What the Buddha Taught

When I teach Zen, am I teaching what the Buddha taught? Who knows? The Buddha taught 2500 years ago. It’s probably getting closer to 2600 years. His teaching was handed down orally for five hundred years before it was written down in Indian languages that I don’t understand. The teaching came to me largely by way of China and then Japan, bits through Viet Nam and Korea and Tibet, and then to America. Along the way the teaching was translated into more languages that I don’t understand and finally translated into English.

In our Zen tradition, the teaching is passed not by means of texts though but through the face-to-face relationship between teacher and student. I trace my lineage of teachers from Shakyamuni through 80 generations. With each succession, the teaching is transmuted by the culture, the experience, and the personality of the new teacher. The gifts which originated in India were transmuted profoundly as they passed through China and then again as they passed through Japan and now again as they are morphing in America.

When I teach Zen, am I teaching what the Buddha taught? When I teach Zen, am I teaching even what my teacher Roshi Bernie Glassman taught? It’s not possible. Bernie’s teaching passes through me and is transmuted by my experience. Bernie “transmitted” what he had received from his teacher, transmuted by his experience and personality to more than 30 “successors” and we all experienced it differently because we’re all different people.

Is that a problem? Does it matter what the Buddha was teaching long ago? It’s an interesting question, but I think it’s not so important. What’s most important is what he’s teaching today. It’s the teaching of the living Buddha that matters today. Bernie has been gone 8 years. Is his teaching dead? Am I teaching what Bernie taught? Not exactly, that’s for sure. All I can do is share the teaching as I experience it and my experience keeps changing. Traditionally, we call the ceremony in which the new teacher is empowered “Dharma transmission.” Maybe should call it “Dharma transmutation.”