The Role of the Spiritual Master

by Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

I will discuss the role of the master with particular reference to Vajrayana. At the time of the Lord Buddha himself, the teacher was of course the Buddha, and he was the ultimate authority. It is recorded that when the Buddha was about to pass away, Ananda asked him who the new teacher would be, and the Buddha replied, "Let the Dharma itself be your teacher." In the Mahayana tradition, the teacher's role is described as being that of the kalyanamitra, which means "good friend" or "spiritual friend." Such a person must be one who has travelled further along the path than the student. The Guru must have developed wisdom and compassion to a high degree. The appropriate response by the student is that of deep gratitude toward the teacher along with trust in his or her ability as a guide.

In the Vajrayana, or Tantric, school, the guru plays an extremely pivotal role. I think there are two principal reasons for this. Firstly, a genuine teacher, or guru, is the one who reveals to us the empty, aware, clear nature of the primordial mind, our inherent wisdom and compassion. This, the mind's unconditioned nature, is always with us. It is the most fundamental aspect of our being. However, it is very difficult for us to gain access to this without help. We need a teacher who can create the psychological circumstances for us to glimpse this inherent nature. So a true guru is the one who shows us the nature of the mind. He or she is therefore an extremely important person in our lives.

The traditional analogy to describe the role of the teacher uses the example of the sun. The sun is huge and powerful, and it illuminates and warms the whole earth. Yet if one were to put a piece of paper on the ground in the sun, even in the midday sun, at the most the paper would dry out a bit and maybe get a little crinkly. It would certainly not catch fire. But if we were to place a magnifying glass between the rays of the sun and the paper, the sun's rays would be focused, increasing their intensity. Within a very short time the paper would begin to turn brown, then it would start to smoke and shortly afterwards burst into flame. Likewise, it is said that although the blessings of the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas are infinite and incredibly powerful, it is difficult for them to transform us directly without the intermediary of a spiritual teacher because of our defilements and obscurations. A qualified teacher embodies the blessings, power, compassion, and wisdom of all the Buddhas within a human form. Like a magnifying glass, he or she can condense and transmit those blessings, igniting realisations in the disciple. This is because the guru has a human form and this is a mind-to-mind transmission. You see, the guru doesn't give us anything — he or she merely allows this inner opening to take place. We will come back to this idea again later.

The second thing a guru can give us is guidance. If we are travelling through unknown territory (and what is more unknown than our own inner psychological landscape?) on our own, it is very likely we will go astray, even with the aid of a map. Sometimes we may be walking along and suddenly the path divides. Do we go to the left or to the right? When we consult the map, it's not always clear what to do. The map gives the broad outlines, but these little sidetracks are not included. We might choose the right path, but we might also choose the wrong one and end up in quicksand or a swamp!

I remember once I was practising with this old yogi. In those days I was going to see him every day and he would just give me general indications. I would tell him what I was doing and he would say "Oh, mm, yes, okay." On one occasion, something had actually happened. I was really pleased because I had had an experience! So I went along and told him about it and he said "Mm" and looked totally bored. Then he said, "Didn't anything else happen?" So I racked my brain, trying to remember. I remembered some other minor thing, and I mentioned it just in case it was of any use. Immediately he sat up and said, "Say that again." So I repeated what I had said and explained that this and this had happened, and he said, "That's it, that's what we've been waiting for. From now on, you do this and this." Then he sent me off in a completely different direction. I would never have known about it on my own. I didn't know that was what we had been waiting for. It didn't seem significant to me at all. This is why we need a teacher. Again, if we have a guide, we can walk confidently because we know we are with someone who knows the road. If we are alone, we have to go slowly. We hesitate a lot. With somebody to guide us, we can stride along the path.

Everybody dreams of meeting the perfect master who is going to take them under his wing. From now on, no more problems! Ha! There are movies in which people go through tremendous difficulties looking for their teacher, and when they finally find the right cave, there is an old yogi sitting there. He looks at them and says, "Ah, I have been waiting for you. What took you so long?" Trying to meet the perfect master who is going to set it all up for you is a common fantasy, where all you have to do is follow the instructions and enlightenment is guaranteed. I even know people who refuse to make any kind of effort on their own behalf, because they are waiting for the perfect guru to turn up and say the perfect sentence. Then they will immediately understand it and be enlightened once and for all, without needing to make the slightest bit of effort. They believe that they're going to meet the master, and he's going to say the thing or do the thing which will solve all their problems for ever and ever.

You might ask what is wrong with this scenario. It sounds good! Well, first of all, even if we did meet the perfect master, as long as our minds remain completely deluded, would he or she be able to help us? Maybe the teacher's only advice to us would be to "go and sit." Maybe we wouldn't be ready to receive instruction. We might first need to practice a lot more. Even the great' est masters can help only when the disciples are ready. In the meantime, we need to prepare ourselves. In doing so, perhaps we will discover that everybody we meet is actually our master. This area of guru-disciple relationships is very tricky.

What are the requirements for a truly qualified guru? Well, if you are going to study physics, you will want to make sure that the person you are studying with really does understand physics. If you are going to learn anything, you want to know that the person you are studying with is truly a master of the subject. How much the more so when we are trying to discover something as momentous as our inherent enlightened nature! Obviously, nobody can reveal that to us, nobody can show us the path to travel unless they have already travelled that path themselves.

The next question is, "How do we know if someone is genuinely realised and qualified?" The answer to that is that we don't know. It's always a gamble. But there are indications. Personally, when I look at teachers, the one question I ask is, "Is this all coming from their inherent emptiness, or is it coming from an ego?" Realisations have nothing to do with charisma. We are very taken in by charisma and by someone's ability to market himself or to be intellectually satisfying. But where is it coming from? Is it really coming from this empty wisdom and genuine compassion? Or is it just another big ego inflation trip? We have to be sensitive enough to feel this. I am extremely suspicious of anyone who claims to be enlightened. I have never met any Tibetan lama who would even dream of making such a claim. Most lamas will say, "Oh, I'm just like you, I'm also practising, I'm also training. Now so-and-so, that lama over there, he's really fantastic, he's amazing, he can do this and this, but me, I'm just an ordinary guy." This doesn't mean that when they are sitting on a high throne, they cannot manifest inner confidence. But the confidence should be coming from what they are teaching and not from their own ego-aggrandisement. The other thing I think we need to look at is how they are when they get down from the throne and are mixing with ordinary people. How do they conduct themselves in ordinary circumstances? How do they treat ordinary people who are of no possible benefit to them?

The Dalai Lama says we should investigate the teacher. I know it's difficult, but Westerners really tend to be too trusting and too gullible. Asians are much more exacting. They have standards by which they judge because they've been around the spiritual scene for a long time. Tibetans are not naive. Some people imagine that Tibetans are simple-minded and superstitious, but Westerners leave Tibetans open-mouthed at their gullibility. In the tantric texts it is said that one should test the guru for up to twelve years before deciding to accept him or her. The Dalai Lama even says we should spy on the gurus! How do they act when they're not in the spotlight? Are they kind and compassionate, or are they basically just rolling along, having a good time, and enjoying taking people in? When I asked my own teacher about certain lamas who were quite controversial in the West, he said, "Well, at that level it's difficult to judge, but in twenty years' time have a look at their disciples." This is a very good indication of a teacher's calibre. What is happening to their older disciples? Would we want to be like them? What is the scene around the guru like? Is it psychologically healthy? Are the disciples being manipulated? Are they unable to make decisions for themselves without running to the guru all the time? Are they psychologically dependent on their teacher?

The Tibetan word "lama" actually means "a high mother," and ma of course is female. So, lama is a female word. Tibetans don't usually mention this. So the guru is like a mother. When a mother has small children, she cares for them, nurtures them and is there to cherish them, discipline them, and train them. That's her role. Small children are dependent on their mother because they don't know anything yet. But if the mother still wants to be "mummy" as the children grow up and wants t to keep them dependent on her, tied to her apron strings, she is no longer a good mother. A good mother brings up her children to become increasingly independent and to be able to leave home when they come of age. A good mother raises her children to be autonomous beings in their own right, and to act as parents to others in the future. Likewise, a true guru trains the disciples to discover their own inner wisdom and their inner guru. He or she trains them to make decisions for themselves. Any "guru" who is merely creating a circle of adoring acolytes waiting for every nee tar-like word he speaks, growing increasingly dependent on him and focused on gratifying his every wish, is just in love with the idea of being a guru. Without disciples, that person wouldn't be a guru any more, and that's the source of his power. It's quite a power trip when you can tell people to do something and they do it unquestioningly, even if they don't want to! It can become a drug.

You see this sort of thing happening around some teachers. Year by year, they create this symbiotic relationship in which the disciples become increasingly dependent upon their guru. They can't make any decisions without first going to see what Guru-ji has to say about it. If this is happening, there is something seriously wrong. In the beginning, of course, a good teacher tells the disciples what to do because he or she is there to guide them. But as time passes the teacher will begin to say, "Well, what do you want to do? What do you feel you should be doing now?" Increasingly, he or she tosses the ball back to the disciple so that the disciple can grow. When the time is right, the teacher will probably send the disciple away altogether.

Milarepa, the great Tibetan yogin of the eleventh century, kept his disciples with him, either in the same cave or in adjacent caves, until they were stable in their practice. Then he sent them away, and from time to time he would visit them to see how they were getting on. The guru is supposed to help us discover our innate wisdom so that we do not have to rely on his or her advice indefinitely. That is why we need to do our part by purifying and simplifying our minds and making them increasingly open. Then when we meet the master, we are truly present and real transmission can take place.

So what are we going to do? Here we are in the West. There are not many teachers around. There are two main questions I am asked everywhere I go. One is how to deal with anger, and the other is how to find a teacher. Both questions are very complex. There are teachers and then there are teachers. There is the heart teacher, who has vowed and committed to take the disciple to enlightenment in this or future lifetimes. That is a heart commitment on behalf of both the teacher and the disciple. It is a total commitment which requires total surrender on the part of the disciple. This is why we have to be extremely careful. If you find a true guru, that is the greatest blessing this life could give you as far as travelling on the path is concerned. If you find a false guru, then, as the Tibetans say, teacher and disciple jump hand-in-hand into the chasm. According to the Tibetans, you end up in a hell realm. There are, however, many other teachers apart from a heart guru. And it doesn't mean that we have to throw ourselves down on the ground and say, "Okay, take me, I'm yours from now until enlightenment,"every time we meet a teacher we like and feel a connection with.

We are here now, but we want to learn how to go home. We want to learn how to return from our enormous confusion back to the ultimate simplicity of our true nature. There are many who can help us on our way. There are many who can point out signposts. It doesn't always have to be the ultimate guru. Anyone who can give us valid help and guidance is a teacher. They may come in the form of a teacher who is giving teachings. They may come merely as a brief encounter. They may even come in the form of a relative or a friend. How can we know? Anyone from whom we learn becomes a teacher, a spiritual friend. So I personally think we should shift our focus from this idea of finding a heart guru and instead start seeking spiritual friends. If we think of teachers as spiritual friends, that makes everything much vaster because we can have many spiritual friends. The Buddha once said that the Dharma was to be our teacher, and the teachings are here. The techniques are here. The practice is here. There are those who have been practising for many years and who have devoted their lives to the practice. There are many people around who know. Help is available. It may not come in the form of high spiritual masters radiating lights or sending out brochures ahead of time to tell us they're enlightened. Teachers may come in very simple forms. But if they have had the practice, and if they themselves have had valid teachers, belong to a pure and genuine lineage, and have received the fruits of their practice, they are valid teachers.

We all have a lot of work to do. We have to do a lot of purification, a lot of learning how to pacify the mind, how to clear it out, how to simplify it and begin to understand it. We don't need the Lord Buddha standing in front of us. We can manage this on our own with informed guidance. It's not much use just waiting around for the perfect master to appear. As I said, even if the perfect master appeared, would we be ready? So in the meantime, we prepare. There is an enormous amount that we can do. And then, perhaps, just a very small thing could trigger off a major breakthrough.

There are many Zen stories in which there's some hermit living somewhere, and some monk wanders by. The hermit utters some enigmatic sentence, and the monk "gets" it! But what they don't talk about, because it's taken for granted in the Asian mind, is that this monk spent thirty years sitting on his carpet before somebody came along and gave him the enigmatic sentence. It wasn't only the sentence, because we can read that sentence and think, "So?" It doesn't trigger a major insight for us. It was the preparation — all those end' less hours and hours and months and years of sitting, of bringing awareness into every activity, of really learning how to prepare and train the mind to be present. Do you understand? It cannot all come from the guru. A great deal of it has to come from the disciple.

Many stories are told of the lives of the mahasiddhas, the great yogis of eighth' and ninth-century India. They were often lay people, tailors, shop' keepers, jewellers, all kinds of people with different careers who found themselves in a kind of spiritual quagmire. They weren't going anywhere. Then a master turned up and gave them some small teaching, just some small technique, then went away, never to be seen again. But they practised that technique. They took it and transformed it into their everyday lives until they attained great accomplishments. In other words, they weren't living with their gurus. Maybe they only saw their guru once. But they worked on it. They worked on it and worked on it persistently day after day until the accomplishment occurred.

You see, sometimes this ideal of finding the perfect guru is just another form of laziness. "Well, I'm not accomplished because I haven't found my teacher yet." But in the meantime, there is everything for us to do. Because, as I said at the beginning, what we are really trying to do is reconnect with what we have always had and find the inner guru. To reconnect with our primordial nature, our wisdom mind, which is always here. In the end, the practice is our refuge. This is not perhaps what I should be saying as a Tibetan Buddhist, but honestly, merely being caught up in the circle surrounding a guru, spending all of our time jockeying for position and making sure the lama notices us, has little to do with Dharma. It's just the same old worldly emotions, gain and loss, happiness and sorrow, praise and blame, fame and disrepute. You see all of this appearing nakedly around some gurus. There is rampant jealousy and competition. It would be better to go home and just sit on our cushion, try to be kind to our family and learn to use them as our Dharma practice. It would be better for us to learn how to be loving, compassionate, kind, and patient to everyone we meet. Very often, when people get caught up in a big guru trip, they end up just serving that one organisation and develop a very narrow vision. There's only the guru and that guru's sangha, organisation, and teachings. Nothing else exists. If you are in doubt about your involvement with a particular group, take a good look at the people there. Do they appear to be more enlightened than people you meet every day in the street?

I believe it is better to meet a teacher who really has wisdom, who has that very special presence which some lamas and other teachers of all traditions have. There is a certain spacious, egoless quality that makes you know you are in the presence of a genuine master, not one who is just interested in self-promotion. A teacher who is totally simple, yet in whose presence you experience something special. When you encounter such a teacher, then you should gain some teaching from that person and go away and work on it. In the meantime, if you have not met someone like that, learn from whatever sources of understanding, wisdom, and genuine practice are available to you. We all have so much to do. And all of us can start doing it right this moment. We gain nothing by hanging around waiting!

This notion of "the guru" can be pernicious. It gets people completely turned upside down and leaves them standing on their heads. I had a perfect guru, so this is not sour grapes. But I honestly don't think it's what you really need. What we all need is more practice, not this fantasy of finding Shangrila. There is a great line in the film Kundun where the Dalai Lama says, "You cannot liberate me General Tan, only I can liberate myself." The Buddha said that Buddhas only point out the way. Each of us must walk the path. This can seem contradictory, because it's also true that if we meet a really perfect master, he or she can accelerate our progress. There's no doubt about that. What I'm saying is that if you do happen to meet a perfect master who does that, good for you! In the meantime, just get on with it! Don't hang around waiting. And don't base your whole life on hanging around a guru scene. It is such a waste of time. From my own observations, these scenes bring out the really base parts of our nature without reconciling them. Some gurus become outrageous, and I personally think that they can go overboard. Where is the compassion, where is the skillful means? People can get so confused, telling themselves, "This has to be a teaching." It's a bit like, "Hit me harder, ouch, it hurts, it must be good for me." Maybe it isn't good for you at all! Maybe it just bruises you! Of course, this is not always the case. Some gurus have very nice scenes, but often people's energy gets caught up in the dynamics of being around the guru instead of looking within and discovering who they are. It's better for us to focus on keeping our lives plain and becoming one with our practice rather than getting caught up in all this other stuff.

A skillful guru is like a good surgeon. He or she knows just where and how to apply the scalpel. And even though it may hurt for a moment, the body knows it is being healed, and it does heal. On the other hand, an unskillful surgeon stabs away blindly and doesn't reach the vital part. Such a person leaves the patient cut, bleeding, and scarred. Creating pain is not the purpose of the exercise. The point is to reach the vital part of the body which needs the surgeon's attention so that the patient is healed and transformed.

In the final analysis, we are all our own gurus. In the end, we have to access our own innate wisdom. This can be dangerous because our inner guide may appear to be telling us what we want to hear. But we know it really is the inner guide if it tells us to do exactly what we don't want to do!

We all possess inner wisdom, and we should begin to get in touch with it more and more often. Then we will start to experience an inner poise and a sense of autonomy. After all, we are trying to grow up, not remain children forever. The Buddha called unenlightened people "the children." Sometimes that is translated as "fools," but it doesn't actually mean "fools." It means those who are still immature. So those of us who have been on a spiritual path for some time should look back to see what is happening to us. Do we feel that there really is some inner transformation, that we really are beginning to grow up? Are we gaining greater understanding? Is our inner psychological life becoming clearer and simpler, more open and spacious? Are our negative emotions, greeds and desires, angers and aversions, delusions and confusions diminishing, increasing, or remaining the same?

Palden Atisha, the great Bengali saint who lived in Tibet during the eleventh century, said that the test for whether a practice is successful is whether our negative emotions have declined or not. If they have not, then it is of no use. If they have, we know we're on the right path. We can all test this for ourselves. We don't need anyone else to tell us. The path is here. There has been so much written about it. People have walked this path. They're right here amongst us. We don't have to give everything up and rush off to India. Right here, right now, this is our place to practice. With our family, our work, our social obligations. If we cannot practice here, where can we practice? We carry our mind with us everywhere. The mind that we have in L ism ore is going to be the same mind that we will have in the Himalayas. The same ego. The same problems. Why go to the Himalayas? Why not resolve it here and now? No master can do that for us. No master can ever remove our greed, anger, and jealousy. No master can remove our ego. Each of us must do it for ourselves.