Teachers Are Troublemakers!!

Being both and English teacher and a Buddhist monk, I’m generally doomed when it comes to meeting other people’s expectations of me. Somehow that combination means I should move through this life with a detached holy piety of perfection. Or at least that’s what’s suggested. It’s funny how many times I am told what I should or should not be doing. I should be a vegetarian. I shouldn't drink beer. I should be driving a Prius. One guy insisted that if I was a monk, I should get a divorce, as I shouldn’t be married. Nice.

Ahh, projection, projection, projection.

There seems to be this notion that spiritual teachers must live up to people's ideals of what a spiritual teacher should be. The only problem is that each person has a slightly different set of ideals based on their own ego issues and they project all their own shit on their image of perfection, their teacher. In his book, The Spiritual Tourist, author Mick Brown, a journalist, travels around the world checking out different spiritual traditions. In India he visits both living and dead Gurus and at one point makes the observation that he prefers the dead ones.

Genpo Roshi has often said that the problem with only having teachers like Jesus and Buddha or even a man like the Dalai Lama (if all you’ve ever done is read his books and see him in movies) is they’re our ideals of perfection and because they are not here in our everyday lives they never disappoint us.

If we take on a spiritual teacher, part of that teacher’s job IS to disappoint us, to use our own projections against us. If we see the imperfections of our teachers we become more likely to see the imperfections within ourselves. And if we learn to face the real in our teachers and the real in ourselves, we might actually start living life as it is and not as we wish it could be.

A living-breathing teacher is SUPPOSED to be a troublemaker. An instigator.

It works like this: My teacher is the mortar and I am the pestle that grinds my ego to a fine power. Ground fine enough, it becomes a healing compound for others.

But don't just take my word for it, here's what Pema Chodron has to say about teachers:
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If you want to read more about this check out Trungpa Rinpoche's book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Oh, and Happy Easter.