Who’s My Teacher?

We go looking for a teacher, thinking we know what we need. But we don’t. Not exactly. That’s why we need a teacher. We often don’t know what we need. We keep changing and our needs keep changing. Does that mean we should keep changing teachers? No. Jumping around from teacher to teacher seldom works. What we need is a teacher who can change with us, providing the teaching that we need at the moment.

Last week I was taking Suzuki Roshi to task for talking about meditation posture as if there was a “correct” form, accusing him of falling into “expert mind”? Was I too harsh? It depends. On many things. It depends mostly on the needs of the student. Suzuki Roshi’s words are taken out of context, lovingly by students who are sharing his teaching in book form with the world, but taken out of the context of the moment and the audience that he was talking to. What did Roshi’s students need in that moment? I have no idea, but sometimes students need the teacher to sound like an expert.

We all come to Zen with our unique ways of creating suffering, of making ourselves and others miserable. Most Zen teachers will try to guide us toward a meditation practice. That’s the way we begin. Most of us will resist. I know. It took me 30 years of reading about Zen to get face-to-face with an authentic Zen teacher. I brought all my stubbornness. It  helped me that Kyudo Roshi looked and sounded like he knew what he was talking about. I argued anyway. At least in my head. Why couldn’t I count to 12 rather than 10? I needed a place to start. Kyudo gave me that. And he pointed me forward. He taught me to pay attention to my body, to notice the tensions arising, to make adjustments. Kyudo gave me a starting point. I took his word for it, but he wasn’t an expert on my body. Without the starting point, I was floundering. With the starting point, 40 years later I’m still making adjustments, still learning.