being a generative path of awakening for either of us, we were held in the suffering sway of the attachment. It became betrayal to observe it aloud. In contrast, we engaged a ‘betrayal’ for nearly 18 months by refusing the path of non-attachment in which each of us could breathe, return to life-giving practice. Releasing the ‘samaya’ was the only way to fulfill it.
My view of her healing, wounding? My friend was facing the departure of her grown children into their next challenges. She had a long-ambivalent relationship with a top-flight institution of higher education in which she completed doctoral work but then gave up all traditional career-paths with respect to that degree. In me, she found a perfect fit and release from unconscious dissonance (regrets?). In our blossoming friendship, the ambivalence about higher education and an excruciating need for maternal-protective role combined in a congregational system in which connection with the leadership bequeaths particular or ‘special’ communal standing. Her ‘healing’ or ‘salve’ for ordinary mind challenges arose here, paired nicely with provocative invitations into a newly envisioned teaching role and a (re)awakening of solely feminine sensuality, celibately shared and pleasurably explored. But then, a re-wounding: losing the protector-role and in the process, having one’s ambivalence about higher education shown in stark relief against its materialist forms. Spiritual maturity of one meant less and less need for protector or maternal nurture. Materialist success within higher education for one meant stark contrast for the other. Disrespectful reliance upon Vajrayana tradition fed exactly into her lack of professional esteem. We created the perfect storm of ego-yearning with a spiritually materialist attachment—being seen as a vajra master when none of the traditional characteristics would ever legitimate or validate it. My friend’s path was transformed for the good in our relationship, of that I have no doubt. I can also imagine how our dramatic-ritual passion and ignorant-shared foolishness so captivated her own hopes to be special, to be an unrecognized but authentic Vajra spiritual teacher, that nothing but attachment to that possibility remained, in the end.
I do not expect any of this to be wholly true, but I do offer the partial truth contained herein as my attempt to listen better for the authentic Vajrayana lineage(s) from my location as a befriended outsider and devotee of Wisdom, a practitioner of received-and-receiving devotion about which I learned in this, my first encounter with Tibetan Buddhism. I make no definitive proclamations about my friend’s path—past, present, or future—except to appreciate the karmic connection and that the karmic seeds have come to fruition. Suffering arises from attachment and release is the path of practice to awakening.
My suffering, at least in this respect and upon conclusion of this essay, may finally be completing—or being perfected—with dedication of any merit within it to the good of all, in my Teacher’s name. The resulting spaciousness of this path has opened to new work, deeper intimacy within my life’s relationships, new growth and voice for the works of hope I yearn to offer the world. My path is to cross-traditional friendships without needful attachment, living into gifts and graces, woundings and healings that shape my own mindstream and that of others toward what my teacher called the “reign of God,” what new companions call the World to Come. For now, I take delight in Rig’zin Dorje’s conclusion to Dangerous Friend: “Well, there’s nothing like a healthy quota of confusion and mixed motivation. … In Vajrayana people have to experience things for themselves. For each individual practitioner, things are simply as real as they are real. If one has had no experience yet, then the experiment simply continues. One starting point is as good as another” (115). I am grateful to have encountered this living tradition amidst all our errors and impassioned pursuits.
I am also thankful for the opening words of the Tibetan Buddhist story, told me by an elder of the sangha in which I have been affiliated for a time. With care for me as a friend and companion on the path, she listened as I lamented this story. She startled me out of my sense of shame and guilt, saying, “What a beautiful story!” In contrast to my overlay of ‘tradition-abuse’ and more, she saw a purity of intention, one spiritual friend to another. As she told me the story of the sitza, I could feel the bubbling smile of release, of reconciliation within, of reminder that our experience relates directly to our thoughts. I began to laugh through tears, what I know as ‘bright-eyed’ laughter. How easily do we imprison ourselves, each other, in the afflictive emotions and mental constructs of our past, our world. “Oh no!” I say. “This should not be.” So be it.
We smile, and go on our way. If we are lucky, we get to come back again and again, to help others see their minds, to awaken to their insubstantiality, and to release all affliction and attachment into the Light of the World.
[1] In each of these experiential-contextual items (plus others not significant for detailed mention here), there was a suggestive connection between the images, symbols, metaphors of this Vajrayana teaching and our awarenesses emergent in context. We experienced these initially as instructive for continued growth on our linked but separate paths. But then they became obstacles, obstructions to conversation and mutual examination. For instance, I felt a calling to honor her as a new kind of teacher but I was the tiger-one, a characteristic the Vajrayana tradition ascribes to the teacher, the vajra master (78). Here the tradition-teaching’s imagery enlivened connection, then confused it. Second, we were both newbies into Buddhist wisdom, a tradition she had joined but I had not. As such, we each understood ourselves as student-teacher and teacher-student. Vajrayana holds this equanimity too (24), though in paradoxical tension with an ultimate, undemocratic authority only for the teacher or vajra master (33ff). This paradox in the Vajrayana ascribed to the teacher-student relationship disrupted our equanimity with an assumption of surrender by the other from time to time. Certain times I abused the teaching-authority; other times, she did. All this without either of us being steeped in any Vajrayana lineage. Seen from this side or direction of the path, I am astounded we ignored or neglected so many aspects of a religious/practice tradition meant for human flourishing but also with power for such potential injury. I am embarrassed and smile at my own foolishness in the face of the overwhelming physical sensations and emotional experience of this time.
[2] “Repugnance for samsara” means the sense of having exhausted indulgence in one’s own coping strategies in life to the extent that not only the result they bring, but even these self-defeating processes themselves, have become burdensome, aggravating, and no longer pleasurable. One has become unable to escape a nagging sense of suspicion that the basis of one’s rationale might in fact be empty.” (p. 118, n. 4).
[3] I say ‘unlikely’ and not impossible because most Christian communities identify the integrity of their sacrament rooted in God’s agency, not the virtue or purity of the celebrant. In this logic, the possibility remains that there was indeed transmission of wisdom in the worded action, if in a fashion unimaginable by current lamas or myself, imagined only by my friend. Place that possibility over and against Rig’dzin Dorje’s impassioned plea for an authentic Vajrayana traditioning, within practices established over centuries, and I err on the conservative side that no transmission occurred and a tradition was disrespected, at the very least.
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