DANGERS OF A GURU-DISCIPLE RELATIONSHIP A word of warning though: unfortunately, there are teachers, traditions and centers which are questionable in the Buddhist world. Please make sure you know what and who you get involved with before you fully commit yourself to someone as your teacher!
Traditionally in India, a guru and a disciple sometimes took up to 12 years to test each other out if they suited each other. Now this may be very impractical these days; most students would not have a teacher at all, and most teachers would remain without students... Still, we need to be critical and very careful. Even His Holiness the Dalai Lama mentioned the potential for abuse from either side 'the shadow-side of the practice of guru devotion'. Especially westerners need to realise this potential problem, as in our culture we have completely lost (or never really developed) this kind of guru-disciple relationships. Simply said, it is very easy to mislead many westrners on the spiritual path, by twisting the meaning of the teachings so that a teacher can take advantage of a student materially or eg. sexually. >From the article 'Spiritual Pathology' I found at Wisdom Books: "Individually we have personal responsibility for our spiritual distortions and self-deceptions and must at some point address the consequences of our actions. An example of an individual's capacity to turn pathology into a religion was extremely painful for me when I was younger. I was in a relationship with a woman who made friends with a man who was an experienced practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. He was very charismatic and lived with his wife and two children, having turned his home into a kind of Buddhist centre. He was an enthusiastic follower of the Indian saint Padmasambava, who brought the Dharma to Tibet and who had two consorts one called Mandarava and the other Yeshe Tsogyal. My partner went to study with this man who had offered to be her teacher. She was very attracted to his rather theatrical charisma and gladly took up his offer. She went to stay with him and over a period of time started to learn more of his practice. It was on her return from one of her visits to him that I learned that part of the nature of her stay with him was that she would also be his lover. He had convinced his wife that this was important because the relationship he had with my girl friend was so special it was a deeply spiritual experience. Although it was painful for his wife, she agreed that part of the time he would sleep with my partner and part with her. When I began to ask my girl friend what was going on she told me that I should accept it as part of her practice in the same way that Padmasambava had two consorts. They both tried to tell me that I could never understand the spiritual heights to which they would go in their sexual relationship and that it was so pure there could not be any fault in it. My problems, they insisted, were because I was so attached and that I should really let her go to this higher love. I was told that she saw him as her guru and as such she must be with him, irrespective of the pain it caused his wife or myself, after all pain comes through attachment. At some later point the man, who was increasingly presenting himself as a so-called Lama, wearing exotic robes and the regalia of a yogi, came to visit us. I was shocked and hurt one day when he came to me and said that he was going to sleep with my girlfriend and that I should allow it as it was good for my practice of generosity. If I should object it would show that my practice of Bodhicitta, the aspiration to always work for the welfare of others, was hopeless. I was sufficiently young, naive and feeble to take all this seriously and found I had no grounds to question the validity of what he was saying. Whatever pain I was in was entirely because of my attachment. He tried to convince me it was best for my practice and that his love of my partner was so pure and what they were doing was right. I tell this story because it is typical of the kind of delusion we can conjure around our self-beliefs sufficient to create the conviction that we are entirely right in what we are doing. The grandiosity, for example, of this man made him utterly blind to the delusion he was caught in and the consequence of his actions. I was somewhat intrigued several years later when the same man came to me devastated because the woman had left him for another man. He wanted someone to talk to in his distress, and was surprisingly apologetic for the way he had treated me. I did not find it easy to contain my sense of vindication." LINKS For meditations, see the List of Sample Meditations. Good reading on this subject is the book 'Relating to a Spiritual Teacher' by Alexander Berzin, freely available on the web!. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
