Most people, especially, the young tend to look at people in a external, largely superficial way. E.g., what someone wears, how they keep their hair, their income, the car they drive, status, etc. Relying on this kind of criteria would not do well if someone were looking for a Zen teacher or Lama. The external person is of secondary value in Buddhism when it comes to looking for a teacher.
What should matter for the student who is in a search for a good teacher is their own ability to have a heart to heart conversation which the student may not completely understand. Having close friends or buddies may not prepare the student, or have anything to do with what it means to have a heart to heart dialogue. Needless to say this is a difficult topic for any Western student who is looking to study Zen Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhism for that matter.
But now let’s look at this problem from the perspective of the teacher. A real teacher sees people mainly through the heart (心). Frankly, most Westerners tend to be more like children when it comes to the world of spirituality. Their heart is closed off. They are immature and unrefined. Nor are they even aware of it. Maybe the reason for this immaturity stems from their culture. Foremost, they do not know how to communicate heart to heart.
So what is this kind of communication really about? Very simply this, if spiritual knowledge is to be imparted from teacher to student, there has to be a psychical connection. Some students have it—most do not. When you take into consideration that the teacher’s goal is to introduce the student to what actually animates their corporeal body which is unconditioned they have to be, so to speak, on the same wavelength as the teacher.
Make no mistake about it, Zen and Buddhism, in general, is learning how to access the luminous Mind which is very real. But much of the practice consists in weaning our self off many bad habits (vasana) and beliefs that have no place in Buddhism. And the conversation or dialogue with the teacher is not yet heart to heart but tends to be closer to a parent to child dialogue.
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