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Some Suggestions on What to Look Out For
Sensei Sevan Ross, Chicago Zen Center
There is confusion on all fronts.
An individual faces a bewildering scene when looking for or working with spiritual teachers. In Asia there is a narrower array of options than in the West. There we find Traditions which are quite old, and a temple structure and lineage apparatus which lay down some clear guidelines for the shape, duration, and boundaries of spiritual training. From the Zen temples of Japan to the mountain enclaves of Tibetan Vajrayana, from the Thai Forest Monks to even the loose structure of Hinduism, there is long and entrenched tradition to look to when considering spiritual guidance. While these deeply enculturated structures do not in any way guarantee high quality or uniform behavior on the part of practitioners or teachers, and while to a Westerner these structures can even be seen as a lack of choices, this more traditional environment does usually at least provide a stricter set of guidelines to both teachers and students for defining exactly what a spiritual teacher is. While I am most concerned with the Zen teaching scene here in America since that is where I hang my hat, the following reflections may also be applied to not only other Buddhist traditions but to any spiritual work where there is a mentor.
In the USA we find an environment with a rich loam in which to grow both legitimate and illegitimate spiritual teachers and traditions. While we host here in this multicultural landscape all manner of traditions, we add to these traditions a highly (and some would say overly) psychological framework. On top of this we may add an aggressive commercial bias. Throw in all the New Age inventions and blendings, water it down with a hankering to change and reshape virtually everything until it is exactly what we would prefer (read, make it easy and shallow), and you no longer have a spiritual garden which is being cared for by well-trained and dedicated master teachers. Not at all. Instead you find a garden which may grow both useful and desirable spiritual food (even if these plants are naturally of somewhat uneven quality), but along with this crop grows a tangled patch of weeds. These weeds may look like spiritual traditions, but they may be dangerous to the real food plants, and are often downright poisonous to would-be practitioners.
While a careful examination of this whole scene may have great value, and while there have been attempts to make some sense out of either all or part of it, our purpose here is merely to offer some insights aimed directly at the questions which arise when one is looking for a teacher, or is looking to augment one’s practice with the teaching of someone other than one’s root teacher. Our interest lies in the personalities and psychologies of teachers. To use a more familiar commercial lens: Who are the producers and what is offered? And while we are surveying this garden, let us consider the likely impact of the crops grown.
Traditional spiritual training as I understand it (from my clearly Zen Buddhist bias) has as its aim the shaping and refining of thoughtful, active, caring, social, deeply grounded people who (at least from the Zen perspective) come to approach the world from a mind steeped in insight. This particular insight surpasses simple intellectual realization. It arises from the “gut” where it has been awakened through years of hard, unremitting practice. This practice happens in the context of a community of fellow practitioners as well as in the society as a whole. The impact of this training is nothing less than a reorganization of one’s approach to life and to others, as well as to one’s self. In my tradition we help the student pry the mind loose from its barnacle-like hold on its routine – its ego-centered habits and pain-producing attitudes.
The teacher’s place in this training model should be one of coach and example. While in the strictest sense the teacher has nothing whatever to give the student, what the teacher can offer the student is a living example of how one might address the world after a great deal of development and insight in one’s spiritual life. Along with this example of the fruits of long practice should come a firm but kind guiding hand which both challenges the student in his or her journey, and protects the student from influences which may sidetrack or even cause harm. It is well understood that these influences may well include aspects of the teacher’s own personality, will, or desires. Teachers are here to guide students along, not sidetrack them into another agenda. A real teacher must not twist the teaching in such a way that the teacher, the lineage, or even the tradition itself is seen in a better light. We are in service here of the highest truths, not in service of the teacher and the teacher’s image or desires.
All the above is said to set the stage for a number of crucial questions which every student should ask when considering a teacher or teaching. As one of my students put it once, “Buddhism treats you like an adult.” This should be true of any religious tradition. The practitioner is an adult in that the practitioner should never simply check her or his brain at the door of the temple or meeting. Finding the right relationship is all rather like dating (perhaps a little too much so). Even somewhat further into the relationship, after some time and experience working with a teacher, one should keep one’s eyes open for flaws that are possibly serious. If one feels one has found such a flaw, one must reconsider the relationship of teacher and student.
In referring to these training and relationship issues commentators often reminded us of three things which should be red flags: Seeking name and fame, sexual involvement with students, acquisition of riches. These three are classic warning signs for students of teachers to avoid. Central to our use and understanding of these is the fact that they all share some clear characteristics. All spring out of and are evidence of an inflated ego on the part of the teacher. All are related to power. In each abuse we see the workings of a special type of domination paradigm where the teacher acquires more power and stature and the student is in some way further subjugated.
So what follows here are the classic warning signs. But first a warning: There is always the problem of exactly where the lines are on these. For example, if the teacher buys a very nice car as opposed to a merely functional one, some observers will write off such a purchase as necessary to either attract certain donors or to help the teacher with his bad back whenever he travels. Others may feel that any car at all is unnecessary. And there may be opinions everywhere in between. We could spend our whole discussion trying to pin down where these lines are, but since we have a long way to go, let me instead suggest some simple questions to ask in these classic areas. I am herein appealing to the deep compass which I feel is available to most people. I’ve discovered through the years that we as a society often do not engage these deep moral instincts enough, either because they were underplayed or not taught at all when we were children, or because of some misguided over-application of our current sense of political correctness. I feel strongly that we need to revive and engage our common sense.
So simply put:
1. How much money is too much for a teacher? If you find yourself or others reaching for justifications to explain the opulence, look out. If you find yourself justifying the fact that your spiritual guide just bought a new decked-out Harley, congratulations – you are now in the same neighborhood as the families of alcoholics who stretch to justify the drinking. It’s a dangerous neighborhood.
2. Sexual contact with students: There should not be any. If there is, then what should occur is disclosure, counseling, mea culpas, guidelines, community healing. We need to be careful here, however. I feel that because of the recent abuse issues growing out of the Catholic Church and other high-profile organizations, we are nuclear in all our responses to these situations. I heard of a state government which recently enacted a law which provides mandatory prison terms for anyone who has sexual contact with clients when they are providing counseling. I submit that this will neither prevent this contact, nor will it reform the perpetrator. This kind of thinking is draconian and shows once again our lack of simple common sense. Of course there are situations when this sort of punishment is needed. But one cannot legislate the human heart, and people will not only cross care-giver and client boundaries, but they may actually fall in love, and moreover, some of these relationships may well last a lifetime. A complex range of interactions can and will occur between spiritual teachers and students.
Because of the power disparity which is tipped in favor of the teacher and the clear vulnerability of the student we must do everything in our power to prevent this – that is without beheading people. More important for our purposes here, however, is the notion of Pattern. Did the teacher cross sexual boundaries because he or she fell in love – or is this just lust and abuse? If this behavior occurs again and again, we know the answer. If a community of women, say, is polled confidentially, and they strongly agree that the teacher is safe, and they have a good bird’s eye view of the teacher’s habits and history, then we can be somewhat assured (though never entirely) that we do not have a sexual abuser on our hands. Bottom line: Ask the women of the community (if considering a heterosexual man teacher). If they all smile beatifically and admire him, but they can’t tell you about any of his flaws, they may not be reliable. But if they have seen him at close range over a long time, can tell you that he is not perfect in various areas, and still tell you that they see him as sexually safe, he may well be safe. And this may be true even if he has once had some slip in this department. We have to look at the whole record. What’s the pattern? What’s the history?
3. Is the teacher self promoting? Self-promotion is easy to see, even if the teacher is not famous. Does the teacher speak of her or his attributes often? Are they trying actively to “promote” themselves? A gauge I can offer here is quite simple: How much time do they spend working on building their practice and community compared to the time spent out on the lecture circuit promoting themselves? More on all this below.
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Beyond this set of useful guidelines there is the world of pattern, instinct, and simple observation. My father shocked me once while we were sitting on his back porch in Pittsburgh when he confidently predicted that a red-tailed hawk that had been lurking around the birdfeeder would soon “pick off two of those sparrows.” Not more that five minutes later that bird swooped down on the hapless flock, talloned one sparrow, twisted around the tree the feeder was mounted on and surprised another who had fled in that direction. Two birds under wing, the hawk silently glided further down the hill. Of course I asked Dad how he knew. He replied, “I watch ‘em.”
Careful observation will give us certain patterns which, while not infallible, can provide us with amazingly accurate predictors. Then we can engage and even improve our instinct and avoid trouble. So we are indeed here in the business of making judgments. When we cross the street and we see that a car is careening toward us with a drunken teenager behind the wheel and we jump far back onto the curb we are also making judgments. This is not sinful, no matter what the politically correct crowd may say. This is a survival instinct, and to ignore it is to do so at great peril both to ourselves and to others. If my father came to his bird observations with what some might see as an “open mind,” he would be blind to the damage about to be done. I appeal to the reader here directly: You have witnessed human abuses, abuses by commercial marketing thinking, abuses by predators – use what you have seen; look for the patterns; watch for the signs. Perhaps this can help:
Let us set up a sliding scale, and we will do this using an old playground toy as our metaphor – a kid’s teeter-totter. On one end we have the traditional institutions charged with delivering a certain spiritual message and/or providing for a certain, well defined kind of spiritual training experience. In Western Zen we call these Zen Centers, Zen Temples and such. These are classically monastic or semi-monastic in nature, but in this new environment of Western commercial society they may also be entirely lay institutions. The point is that they advertise little, uphold the traditional training in pretty much the form they found it, and stick to their spiritual knitting. As we move toward the other side of our teeter-totter we typically start adding stuff. Some of this stuff comes in the form of adaptations of Western religions and psychology. Many of the add-ons are not only innocent but are helpful – Sunday schools for kids, coming-of-age ceremonies, famine relief days, church socials, layers of oblate or deacon-like lay ordination, interfaith programs. In Zen Centers we may adapt things for the local Sangha by changing Sesshin retreat schedules somewhat, tweaking the sitting rounds to be longer or shorter, adding to the schedule holidays and celebrations and possibly even rites that are outside the tradition but are very helpful for our community. But we are still sitting on the teeter-totter with our feet on the ground. We are still focused on training, the tradition, the insights of the tradition, and the community. The influence of the commercial market society as a whole is there, of course, but it is in check.
But let’s see what happens as we move our attention (and intention) up that board to the fulcrum – to the point of confusion. Near the fulcrum there is danger. But to understand the danger we must look to the other side of the continuum – the marketplace. Far out on the end of our teeter-totter we have an environment of, well – to put it bluntly – sales and business success. This is the theme that now runs through pretty much all American life, from our measurement of sales at the box office and the bookstore (how to gauge artistic quality) to our income comparatives and (can you believe) our credit scores. In all areas of life here now we measure quality by quantity. I suspect that we do not even really know the difference between them most of the time. Growth is king in every field, and when it comes to the world of the spiritual mentor things are apparently no different. At an American Zen Teachers Association meeting a few years ago I was involved in a workshop in some management aspects of operating a Zen Center. We had about twelve Zen teachers in our group there and we were simply discussing the things we do or have considered doing to attract students. (The significance of the very existence of such a discussion should not be lost on us.) At one point I commented that we should all remember that a conscious decision to limit the growth or the size of our own temple is not only okay but may be desirable. To my surprise this passing comment brought sighs of genuine relief from a number of the participants. They went on to say that they have always felt a quiet inner pressure to grow the place and that lack of growth (let alone shrinkage!) marked some sort of failure of theirs as a teacher. One teacher put it beautifully when he offered, “Let’s face it, all Zen teachers count the shoes.”
There are, to be sure, good reasons to wish the temple to grow and prosper. We want our tradition to remain healthy for future generations. We want it to serve its members and community. We want it to be a guiding light for as many people as possible. But just under these noble concerns may well lurk others: Am I a good teacher (like the movies, measured in attendance numbers – confusing quality with quantity)? Is what I am doing popular (read, do I make people feel good about themselves)? This reveals the insecurity of our age, an era in which people will broadcast drunkenness, sex acts, and silliness through the internet just so they can garner more viewers to their apparently all-consuming video attempts to shore up the self. (Do spiritual teachers need personal Blogs? Would Zen Master Hakuin have even considered this?) And naturally there are all manner of other compromises spiritual teachers can and do make to promote themselves, their temples, their teachings, their lineages – their product.
So on one end of the balance we have the traditions themselves, and on the other end the marketplace. But now back to that dangerous fulcrum. The unique danger of the tipping point is that we often don’t see it. I propose that to teach our traditions, teachers should never allow their feet to leave the ground – pardon the image, but we should be happiest with teachers who remain grounded in their respective traditions. Our seesaw has a unique danger built in at the fulcrum because as we get further from the traditional end with our attention, we become enamored with our success (at improving whatever score we are keeping) and find ourselves more open to changes and ideas just a little further down the board we are sitting on. If we attract more (people, admiration, attention to the temple, money, whatever) here, why not go a little farther toward the commercial model? Certainly it can’t hurt to push a little more. The problem is that somewhere out there the balance suddenly changes and we find our spiritual community morphing into a commercial enterprise.
Why is this important for our discussion here about finding a teacher? It is crucial to know the difference between real training and the simple consumption of a commercial product. Real training always centers itself around the benefit and welfare of the student, while the commercial enterprise here does not, and may well focus on benefits for the spiritual director. The traditional neighborhood is safe and loving while the other neighborhood takes your money, your time, your mind, and your body. In this neighborhood what you reap from the enterprise is of little value as spiritual nutrition, but it tastes great going down. The spiritual-commercial neighborhood is a dangerous one indeed, and it is filled with scams and crooks, rapists and con men. It looks safe to the untrained eye because it is made to look safe. And on the commercial side of our seesaw the most dangerous area is right near the fulcrum, since what is offered from this place may well look like traditional training. It is well for the observer to remember that crooks and con artists can appear anywhere along the continuum, but the possibility of danger grows exponentially as one feels ones feet lifting off the ground of traditional training and one becomes grounded instead in a marketing world.
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There are certain requirements for having a spiritual community and the most important among them is that you have to have a community. If you have a monastery you have a community. If you have many lay practitioners in close proximity to one another you have a community. If you have only a schedule of retreats where many of the practitioners of a given tradition convene and sit together, you may still have a community, but things are more tentative. If you only have a retreat schedule there is not much of the day-to-day interaction among practitioners that defines community. It only happens during, right before, and right after the retreat, and even at these times there no real continuity. Continuity is important because it sets up and demands repeated encounters among the individuals in the group. We get to see and hear the idiopathic maladies that plague individual personalities. Bluntly put, in day-to-day interactions among practitioners everyone’s shit gets revealed. This may take some time, but it absolutely will happen. If we only see each other around retreats, there is far less opportunity for this level of revelation.
Pushing this still further toward the marketplace end of our seesaw, what happens to our sense of community when we attend only workshops or presentations or “teachings” given once or twice per year at some forum open to the public? The teacher gets off the plane, is nurtured by the group, fed, praised. Everyone smiles. He always appears happy and content. He always has wise things to say. And he is so generous to give us a few minutes out of his busy schedule. And in the end he gets back on a plane and is gone, and our “community” of practitioners falls apart instantly.
Where is the interaction and important feedback in this? How can we see the flaws of the teacher if all we get is this polished presentation? How can he or she know us at all? (Does he or she even want to?) How can he or she council us about our practice? E-mail? How do we get to know each other as individuals and as practitioners? (Do we want to?) How can we support each other through the difficulties of practice? (Do we want to?)
If our idea of a spiritual community is wrapped around attending “events” which cost money (especially a lot of money), we need to see these for what they really are – they are commercial affairs at which we are “entertained” and may purchase trinkets and more propaganda which is designed merely to get you to attend more such events. We are consumers here, nothing more. We are supporting a jet-setting, marketing-driven institution which is not a community of practitioners in any form, is not designed to develop and support such a community, and which is almost certainly wrapped tightly around one charismatic personality, and this for the benefit of that personage’s ego, power, riches, and freedom to continue this celebrity lifestyle.
In this marketing/commercial/consumer modality there is neither the accountability of the teacher which is demanded by emersion in a real practice community, nor is there any way for the “student” to see the teacher’s warts. Beware the “expert from afar.” We may chuckle at the image of the devotees, by the hundreds, chanting and throwing money while they dance and look to the heavens, all the while waiting for the rented helicopter of the guru which finally hovers above them for a few minutes, dropping millions of special flower petals to them while the guru smiles down and makes a few bows. We may chuckle, but I just described a real scene which happened recently not fifty miles from this spot. And if people can buy into that, they can certainly be wooed by a teacher who will stand in front of them for a few hours and spout platitudes in all the right language, then retire to his hotel room and all the temptations of the road while his accounting people and handlers pave his way. Should we not instead be able to see the living teaching of the living teacher? Should we not be able to check the words with the deeds and either be given a good example of the living truth or be shown that the teacher also has work to do?
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At the Lutheran School of Theology here in Chicago a course is offered every year called “Religions in Dialogue.” Three instructors, all steeped in their traditions, engage the students in deep and spirited discussion concerning three major world religions. These traditions are Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. We ask the students who sign up for the course a question the first class meeting: Why these three traditions? Why not Judaism, Hinduism, or other traditions?
These traditions have something in common historically – all three have consistently shown the ability to move from culture to culture, the ability to transplant themselves and grow to a magnitude that often allows them to come to dominate the spiritual life and landscape of their new home. Each goes about this in a different way, each having its own unique ability to adapt to its new home and attract adherents from native traditions, no matter the cultural template of the new adherents. In the course at the seminary we spend considerable time examining exactly how each tradition grows in its new cultural landscape. Buddhism does this by being extremely flexible in its forms and traditions and also by taking a very soft approach. Buddhism is not confrontational. Buddhism is dynamic by nature with its forms, traditions, and even its primary literature constantly being added to. It embraces change naturally.
When we consider the West, especially the United States, we consider a culture hell-bent on change, often simply for the sake of change itself. We could even submit that change, adaptation, augmentation, and the blending of all cultural traditions (most especially religious ones) pretty much define our American approach to traditions. We can never embrace traditions as we find them. Soon after an American adopts a new religion, it seems, she or he is looking for ways to change it, to make it more user friendly, to make it more modern, to make it . . . different.
We here in America have a questionable habit of altering overnight traditions which have taken centuries to develop. This habit is a pernicious weed in our spiritual practice garden. If we alter the tradition enough, in fact, we no longer even have a tradition at all, but have what the post World War II Japanese called (and embraced to the point of the absurd) a “New Religion.” Here in the West we capture all this sort of activity in the rather global term “New Age.” We speak with a straight face about “classic” New Age religions. We have such a weak sense of what a tradition really is and what it requires from us that many in our culture could not tease out “traditions” which count their history in years from those which measure theirs in centuries.
In a culture for whose members geography is a dreamlike state, for whom history often confuses the Civil War and the first World War, it is asking a lot to expect that people could sort out even major world religions, let alone understand the dizzying array of various amalgams out there. Words like “Master,” “Roshi,” “Guru” are tossed right into the same salad as “porno” and “operating system” and “ISP.” (I have heard Guru used with all three of these.) If someone simply calls herself a Master or a Teacher or a Sensei, then surely she must be. And if many people, no matter how badly informed on the subject, call her so, well then no one can question such a title.
For example, Frederick Lenz, AKA Zen Master Rama (“Zen” and “Rama” being an oxymoron – but no matter), sold himself as a great teacher with no real training I could ever find, all by using the marketing presentation described above to hundreds, if not thousands, of people who were otherwise sensible and who paid lots of money for his “teaching.” He sexually abused his students (read customers), took their money (sold spiritual trinkets to the natives), and lived high (just read the testimonials on the internet). How could this happen? Simple. We are not educated when it comes to false teachers, and we are not educated when it comes to the traditions which they so freely abuse, dissect, steal from, and Frankenstein together in order to give themselves a platform to speak from.
I have a simple guideline to offer here: If a many-centuries old tradition works, why does it need to be radically “adapted” or “augmented?” Has it not already shown that it already IS adaptable? We may laugh at the turtle because it is prehistoric in design, but it has come all this way without our “help.” I’m not proposing that we do not look for sensible adaptations to our traditions. This is necessary and natural. But why must we insist that our limited experience can enable us to turn a centuries-old vehicle for the truth inside out and in doing this come up with something better? This is akin to handing an eleven-year-old the keys to the White House and inviting her to run the country. While our frustration with our leadership may at times run deep, we would never do such a thing. Would we?
I am personally troubled by Buddhism’s need to cling so tightly to a concept like Rebirth while at the same time teaching Emptiness. But I am allowing this skepticism to endure decades of testing on my part and I’m not about to toss Rebirth out as some totally fictitious notion just because I may see it as such if you catch me on the right day. But in our quasi-scientific mode these days, with all our real and pop psychology, with all our rampant political correctness and all our sureness of our historical hindsight and perfect grasp on all human problems, we pass final judgment in minutes on the contained and applied wisdom of the ages.
The irony of ironies here is that it may be our very apprehension about not wrapping ourselves in a more traditional set of spiritual values that drives us to try to adapt these traditions to our hectic lives. We know we should be doing something deeper. Yet we do not have the spiritual grounding to judge what is best to do. So we do what we always do when we feel inadequate here in America – we shop. And if the product LOOKS like it may be legit Buddhadharma, we buy. Never mind that it has been mangled into something which can be presented as a “product.” We do not have the context to grasp that it is not supposed to be a product at all, but a practice. And more, it is a practice with a teacher within a practice community.
So we must beware of psycho-babble filled tradition look-alikes, since these are almost certainly Frankensteined just for our consumption, at a price. They are just too friendly to be transforming. There is an old saw: “Effective medicine tastes bitter.” Herein we have the next warning: If the teacher comes down to our level too much, look out. He may not really want to aid in your transformation into a spiritual adult. He may only desire our adoration as a spiritual child. Not only do the commercial gurus offer alternatives to the traditional approach, they offer teachings which have been rather “modernized” (read dumbed down) by them (of course), for your easy consumption (oh how nice). I am a Zen teacher. Zen is HARD to grasp. It is certainly NOT simply sitting and staring at a wall. The doings and sayings of the Zen Masters are rough stuff, hard to understand, hard to absorb. I’m in roughly the same boat I was in when I was a high school English teacher many years ago here: I can interpret Shakespeare so that the students do not have to stretch too far to work with the vocabulary and syntax, or I can be a hardass and force them into Shakespeare’s language. If I do the former they will have it easier. If I do the later they will struggle. I can go down to their level, but I prefer to force them up to mine. If you think this cruel, ask yourself this question: Who were my best teachers in school, that is to say the ones I actually grew with and learned the most from? Those who push us help us the most.
But this runs opposite to our wishes as a student. We want the easier road, at least until we mature and discover that the easy road is always a fraud. If we are to be spiritual students, we will struggle. Period. “Enlightenment before noon with our workshops,” is a product advertisement designed to cater to the instant gratification, spiritual chocoholic in all of us. Beware. Practice is not only about an “experience” which has been carefully orchestrated by re-wrapping a tradition in contemporary psycho-speak. Practice must have legs. It must work in us over a long period of time, and almost always this time occurs both BEFORE AND AFTER the occurrence of anything that can be called an enlightenment (read any kind of meaningful breakthrough). There is no easy road which will have lasting effects for us, and there is no simple formula for realizing the truth. If you feel that you are being addressed in a language and in a style which seems almost commercial and which claim to take the heart of any major spiritual tradition and turn it over to you without much effort on your part, then that little voice of caution squeaking inside you should be attended to. It is the very same little voice which warned you away from the huckster car salesman, the real estate woman, the friendly man who wanted to date you and who magically adored your kids, and the man in your childhood nightmares who leaned out of the car offering candy and a ride. Listen to that inner voice.
If someone is selling an experience, we can be sure that the situation we find ourselves in is being orchestrated so that we feel we have that experience. If it seems too obvious, too slick, too quick, too impossibly easy, guess what – it is.
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One of the many tools in the toolkit of the commercial teacher is the “specialness” of any given student. Teachers with a hidden agenda often tell certain students (read rich, beautiful, sexually available) that these students are “special.” Amazingly this is often the very word used – “special.” This is often the beginning of a come-on of a sexual nature, of course. After all, this line shows up, and with some success, in other areas – work, associations – where it is simply a baited hook. So it also is used in a spiritual context to cast a line with only slightly different bait. Here we have a great power disparity between guru types and student types, and so this pick-up line is particularly toxic because it is used to hit below the belt (pun intended) and get right into the emotional mushiness of the student.
We need to be aware of this sort of fisherman, and although many of us are, it is nevertheless astounding just how many people ( mostly women who are baited by men teachers) fall for this “you are special” line. But here I would like to introduce another brand of specialness which is used not only by sexual predators who disguise themselves as teachers, but by the entire commercial guru set. This is the specialness of anyone who can “really hear my message.” The auditorium filled with nodding heads. The agreeing masses. “Mega Dittos, Rush!!”
I was once, many years ago, working as a teacher in a small business finishing school in Upstate New York. I was underpaid, overworked, and I felt sorry for myself. The office building next to the school housed a regional office of IBM. One of the IBMers happened to be in our school one day and we were introduced. He was a middle-aged, middle management type who was articulate, even smooth. He pulled me aside and said that he was involved in a side business and that there may be an opportunity for me. Three days later I found myself being driven to a meeting seventy-five miles away. We ended up in a large Ramada Inn party room with 200 strangers. This is where I would learn the scoop about how to make money on my own. We sat in the middle of the auditorium-like setup. On the dais paraded one speaker after another, all booming inspiration. Charts were used, and testimonials too. The only evidence of any sort of corporate unity was the pervasive presence of a triangle-shaped logo.
But after even half an hour of this there was no mention of products or services. Also, it became clear to me that the onlookers consisted of two distinct types. There were the believers, understanders, ones who could identify with the message with nods, grunts of knowing, and smiles. The other group (far fewer of us) was the novices, the uninitiated, the anxious, the ones left out who wanted in. At forty-five minutes into this initiation-cum-stage show I noticed something. People around me who were clearly soldiers of the system kept doing two bothersome things. They would turn (just as the man who brought me would turn) to their uninitiated charges and smile during key moments in the testimonials, or during moments which were “don’t-you-get-it” moments in the presentation. They would smile, but housed within that smile was a look of stern “checking.” They seemed to be checking to see if the ideology, the point of view, the system (read brainwashing) was taking root there in the psyche of the new recruit. This discovery was chilling. I realized in a flash that we were to be “hooked” in this initial stage into staying and participating in the small groups to come. In these (I discovered later from a friend who stayed the whole evening) there was not just push but also shove, and this done on a personal level, all directed at making the recruit a believer.
The other annoying habit of the soldiers was the breath spray. It was the 1970’s, and these little canisters of breath spray were popular. I noticed that everyone around me was using these – that is the soldiers were. Finally I also noticed that they all used the same brand, and when we were reaching the one hour mark in our indoctrination I caught a glimpse of the brand – Amway. I leaned over to the IBMer and asked if this was really an Amway meeting. He did not respond. I asked again, and he would not look at me. I then, in the rude carelessness of young adulthood, stood up and called out, “You new people! This is an Amway recruiting meeting!” Pandemonium broke out, arguments, smiles, breath spray galore. I made good my escape and called my wife, who rescued me with the smirk of Alice of The Honeymooners. My friend escaped later and assured me that the meeting survived my meltdown (and later his) and new recruits were gleaned from the initiates.
If you stay up late enough and watch enough cable TV, you will find these hucksters in operation, selling everything from cooking ware to spiritual wellness, from nutritional supplements to speed reading. There are always nodding heads in the audience. There are always people who really get it. We are shown camera shots of these people all throughout the presentation. We may even sit back and shake our heads and marvel at how anyone could be taken in by such hype. Well hear this warning: This stuff is much more effective in person. And the smaller and more intimate the group, the more effective it can become. False teachers offer charming false teachings and they do this in a very charming way. Charm is the word. They mesmerize us into entering a self-referential and make-believe world which will contain all the right buzz-concepts. Enlightenment. (Some of the best Zen teachers I know never mention that word. Wonder why.) Peace & Justice. Inner strength (or peace). Focus and success (Why these, I wonder). And, of course, they use the framework of either the spiritual world or the corporate world, since they know that we will speak one of these two languages when addressing our own inner landscape.
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We need to be wary when the setting is a familiar institutional one (read dumbing down, coming too much into our arena to reach us) – lecture circuits, conferences, motel party rooms, revival tents set up in your own neighborhood. These settings are far from community and the watchful eyes of peers. We need to be wary when there is a perfume of insiders and outsiders, of charm, of several hours of a very casual but carefully controlled environment, where outside information has carefully been controlled, most especially when this happens in a “safe” place we are familiar with (where we have lowered our guard). Watch out when the teachings are represented as deep and yet they are familiar both in language of presentation and in concept. If the group is quietly special, or you yourself are made to feel special, run.
If this teaching is a Frankenstein of at least two seemingly disparate traditions, consider hard the efficacy of this. In a sense we are facing in such teachings the founding of a new religious tradition and this tradition in usually being presented by the founder. And often this founder is charismatic. The excitement of this sort of moment can adversely influence our decision-making and reasoning process. We need to reflect on the simple statistics before us. How many of these new approaches or new-age inventions or blendings get presented each year? How many survive to become even minor contributions to our human approach to spirituality? Is the man before us really in the league of a Christ or a Mohammad or a Buddha, even ignoring any thoughts of divinity, even as an original spiritual thinker?
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And what of the typical trajectory of such teachings? What historically happens to these Masters who have commercially presented their new approaches? Let me try to present a pattern here. We are all free to find our own examples. Basically, while the initial teachings of many false teachers will contain the underpinnings of the tradition these teachers were trained in (often not for very long), the teachings (product) tend over a few or even several years toward two features: The product slowly morphs further and further away from the teachings of the root tradition in content, form, and manner of presentation, and the product also tends to spawn additional products.
Both of these trends are corporate in nature – this is to say that these are product and service trends very familiar to anyone involved in selling and developing new products and services. We start out with simple toothpaste. We might even market the toothpaste as an alternative to more mega-corp products out there by advertising that our toothpaste does not have evil artificial ingredients in it and is not tested by torturing rabbits like our competitors’ products. We do well. We gain market share. Some time later (a few years at most) we discover that our sales growth has stopped, or even reversed, that our competition has responded with a more “natural” toothpaste of their own, etc., etc. We need a shot in the arm. So we morph the product and offer basted turkey flavor toothpaste. Sales rise since all consumers are addicted to New and Different. We also develop natural dental floss, make from recycled underwear (don’t worry, we wash it!), and this morphs us laterally into new but parallel markets. Sales go up, but only until the competition responds and the consumer gets bored again, at which time we will develop even further.
Silly as this example may seem, if we take a careful look at the mainline Christian churches in our neighborhood, we will quickly discover that for years they have been at least dabbling in these very marketing waters too. Modern dance and music at Sunday Service, children’s groups that go way further than Sunday School, no Latin, easy-read Bibles, field trips, all manner of social activities and charities and discussion groups. And if we go back to our seesaw and watch the trends carefully, we may also discover that there are all manner of break-away churches which may disagree with some religious or practice tenant of the mainline organization, but may also simply find themselves on the commercial side of the seesaw.
And once there the marketing morphing starts in earnest. We have here in Chicagoland a number of these huge mega-churches. They are literally the size of huge high schools or small colleges. Auditoriums seat 5,000 and attendance runs past this capacity. Inside one I visited recently I found a large restaurant, a Borders-size bookstore, several meeting areas, many offices, huge grounds, exercise room, etc. There were programs available (all for hefty fees) on all manner of human situations. Charities galore. Small groups to join. Something for everyone. But nowhere in that mammoth building – nope, nowhere – did I see so much as one cross. Not on the outside, not in the literature, not in the rooms. The pulpit (I actually hesitate even designating it as such.) that stands in front of thousands of in-the-semi-round easy chair seats has no cross on it, nor above it, nor behind it. I was thunderstruck. This was a deeply reminiscent moment for me. The real product, the real import, the real purpose lay hidden from those thousands at the Sunday gathering. I went chill, because I remembered this – an Amway meeting at a Ramada Inn nearly thirty years ago.
So the trajectory of these operations is pretty consistent. There is an original message which may be delivered from within one of the familiar religious traditions. Then, with the passage of enough time, the message widens and morphs. Within a few generations of its Godzilla-like life cycle the lopped off arms which look more promising from a marketing standpoint grow new bodies, and soon the whole spiritual product bears almost no resemblance to the original tradition which spawned it. Now it is offered in today’s version of Ramada Inn party rooms and has a slick format. It and its chief champion are no longer accountable to the tradition’s forms nor to the authority figures in the tradition. It has become product-like in that its teachings are to be consumed (after having been “purchased”) along with various add-ons and sister products. Newer products will come out soon. It is homeless both in temple venue and in any real sense of community to which it may be accountable. It is adaptable, but only in a marketing sense – it has learned how to bring consumer attention to itself. The “teacher” has, eventually, lost by degrees all respect when it comes to his or her peers (that is the ones who count, those in the original tradition). There may be exceptions to this latter feature – he or she may have the grudging admiration of those peers who themselves either privately or publicly covet such fame and fortune and power. I’m embarrassed to say that even among the leadership of many spiritual traditions these days there is a dearth of good judgment when it comes to crossing the fulcrum of our seesaw.
The “teacher” is often a marketing genius who knows how to develop and sell his product, at least for a while. He or she is almost always personally magnetic and charismatic. These people could sell ice cream to Eskimos. Actually, this is exactly what they are doing, since these great inner truths are really always there simply for the taking – or maybe the uncovering. If the customer feels eventually that crossing over to the other side of the seesaw is healthy, he or she may seek out real teachers. These real teachers have real communities and accountability within them. They have peer review of some kind. They have a tradition to adhere to, and not necessarily rigidly adhere to. They do not ask for so much money for themselves. They live humbly and otherwise seem to generally embody the spirit of their teachings. They may not be perfect, true, but there is no real question as to where their heart lies. It lies with helping the student, the practitioner, to benefit from the same system which they themselves found so helpful. And if the customer can finally embark on the long and difficult journey of deep spiritual work, these real teachers will sacrifice anything to help.
Sensei Sevan Ross, Chicago Zen Center
There is confusion on all fronts.
An individual faces a bewildering scene when looking for or working with spiritual teachers. In Asia there is a narrower array of options than in the West. There we find Traditions which are quite old, and a temple structure and lineage apparatus which lay down some clear guidelines for the shape, duration, and boundaries of spiritual training. From the Zen temples of Japan to the mountain enclaves of Tibetan Vajrayana, from the Thai Forest Monks to even the loose structure of Hinduism, there is long and entrenched tradition to look to when considering spiritual guidance. While these deeply enculturated structures do not in any way guarantee high quality or uniform behavior on the part of practitioners or teachers, and while to a Westerner these structures can even be seen as a lack of choices, this more traditional environment does usually at least provide a stricter set of guidelines to both teachers and students for defining exactly what a spiritual teacher is. While I am most concerned with the Zen teaching scene here in America since that is where I hang my hat, the following reflections may also be applied to not only other Buddhist traditions but to any spiritual work where there is a mentor.
In the USA we find an environment with a rich loam in which to grow both legitimate and illegitimate spiritual teachers and traditions. While we host here in this multicultural landscape all manner of traditions, we add to these traditions a highly (and some would say overly) psychological framework. On top of this we may add an aggressive commercial bias. Throw in all the New Age inventions and blendings, water it down with a hankering to change and reshape virtually everything until it is exactly what we would prefer (read, make it easy and shallow), and you no longer have a spiritual garden which is being cared for by well-trained and dedicated master teachers. Not at all. Instead you find a garden which may grow both useful and desirable spiritual food (even if these plants are naturally of somewhat uneven quality), but along with this crop grows a tangled patch of weeds. These weeds may look like spiritual traditions, but they may be dangerous to the real food plants, and are often downright poisonous to would-be practitioners.
While a careful examination of this whole scene may have great value, and while there have been attempts to make some sense out of either all or part of it, our purpose here is merely to offer some insights aimed directly at the questions which arise when one is looking for a teacher, or is looking to augment one’s practice with the teaching of someone other than one’s root teacher. Our interest lies in the personalities and psychologies of teachers. To use a more familiar commercial lens: Who are the producers and what is offered? And while we are surveying this garden, let us consider the likely impact of the crops grown.
Traditional spiritual training as I understand it (from my clearly Zen Buddhist bias) has as its aim the shaping and refining of thoughtful, active, caring, social, deeply grounded people who (at least from the Zen perspective) come to approach the world from a mind steeped in insight. This particular insight surpasses simple intellectual realization. It arises from the “gut” where it has been awakened through years of hard, unremitting practice. This practice happens in the context of a community of fellow practitioners as well as in the society as a whole. The impact of this training is nothing less than a reorganization of one’s approach to life and to others, as well as to one’s self. In my tradition we help the student pry the mind loose from its barnacle-like hold on its routine – its ego-centered habits and pain-producing attitudes.
The teacher’s place in this training model should be one of coach and example. While in the strictest sense the teacher has nothing whatever to give the student, what the teacher can offer the student is a living example of how one might address the world after a great deal of development and insight in one’s spiritual life. Along with this example of the fruits of long practice should come a firm but kind guiding hand which both challenges the student in his or her journey, and protects the student from influences which may sidetrack or even cause harm. It is well understood that these influences may well include aspects of the teacher’s own personality, will, or desires. Teachers are here to guide students along, not sidetrack them into another agenda. A real teacher must not twist the teaching in such a way that the teacher, the lineage, or even the tradition itself is seen in a better light. We are in service here of the highest truths, not in service of the teacher and the teacher’s image or desires.
All the above is said to set the stage for a number of crucial questions which every student should ask when considering a teacher or teaching. As one of my students put it once, “Buddhism treats you like an adult.” This should be true of any religious tradition. The practitioner is an adult in that the practitioner should never simply check her or his brain at the door of the temple or meeting. Finding the right relationship is all rather like dating (perhaps a little too much so). Even somewhat further into the relationship, after some time and experience working with a teacher, one should keep one’s eyes open for flaws that are possibly serious. If one feels one has found such a flaw, one must reconsider the relationship of teacher and student.
In referring to these training and relationship issues commentators often reminded us of three things which should be red flags: Seeking name and fame, sexual involvement with students, acquisition of riches. These three are classic warning signs for students of teachers to avoid. Central to our use and understanding of these is the fact that they all share some clear characteristics. All spring out of and are evidence of an inflated ego on the part of the teacher. All are related to power. In each abuse we see the workings of a special type of domination paradigm where the teacher acquires more power and stature and the student is in some way further subjugated.
So what follows here are the classic warning signs. But first a warning: There is always the problem of exactly where the lines are on these. For example, if the teacher buys a very nice car as opposed to a merely functional one, some observers will write off such a purchase as necessary to either attract certain donors or to help the teacher with his bad back whenever he travels. Others may feel that any car at all is unnecessary. And there may be opinions everywhere in between. We could spend our whole discussion trying to pin down where these lines are, but since we have a long way to go, let me instead suggest some simple questions to ask in these classic areas. I am herein appealing to the deep compass which I feel is available to most people. I’ve discovered through the years that we as a society often do not engage these deep moral instincts enough, either because they were underplayed or not taught at all when we were children, or because of some misguided over-application of our current sense of political correctness. I feel strongly that we need to revive and engage our common sense.
So simply put:
1. How much money is too much for a teacher? If you find yourself or others reaching for justifications to explain the opulence, look out. If you find yourself justifying the fact that your spiritual guide just bought a new decked-out Harley, congratulations – you are now in the same neighborhood as the families of alcoholics who stretch to justify the drinking. It’s a dangerous neighborhood.
2. Sexual contact with students: There should not be any. If there is, then what should occur is disclosure, counseling, mea culpas, guidelines, community healing. We need to be careful here, however. I feel that because of the recent abuse issues growing out of the Catholic Church and other high-profile organizations, we are nuclear in all our responses to these situations. I heard of a state government which recently enacted a law which provides mandatory prison terms for anyone who has sexual contact with clients when they are providing counseling. I submit that this will neither prevent this contact, nor will it reform the perpetrator. This kind of thinking is draconian and shows once again our lack of simple common sense. Of course there are situations when this sort of punishment is needed. But one cannot legislate the human heart, and people will not only cross care-giver and client boundaries, but they may actually fall in love, and moreover, some of these relationships may well last a lifetime. A complex range of interactions can and will occur between spiritual teachers and students.
Because of the power disparity which is tipped in favor of the teacher and the clear vulnerability of the student we must do everything in our power to prevent this – that is without beheading people. More important for our purposes here, however, is the notion of Pattern. Did the teacher cross sexual boundaries because he or she fell in love – or is this just lust and abuse? If this behavior occurs again and again, we know the answer. If a community of women, say, is polled confidentially, and they strongly agree that the teacher is safe, and they have a good bird’s eye view of the teacher’s habits and history, then we can be somewhat assured (though never entirely) that we do not have a sexual abuser on our hands. Bottom line: Ask the women of the community (if considering a heterosexual man teacher). If they all smile beatifically and admire him, but they can’t tell you about any of his flaws, they may not be reliable. But if they have seen him at close range over a long time, can tell you that he is not perfect in various areas, and still tell you that they see him as sexually safe, he may well be safe. And this may be true even if he has once had some slip in this department. We have to look at the whole record. What’s the pattern? What’s the history?
3. Is the teacher self promoting? Self-promotion is easy to see, even if the teacher is not famous. Does the teacher speak of her or his attributes often? Are they trying actively to “promote” themselves? A gauge I can offer here is quite simple: How much time do they spend working on building their practice and community compared to the time spent out on the lecture circuit promoting themselves? More on all this below.
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Beyond this set of useful guidelines there is the world of pattern, instinct, and simple observation. My father shocked me once while we were sitting on his back porch in Pittsburgh when he confidently predicted that a red-tailed hawk that had been lurking around the birdfeeder would soon “pick off two of those sparrows.” Not more that five minutes later that bird swooped down on the hapless flock, talloned one sparrow, twisted around the tree the feeder was mounted on and surprised another who had fled in that direction. Two birds under wing, the hawk silently glided further down the hill. Of course I asked Dad how he knew. He replied, “I watch ‘em.”
Careful observation will give us certain patterns which, while not infallible, can provide us with amazingly accurate predictors. Then we can engage and even improve our instinct and avoid trouble. So we are indeed here in the business of making judgments. When we cross the street and we see that a car is careening toward us with a drunken teenager behind the wheel and we jump far back onto the curb we are also making judgments. This is not sinful, no matter what the politically correct crowd may say. This is a survival instinct, and to ignore it is to do so at great peril both to ourselves and to others. If my father came to his bird observations with what some might see as an “open mind,” he would be blind to the damage about to be done. I appeal to the reader here directly: You have witnessed human abuses, abuses by commercial marketing thinking, abuses by predators – use what you have seen; look for the patterns; watch for the signs. Perhaps this can help:
Let us set up a sliding scale, and we will do this using an old playground toy as our metaphor – a kid’s teeter-totter. On one end we have the traditional institutions charged with delivering a certain spiritual message and/or providing for a certain, well defined kind of spiritual training experience. In Western Zen we call these Zen Centers, Zen Temples and such. These are classically monastic or semi-monastic in nature, but in this new environment of Western commercial society they may also be entirely lay institutions. The point is that they advertise little, uphold the traditional training in pretty much the form they found it, and stick to their spiritual knitting. As we move toward the other side of our teeter-totter we typically start adding stuff. Some of this stuff comes in the form of adaptations of Western religions and psychology. Many of the add-ons are not only innocent but are helpful – Sunday schools for kids, coming-of-age ceremonies, famine relief days, church socials, layers of oblate or deacon-like lay ordination, interfaith programs. In Zen Centers we may adapt things for the local Sangha by changing Sesshin retreat schedules somewhat, tweaking the sitting rounds to be longer or shorter, adding to the schedule holidays and celebrations and possibly even rites that are outside the tradition but are very helpful for our community. But we are still sitting on the teeter-totter with our feet on the ground. We are still focused on training, the tradition, the insights of the tradition, and the community. The influence of the commercial market society as a whole is there, of course, but it is in check.
But let’s see what happens as we move our attention (and intention) up that board to the fulcrum – to the point of confusion. Near the fulcrum there is danger. But to understand the danger we must look to the other side of the continuum – the marketplace. Far out on the end of our teeter-totter we have an environment of, well – to put it bluntly – sales and business success. This is the theme that now runs through pretty much all American life, from our measurement of sales at the box office and the bookstore (how to gauge artistic quality) to our income comparatives and (can you believe) our credit scores. In all areas of life here now we measure quality by quantity. I suspect that we do not even really know the difference between them most of the time. Growth is king in every field, and when it comes to the world of the spiritual mentor things are apparently no different. At an American Zen Teachers Association meeting a few years ago I was involved in a workshop in some management aspects of operating a Zen Center. We had about twelve Zen teachers in our group there and we were simply discussing the things we do or have considered doing to attract students. (The significance of the very existence of such a discussion should not be lost on us.) At one point I commented that we should all remember that a conscious decision to limit the growth or the size of our own temple is not only okay but may be desirable. To my surprise this passing comment brought sighs of genuine relief from a number of the participants. They went on to say that they have always felt a quiet inner pressure to grow the place and that lack of growth (let alone shrinkage!) marked some sort of failure of theirs as a teacher. One teacher put it beautifully when he offered, “Let’s face it, all Zen teachers count the shoes.”
There are, to be sure, good reasons to wish the temple to grow and prosper. We want our tradition to remain healthy for future generations. We want it to serve its members and community. We want it to be a guiding light for as many people as possible. But just under these noble concerns may well lurk others: Am I a good teacher (like the movies, measured in attendance numbers – confusing quality with quantity)? Is what I am doing popular (read, do I make people feel good about themselves)? This reveals the insecurity of our age, an era in which people will broadcast drunkenness, sex acts, and silliness through the internet just so they can garner more viewers to their apparently all-consuming video attempts to shore up the self. (Do spiritual teachers need personal Blogs? Would Zen Master Hakuin have even considered this?) And naturally there are all manner of other compromises spiritual teachers can and do make to promote themselves, their temples, their teachings, their lineages – their product.
So on one end of the balance we have the traditions themselves, and on the other end the marketplace. But now back to that dangerous fulcrum. The unique danger of the tipping point is that we often don’t see it. I propose that to teach our traditions, teachers should never allow their feet to leave the ground – pardon the image, but we should be happiest with teachers who remain grounded in their respective traditions. Our seesaw has a unique danger built in at the fulcrum because as we get further from the traditional end with our attention, we become enamored with our success (at improving whatever score we are keeping) and find ourselves more open to changes and ideas just a little further down the board we are sitting on. If we attract more (people, admiration, attention to the temple, money, whatever) here, why not go a little farther toward the commercial model? Certainly it can’t hurt to push a little more. The problem is that somewhere out there the balance suddenly changes and we find our spiritual community morphing into a commercial enterprise.
Why is this important for our discussion here about finding a teacher? It is crucial to know the difference between real training and the simple consumption of a commercial product. Real training always centers itself around the benefit and welfare of the student, while the commercial enterprise here does not, and may well focus on benefits for the spiritual director. The traditional neighborhood is safe and loving while the other neighborhood takes your money, your time, your mind, and your body. In this neighborhood what you reap from the enterprise is of little value as spiritual nutrition, but it tastes great going down. The spiritual-commercial neighborhood is a dangerous one indeed, and it is filled with scams and crooks, rapists and con men. It looks safe to the untrained eye because it is made to look safe. And on the commercial side of our seesaw the most dangerous area is right near the fulcrum, since what is offered from this place may well look like traditional training. It is well for the observer to remember that crooks and con artists can appear anywhere along the continuum, but the possibility of danger grows exponentially as one feels ones feet lifting off the ground of traditional training and one becomes grounded instead in a marketing world.
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There are certain requirements for having a spiritual community and the most important among them is that you have to have a community. If you have a monastery you have a community. If you have many lay practitioners in close proximity to one another you have a community. If you have only a schedule of retreats where many of the practitioners of a given tradition convene and sit together, you may still have a community, but things are more tentative. If you only have a retreat schedule there is not much of the day-to-day interaction among practitioners that defines community. It only happens during, right before, and right after the retreat, and even at these times there no real continuity. Continuity is important because it sets up and demands repeated encounters among the individuals in the group. We get to see and hear the idiopathic maladies that plague individual personalities. Bluntly put, in day-to-day interactions among practitioners everyone’s shit gets revealed. This may take some time, but it absolutely will happen. If we only see each other around retreats, there is far less opportunity for this level of revelation.
Pushing this still further toward the marketplace end of our seesaw, what happens to our sense of community when we attend only workshops or presentations or “teachings” given once or twice per year at some forum open to the public? The teacher gets off the plane, is nurtured by the group, fed, praised. Everyone smiles. He always appears happy and content. He always has wise things to say. And he is so generous to give us a few minutes out of his busy schedule. And in the end he gets back on a plane and is gone, and our “community” of practitioners falls apart instantly.
Where is the interaction and important feedback in this? How can we see the flaws of the teacher if all we get is this polished presentation? How can he or she know us at all? (Does he or she even want to?) How can he or she council us about our practice? E-mail? How do we get to know each other as individuals and as practitioners? (Do we want to?) How can we support each other through the difficulties of practice? (Do we want to?)
If our idea of a spiritual community is wrapped around attending “events” which cost money (especially a lot of money), we need to see these for what they really are – they are commercial affairs at which we are “entertained” and may purchase trinkets and more propaganda which is designed merely to get you to attend more such events. We are consumers here, nothing more. We are supporting a jet-setting, marketing-driven institution which is not a community of practitioners in any form, is not designed to develop and support such a community, and which is almost certainly wrapped tightly around one charismatic personality, and this for the benefit of that personage’s ego, power, riches, and freedom to continue this celebrity lifestyle.
In this marketing/commercial/consumer modality there is neither the accountability of the teacher which is demanded by emersion in a real practice community, nor is there any way for the “student” to see the teacher’s warts. Beware the “expert from afar.” We may chuckle at the image of the devotees, by the hundreds, chanting and throwing money while they dance and look to the heavens, all the while waiting for the rented helicopter of the guru which finally hovers above them for a few minutes, dropping millions of special flower petals to them while the guru smiles down and makes a few bows. We may chuckle, but I just described a real scene which happened recently not fifty miles from this spot. And if people can buy into that, they can certainly be wooed by a teacher who will stand in front of them for a few hours and spout platitudes in all the right language, then retire to his hotel room and all the temptations of the road while his accounting people and handlers pave his way. Should we not instead be able to see the living teaching of the living teacher? Should we not be able to check the words with the deeds and either be given a good example of the living truth or be shown that the teacher also has work to do?
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At the Lutheran School of Theology here in Chicago a course is offered every year called “Religions in Dialogue.” Three instructors, all steeped in their traditions, engage the students in deep and spirited discussion concerning three major world religions. These traditions are Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. We ask the students who sign up for the course a question the first class meeting: Why these three traditions? Why not Judaism, Hinduism, or other traditions?
These traditions have something in common historically – all three have consistently shown the ability to move from culture to culture, the ability to transplant themselves and grow to a magnitude that often allows them to come to dominate the spiritual life and landscape of their new home. Each goes about this in a different way, each having its own unique ability to adapt to its new home and attract adherents from native traditions, no matter the cultural template of the new adherents. In the course at the seminary we spend considerable time examining exactly how each tradition grows in its new cultural landscape. Buddhism does this by being extremely flexible in its forms and traditions and also by taking a very soft approach. Buddhism is not confrontational. Buddhism is dynamic by nature with its forms, traditions, and even its primary literature constantly being added to. It embraces change naturally.
When we consider the West, especially the United States, we consider a culture hell-bent on change, often simply for the sake of change itself. We could even submit that change, adaptation, augmentation, and the blending of all cultural traditions (most especially religious ones) pretty much define our American approach to traditions. We can never embrace traditions as we find them. Soon after an American adopts a new religion, it seems, she or he is looking for ways to change it, to make it more user friendly, to make it more modern, to make it . . . different.
We here in America have a questionable habit of altering overnight traditions which have taken centuries to develop. This habit is a pernicious weed in our spiritual practice garden. If we alter the tradition enough, in fact, we no longer even have a tradition at all, but have what the post World War II Japanese called (and embraced to the point of the absurd) a “New Religion.” Here in the West we capture all this sort of activity in the rather global term “New Age.” We speak with a straight face about “classic” New Age religions. We have such a weak sense of what a tradition really is and what it requires from us that many in our culture could not tease out “traditions” which count their history in years from those which measure theirs in centuries.
In a culture for whose members geography is a dreamlike state, for whom history often confuses the Civil War and the first World War, it is asking a lot to expect that people could sort out even major world religions, let alone understand the dizzying array of various amalgams out there. Words like “Master,” “Roshi,” “Guru” are tossed right into the same salad as “porno” and “operating system” and “ISP.” (I have heard Guru used with all three of these.) If someone simply calls herself a Master or a Teacher or a Sensei, then surely she must be. And if many people, no matter how badly informed on the subject, call her so, well then no one can question such a title.
For example, Frederick Lenz, AKA Zen Master Rama (“Zen” and “Rama” being an oxymoron – but no matter), sold himself as a great teacher with no real training I could ever find, all by using the marketing presentation described above to hundreds, if not thousands, of people who were otherwise sensible and who paid lots of money for his “teaching.” He sexually abused his students (read customers), took their money (sold spiritual trinkets to the natives), and lived high (just read the testimonials on the internet). How could this happen? Simple. We are not educated when it comes to false teachers, and we are not educated when it comes to the traditions which they so freely abuse, dissect, steal from, and Frankenstein together in order to give themselves a platform to speak from.
I have a simple guideline to offer here: If a many-centuries old tradition works, why does it need to be radically “adapted” or “augmented?” Has it not already shown that it already IS adaptable? We may laugh at the turtle because it is prehistoric in design, but it has come all this way without our “help.” I’m not proposing that we do not look for sensible adaptations to our traditions. This is necessary and natural. But why must we insist that our limited experience can enable us to turn a centuries-old vehicle for the truth inside out and in doing this come up with something better? This is akin to handing an eleven-year-old the keys to the White House and inviting her to run the country. While our frustration with our leadership may at times run deep, we would never do such a thing. Would we?
I am personally troubled by Buddhism’s need to cling so tightly to a concept like Rebirth while at the same time teaching Emptiness. But I am allowing this skepticism to endure decades of testing on my part and I’m not about to toss Rebirth out as some totally fictitious notion just because I may see it as such if you catch me on the right day. But in our quasi-scientific mode these days, with all our real and pop psychology, with all our rampant political correctness and all our sureness of our historical hindsight and perfect grasp on all human problems, we pass final judgment in minutes on the contained and applied wisdom of the ages.
The irony of ironies here is that it may be our very apprehension about not wrapping ourselves in a more traditional set of spiritual values that drives us to try to adapt these traditions to our hectic lives. We know we should be doing something deeper. Yet we do not have the spiritual grounding to judge what is best to do. So we do what we always do when we feel inadequate here in America – we shop. And if the product LOOKS like it may be legit Buddhadharma, we buy. Never mind that it has been mangled into something which can be presented as a “product.” We do not have the context to grasp that it is not supposed to be a product at all, but a practice. And more, it is a practice with a teacher within a practice community.
So we must beware of psycho-babble filled tradition look-alikes, since these are almost certainly Frankensteined just for our consumption, at a price. They are just too friendly to be transforming. There is an old saw: “Effective medicine tastes bitter.” Herein we have the next warning: If the teacher comes down to our level too much, look out. He may not really want to aid in your transformation into a spiritual adult. He may only desire our adoration as a spiritual child. Not only do the commercial gurus offer alternatives to the traditional approach, they offer teachings which have been rather “modernized” (read dumbed down) by them (of course), for your easy consumption (oh how nice). I am a Zen teacher. Zen is HARD to grasp. It is certainly NOT simply sitting and staring at a wall. The doings and sayings of the Zen Masters are rough stuff, hard to understand, hard to absorb. I’m in roughly the same boat I was in when I was a high school English teacher many years ago here: I can interpret Shakespeare so that the students do not have to stretch too far to work with the vocabulary and syntax, or I can be a hardass and force them into Shakespeare’s language. If I do the former they will have it easier. If I do the later they will struggle. I can go down to their level, but I prefer to force them up to mine. If you think this cruel, ask yourself this question: Who were my best teachers in school, that is to say the ones I actually grew with and learned the most from? Those who push us help us the most.
But this runs opposite to our wishes as a student. We want the easier road, at least until we mature and discover that the easy road is always a fraud. If we are to be spiritual students, we will struggle. Period. “Enlightenment before noon with our workshops,” is a product advertisement designed to cater to the instant gratification, spiritual chocoholic in all of us. Beware. Practice is not only about an “experience” which has been carefully orchestrated by re-wrapping a tradition in contemporary psycho-speak. Practice must have legs. It must work in us over a long period of time, and almost always this time occurs both BEFORE AND AFTER the occurrence of anything that can be called an enlightenment (read any kind of meaningful breakthrough). There is no easy road which will have lasting effects for us, and there is no simple formula for realizing the truth. If you feel that you are being addressed in a language and in a style which seems almost commercial and which claim to take the heart of any major spiritual tradition and turn it over to you without much effort on your part, then that little voice of caution squeaking inside you should be attended to. It is the very same little voice which warned you away from the huckster car salesman, the real estate woman, the friendly man who wanted to date you and who magically adored your kids, and the man in your childhood nightmares who leaned out of the car offering candy and a ride. Listen to that inner voice.
If someone is selling an experience, we can be sure that the situation we find ourselves in is being orchestrated so that we feel we have that experience. If it seems too obvious, too slick, too quick, too impossibly easy, guess what – it is.
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One of the many tools in the toolkit of the commercial teacher is the “specialness” of any given student. Teachers with a hidden agenda often tell certain students (read rich, beautiful, sexually available) that these students are “special.” Amazingly this is often the very word used – “special.” This is often the beginning of a come-on of a sexual nature, of course. After all, this line shows up, and with some success, in other areas – work, associations – where it is simply a baited hook. So it also is used in a spiritual context to cast a line with only slightly different bait. Here we have a great power disparity between guru types and student types, and so this pick-up line is particularly toxic because it is used to hit below the belt (pun intended) and get right into the emotional mushiness of the student.
We need to be aware of this sort of fisherman, and although many of us are, it is nevertheless astounding just how many people ( mostly women who are baited by men teachers) fall for this “you are special” line. But here I would like to introduce another brand of specialness which is used not only by sexual predators who disguise themselves as teachers, but by the entire commercial guru set. This is the specialness of anyone who can “really hear my message.” The auditorium filled with nodding heads. The agreeing masses. “Mega Dittos, Rush!!”
I was once, many years ago, working as a teacher in a small business finishing school in Upstate New York. I was underpaid, overworked, and I felt sorry for myself. The office building next to the school housed a regional office of IBM. One of the IBMers happened to be in our school one day and we were introduced. He was a middle-aged, middle management type who was articulate, even smooth. He pulled me aside and said that he was involved in a side business and that there may be an opportunity for me. Three days later I found myself being driven to a meeting seventy-five miles away. We ended up in a large Ramada Inn party room with 200 strangers. This is where I would learn the scoop about how to make money on my own. We sat in the middle of the auditorium-like setup. On the dais paraded one speaker after another, all booming inspiration. Charts were used, and testimonials too. The only evidence of any sort of corporate unity was the pervasive presence of a triangle-shaped logo.
But after even half an hour of this there was no mention of products or services. Also, it became clear to me that the onlookers consisted of two distinct types. There were the believers, understanders, ones who could identify with the message with nods, grunts of knowing, and smiles. The other group (far fewer of us) was the novices, the uninitiated, the anxious, the ones left out who wanted in. At forty-five minutes into this initiation-cum-stage show I noticed something. People around me who were clearly soldiers of the system kept doing two bothersome things. They would turn (just as the man who brought me would turn) to their uninitiated charges and smile during key moments in the testimonials, or during moments which were “don’t-you-get-it” moments in the presentation. They would smile, but housed within that smile was a look of stern “checking.” They seemed to be checking to see if the ideology, the point of view, the system (read brainwashing) was taking root there in the psyche of the new recruit. This discovery was chilling. I realized in a flash that we were to be “hooked” in this initial stage into staying and participating in the small groups to come. In these (I discovered later from a friend who stayed the whole evening) there was not just push but also shove, and this done on a personal level, all directed at making the recruit a believer.
The other annoying habit of the soldiers was the breath spray. It was the 1970’s, and these little canisters of breath spray were popular. I noticed that everyone around me was using these – that is the soldiers were. Finally I also noticed that they all used the same brand, and when we were reaching the one hour mark in our indoctrination I caught a glimpse of the brand – Amway. I leaned over to the IBMer and asked if this was really an Amway meeting. He did not respond. I asked again, and he would not look at me. I then, in the rude carelessness of young adulthood, stood up and called out, “You new people! This is an Amway recruiting meeting!” Pandemonium broke out, arguments, smiles, breath spray galore. I made good my escape and called my wife, who rescued me with the smirk of Alice of The Honeymooners. My friend escaped later and assured me that the meeting survived my meltdown (and later his) and new recruits were gleaned from the initiates.
If you stay up late enough and watch enough cable TV, you will find these hucksters in operation, selling everything from cooking ware to spiritual wellness, from nutritional supplements to speed reading. There are always nodding heads in the audience. There are always people who really get it. We are shown camera shots of these people all throughout the presentation. We may even sit back and shake our heads and marvel at how anyone could be taken in by such hype. Well hear this warning: This stuff is much more effective in person. And the smaller and more intimate the group, the more effective it can become. False teachers offer charming false teachings and they do this in a very charming way. Charm is the word. They mesmerize us into entering a self-referential and make-believe world which will contain all the right buzz-concepts. Enlightenment. (Some of the best Zen teachers I know never mention that word. Wonder why.) Peace & Justice. Inner strength (or peace). Focus and success (Why these, I wonder). And, of course, they use the framework of either the spiritual world or the corporate world, since they know that we will speak one of these two languages when addressing our own inner landscape.
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We need to be wary when the setting is a familiar institutional one (read dumbing down, coming too much into our arena to reach us) – lecture circuits, conferences, motel party rooms, revival tents set up in your own neighborhood. These settings are far from community and the watchful eyes of peers. We need to be wary when there is a perfume of insiders and outsiders, of charm, of several hours of a very casual but carefully controlled environment, where outside information has carefully been controlled, most especially when this happens in a “safe” place we are familiar with (where we have lowered our guard). Watch out when the teachings are represented as deep and yet they are familiar both in language of presentation and in concept. If the group is quietly special, or you yourself are made to feel special, run.
If this teaching is a Frankenstein of at least two seemingly disparate traditions, consider hard the efficacy of this. In a sense we are facing in such teachings the founding of a new religious tradition and this tradition in usually being presented by the founder. And often this founder is charismatic. The excitement of this sort of moment can adversely influence our decision-making and reasoning process. We need to reflect on the simple statistics before us. How many of these new approaches or new-age inventions or blendings get presented each year? How many survive to become even minor contributions to our human approach to spirituality? Is the man before us really in the league of a Christ or a Mohammad or a Buddha, even ignoring any thoughts of divinity, even as an original spiritual thinker?
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And what of the typical trajectory of such teachings? What historically happens to these Masters who have commercially presented their new approaches? Let me try to present a pattern here. We are all free to find our own examples. Basically, while the initial teachings of many false teachers will contain the underpinnings of the tradition these teachers were trained in (often not for very long), the teachings (product) tend over a few or even several years toward two features: The product slowly morphs further and further away from the teachings of the root tradition in content, form, and manner of presentation, and the product also tends to spawn additional products.
Both of these trends are corporate in nature – this is to say that these are product and service trends very familiar to anyone involved in selling and developing new products and services. We start out with simple toothpaste. We might even market the toothpaste as an alternative to more mega-corp products out there by advertising that our toothpaste does not have evil artificial ingredients in it and is not tested by torturing rabbits like our competitors’ products. We do well. We gain market share. Some time later (a few years at most) we discover that our sales growth has stopped, or even reversed, that our competition has responded with a more “natural” toothpaste of their own, etc., etc. We need a shot in the arm. So we morph the product and offer basted turkey flavor toothpaste. Sales rise since all consumers are addicted to New and Different. We also develop natural dental floss, make from recycled underwear (don’t worry, we wash it!), and this morphs us laterally into new but parallel markets. Sales go up, but only until the competition responds and the consumer gets bored again, at which time we will develop even further.
Silly as this example may seem, if we take a careful look at the mainline Christian churches in our neighborhood, we will quickly discover that for years they have been at least dabbling in these very marketing waters too. Modern dance and music at Sunday Service, children’s groups that go way further than Sunday School, no Latin, easy-read Bibles, field trips, all manner of social activities and charities and discussion groups. And if we go back to our seesaw and watch the trends carefully, we may also discover that there are all manner of break-away churches which may disagree with some religious or practice tenant of the mainline organization, but may also simply find themselves on the commercial side of the seesaw.
And once there the marketing morphing starts in earnest. We have here in Chicagoland a number of these huge mega-churches. They are literally the size of huge high schools or small colleges. Auditoriums seat 5,000 and attendance runs past this capacity. Inside one I visited recently I found a large restaurant, a Borders-size bookstore, several meeting areas, many offices, huge grounds, exercise room, etc. There were programs available (all for hefty fees) on all manner of human situations. Charities galore. Small groups to join. Something for everyone. But nowhere in that mammoth building – nope, nowhere – did I see so much as one cross. Not on the outside, not in the literature, not in the rooms. The pulpit (I actually hesitate even designating it as such.) that stands in front of thousands of in-the-semi-round easy chair seats has no cross on it, nor above it, nor behind it. I was thunderstruck. This was a deeply reminiscent moment for me. The real product, the real import, the real purpose lay hidden from those thousands at the Sunday gathering. I went chill, because I remembered this – an Amway meeting at a Ramada Inn nearly thirty years ago.
So the trajectory of these operations is pretty consistent. There is an original message which may be delivered from within one of the familiar religious traditions. Then, with the passage of enough time, the message widens and morphs. Within a few generations of its Godzilla-like life cycle the lopped off arms which look more promising from a marketing standpoint grow new bodies, and soon the whole spiritual product bears almost no resemblance to the original tradition which spawned it. Now it is offered in today’s version of Ramada Inn party rooms and has a slick format. It and its chief champion are no longer accountable to the tradition’s forms nor to the authority figures in the tradition. It has become product-like in that its teachings are to be consumed (after having been “purchased”) along with various add-ons and sister products. Newer products will come out soon. It is homeless both in temple venue and in any real sense of community to which it may be accountable. It is adaptable, but only in a marketing sense – it has learned how to bring consumer attention to itself. The “teacher” has, eventually, lost by degrees all respect when it comes to his or her peers (that is the ones who count, those in the original tradition). There may be exceptions to this latter feature – he or she may have the grudging admiration of those peers who themselves either privately or publicly covet such fame and fortune and power. I’m embarrassed to say that even among the leadership of many spiritual traditions these days there is a dearth of good judgment when it comes to crossing the fulcrum of our seesaw.
The “teacher” is often a marketing genius who knows how to develop and sell his product, at least for a while. He or she is almost always personally magnetic and charismatic. These people could sell ice cream to Eskimos. Actually, this is exactly what they are doing, since these great inner truths are really always there simply for the taking – or maybe the uncovering. If the customer feels eventually that crossing over to the other side of the seesaw is healthy, he or she may seek out real teachers. These real teachers have real communities and accountability within them. They have peer review of some kind. They have a tradition to adhere to, and not necessarily rigidly adhere to. They do not ask for so much money for themselves. They live humbly and otherwise seem to generally embody the spirit of their teachings. They may not be perfect, true, but there is no real question as to where their heart lies. It lies with helping the student, the practitioner, to benefit from the same system which they themselves found so helpful. And if the customer can finally embark on the long and difficult journey of deep spiritual work, these real teachers will sacrifice anything to help.
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