Jean-Luc Godard once composed a short movie, Letter to Jane, as a voice-over above a single visual: a black-and-white press photo of Jane Fonda, talking to local people in Vietnam, during the war. Godard's "letter" articulated the view that Fonda should have gone out there to listen, not to talk.
The cover photo of Alex Berzin's Relating to a Spiritual Teacher: Building a Healthy Relationship is similarly problematic. It shows Mr. Berzin deep in tutorial with an unnamed monastic Lama. I would guess from the side view, that he looks very much like Serkong Rinpoche, a highly revered Gélug Lama, now sadly departed. Mr. Berzin is sitting beside him and craning over to examine a passage which the Lama is indicating for him in the text which they are studying together.
This image - which is rather over-insistently iconized on the back as well - predicates and exemplifies everything which one goes on to find between the covers. Who said you can't judge a book by its cover? Publishers expend vast labour, ingenuity and expense to facilitate that very thing.
On the one hand this photo expresses the indispensable intimacy of the teacher-student relationship. At the same time, one cannot overlook the stiltedness of the pose, its self-conscious self-advertisement. Ven. Ngawang Sherpa, who is credited with the cover photo, must have been infiltrated especially into this scene especially so as to vaunt it; to publicize it for its very privacy.
So brittle is this image, in its self-referentiality, that one cannot but associate it with the great cliché factory of Hollywood. The photographer has caught the Lama's relaxed features, while Berzin is riveted to the text with urgency. If this were a movie still, it would have to be from a scene in a Mack Sennett silent comedy, in which a grim maître d' confronts a hapless patsy with a colossal restaurant bill; and the poor sap is stuck with it, due to the sudden departure of all his fellow diners.
Mr. Berzin avowedly presents himself in faithful accordance with the founder of his school, Je Tsongkhapa: always going back to the texts for validation. But the interface between non-duality and logic is characterized by the natural flickering of paradox; which means that the Kadam Second Buddha would not demur at the reflexive view of this venerable position. Lam-rim, the progressive path, is expressed as approximating towards the summit; but that is the relative explanation which the Buddha gave, from compassion, to the classes of beings who would specially appreciate it. If the mountain peak were not already continuous with the landscape of the valley, no upward path towards it could even be described. The path is described from base to apex, but it manifests from above to below, from within to without: from Buddha-mind, which has never been born and has never gone anywhere; to ordinary mind, which lives in fear that life means only going, from birth towards death.
Double-think about this quintessence of Buddhist view bedevilled the scholastically oriented within the Tibetan period. The Nyingma Tertons perennially suffered the jibes, about the mysterious absence of Sanskrit originals for their Tantras. If such originals ever, with equal mysteriousness, showed up, symmetrical accusations would then flow against their authenticity. This game went on for centuries. The heart of the practice oriented approaches, in particular, has always been Buddhist experience itself. Outside the literary environment of the monasteries, which sometimes, in the non-celibate traditions, down to the present day, has meant outside literacy altogether, the scholastic exegesis of that experience naturally had to accept a lower place. And Mr. Berzin is decent enough to admit that even the academic prowess of the Geshe does not necessarily correlate to an equivalent integration of the meaning of the teachings with personal practice. Hence the cautionary tale of the pandit Naropa, not yet a mahasiddha, who made a dakini weep in pity because he claimed to understand the essential meaning of the text he was studying.
This book is assuredly another publicity stunt from the campaign (now half a millennium old) to bring Vajrayana "in-house": to make it subservient to centralised authority. When the previous Kyabjé Dudjom Rinpoche became the unprecedented supreme figurehead of the Nyingma school in exile, it was by popular acclaim at every level. He was such a being that, without ever having to dictate that such-and-such should be done, nevertheless it was always his ideas and preferences which other Lamas were keen to enact. The same could be said for his successor Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. Where such examples still live in the memory of tens of thousands; where Nyingma Lamas regularly assert their experience of their teachers as Padmasambhava in person; there is little sympathy for the point of view that the guru-tradition of the Mahasiddhas should properly be disregarded in our times.
The highest authority that Vajrayana admits is realization itself; the unborn deathless heart of immemorial Buddhist experience. Eventually, by page 178, Berzin drags out of himself the acknowledgment that - during Tantric empowerment, in the Nyingma, Kagyüd, and Sakya schools, "properly prepared disciples," if they have "sufficient strength of positive potential, deep awareness, firm conviction that the Tantric master is a Buddha, and inspiration - may gain an experience of clear light mind [i.e. rigpa]."
But wait a moment! Who is it who would have "properly prepared" those disciples in the first place? The empowerment master in person, naturally. It is the classic intimacy of disciple relationship, the classic privacy of empowerment, the scrupulous facilitation of the Five Certainties (Ngé-pa Nga,), which is being described here. The "firm conviction that the empowerment master is a Buddha," this would scarcely be an adequate cause of insight if it were a conceptual nyam enjoined on the participants, unexpected and unrehearsed, at the peak of the ritual. I have seen that done, and mighty baffling to most of the participants it was indeed. Such a rough-and-ready path could scarcely once in a millennium connect with the auspicious result. As Trungpa Rinpoche wrote in a poem, with sublimely dry understatement and an outrageously whimsical pun, "It seems that no one has succeeded in perfecting the lucky strike."
The practice of viewing the vajra master as the holder of primal meaning would have been absolutely intrinsic to that "proper preparation." The most vital, the all but indispensable determinant of "proper preparation," would have been a degree of success in that very practice. As Milarepa asserted with unfeigning frankness, "I recognised the nature of my mind the day that I saw my own Lama as a Buddha." That moment did not occur only in the hour that Marpa finally gave Milarepa empowerment. Marpa accepted Milarepa as a candidate for empowerment because of this very perception of his teacher which Milarepa had already developed.
Because of the reflexiveness of ultimate and relative explanations, already touched on, one should not make too much of the fact that Mr. Berzin's window on the teacher-student relationship here, from the View of the ultimate Vehicle, appears to outflank his own painstakingly articulated Maginot Line of earlier chapters, bristling with caveats about relative perception. It is important to understand that the different Buddhist Vehicles contradict each other. This is why they are vehicles, and why Buddhism is not a uniform modality. Sutra says that one should become undefined. Tantra says that one should seek integration. Dzogchen says that one should let both of them interchange. But in books such as Alex Berzin's, the reformist movement to diminish, towards the vanishing-point of scholastic perspective, the status of diamantine experience from the Golden and Silver Ages of Buddhism in Tibet, has degenerated into a self-serving empty hierarchicalism. It's a busted flush.
The downfall waiting for Buddhism in the "new age" can be found at a novel extreme which is manifesting as a congenial-seeming "middle way." In the Kali Yuga, beings flatter themselves about their youthfulness, whilst they are merely failing to grow up. That can be reflected in the path of practice, as well as in ordinary psychology. There is the danger that we could be merely Sravakas who think we are Tertons. We can all be treasure-discoverers, and download "The Dharma' from the informational Buddha-mind of cyberspace. Then maybe it just clutters up the hard disk until it's finally recycled. The teachings reveal their face from bookshop dump-bins. The Middle Way exposes its spine in the Body, Mind & Spirit section. "Hearers" like Mr. Berzin may believe they are asserting a hierarchy of knowledge and experience; but they play into the ethos of new age egalitarianism - as evidenced by the fact that Surya Das endorsed the back cover with one of his marginally articulate sound-bites.
When Mr. Berzin contrasts discipleship with therapy, he writes:
Disciples normally do not share personal problems with their mentors and do not expect or demand individual attention. Even if they consult the mentor for personal advice they do not go regularly. The focus in the relationship is on listening to teachings. Buddhist disciples primarily learn methods for overcoming general problem that everyone faces. They then assume personal responsibility to apply the methods to their specific situations. (pp61-2)
For example, I spent nine years with my root Guru, Serkong Rinpochey [sic] (i.e. until the Lama's death), as his disciple, interpreter, and English secretary. Although our relationship was extremely close, Rinpochey [sic] never once asked me a question about my background, family or private life. I often describe the relationship as "personal impersonal". We dealt only with what was relevant to the moment. (p113)
We may have to take Mr. Berzin's word that this is the norm; but it does not resemble, for example, any memoirs of how the late Gelug Lama Thubten Yeshé interacted with his western students. And it bears no resemblance to any of the traditional anecdotes of the teacher-student relationship, in any school, monastic or non-monastic, which have for so long have inspired and gratified practitioners in both Tibet and the West.
If I may pick up a quotation from Berzin's conclusion, which Arch Stanton also pointed out:
Time-tested Dharma methods adapted and applied to new situations have provided the solutions to the culturally based problems that inevitably arise. (p. 252)
Berzin ought to have acknowledged at this point that the very monastic model which Je Tsongkhapa revised was originally constructed by the Indian pandit Atisha to suit the Tibetan temperament in particular. The greatest twentieth century example, of exactly such dynamic realization, was Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a siddha beyond genius, the living example of a species flatly asserted to be extinct. So one can deduce that it is possible for a great teacher, out of compassion, to adapt the forms of the model, in relation to insights into major karmic differences in the cultural and psychological outlook of the population. Mr. Berzin has been mistaking Tibetan cultural habits for the essence of the tradition. If he personally found them supportive to his practice and his guru-devotion, then of course that is wonderful. But it is not a model that one could imagine inspiring the vast majority of western practitioners. Mr. Berzin is a very odd fish indeed, if he is envisaging a path to western non-celibate Buddhist life which passes through ersatz Tibetan monasticism.
Mr. Berzin painstakingly distinguishes his model of discipleship from psychotherapy, but it relies on a flatness of emotional affect disturbingly close to the therapeutic borderline. Can this really be the promised "middle way?" The Buddhahood which both predicates and is predicated by this resembles no known Buddhist. The closest rôle-model is Star Trek's Mr. Spock. Spock is faultlessly logical; totally unemotional; altruistic out of pure pragmatism; and possesses some useful siddhis for emergency purposes.
I once heard a Catholic bishop observe that some men had the advantage, in a celibate priesthood, of being, simply, rather undersexed. Mr. Berzin might as well come clean and admit that his view of discipleship is only possible for practitioners who are so free from afflictive emotion that they might as well be full gelong. In Berzin's putative western sangha one cannot envisage any enthusiastic displays of non-celibacy. If these are practitioners who have never been capable of much emotional feeling in the first place; or who are so spooked by their emotionality that they have thoroughly repressed it; then even Sutric practice is scarcely going to be possible for them: because one cannot find the emptiness of emotions which one is incapable of possessing; let alone transform them.
On these grounds I second Arch Stanton's scepticism about Mr. Berzin's proposal to extend the sutra-level guru-meditation into the arena of Tantra. Not only is it, as Stanton asserts, a logical nonsense; but for such an audience it is tantamount to encouraging, not the emotional maturity which Mr. Berzin imagines, but a quite regressive infantilism. Who would seriously commend to westerners, if they truly possessed the disfunctionality which he projects on them, the authentic, but wildly inappropriate, sleep-yoga practice of visualising one's head resting in the Lama's lap?
Alex Berzin and Surya Das are a surprising double act. Alex Berzin, after thirty years with the supreme Lamas of the Gelug school, advises practitioners on how they should relate to teachers who are westerners. Surya Das, on the basis of twenty years with the greatest Nyingma Lamas of the age, encourages westerners to abandon dependence on Lamas altogether. Where are refuge and bodhicitta when devotion flows like the bloodstream of an Icelandic codfish?
Aileen Smithy