Teacher-Student Relationship, Healing, and Seamlessness

Last updated on: November 12, 2008 at 1:14 pm by Dosho Port

Teacher-Student Relationship, Healing, and Seamlessness 2008-11-12T13:14:00-06:00 Dosho Port

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Here are some recent questions and my responses (your comments welcome too):

What is good work for the teacher-student relationship? For example, did you discuss personal issues much with Katagiri? Was he open to that? With students, can you do that–or is that kind of thing a problem?

Good work in the teacher-student relationship is case-by-case, depending on where the student is at and how the teacher can serve the truth in any given interaction. Therefore, there is no such thing as a single kind of “teacher-student relationship.”

I didn’t talk much about personal issues by themselves with Katagiri. When I did it sometimes it seemed that he either didn’t get it, didn’t want to talk about it, or came from such a Japanese cultural perspective that it wasn’t real helpful. Some of that was probably my own resistance. Roshi did work with some students primarily on daily life issues. From my perspective, it often didn’t go so well. It left him exhausted and students reinforced in their emotional needy patterns.

How the practice impacts daily life and how to apply the practice to daily life is clearly relevant, especially to Soto training – but it’s a slippery slip into psychologizing.

I do less and less of that myself. When I was a new teacher I was more patient and willing to wander around with a student’s swirling emotions, waiting for an educable “Zen” moment. Now it seems there isn’t so much time and that the fundamental issue of life and death (the primary issue in Zen) is best addressed as directly as possible.

To focus on the primary, a teacher has to be willing to have a very small group and be willing to utterly fail to transmit the dharma rather than compromise her/his innermost intention.

Also, I’m not a trained psychologist and think that if that is what people need, they are best served seeing someone who is specifically trained for that.

Second…Do you feel zazen and Zen practice as a whole–vows, everyday mindfulness, etc.–helped to address so-called emotional pain-body or emotional past in you?

Yes, like a very sharp knife cuts through a lotus root. And like when we walk in the mist our coat is suddenly soaked through.

When you sit with no gaining idea does life eventually become a seamless event without a gaining idea? Is it “just to live” in the same context as “we just sit”?

Yes, when the Buddha Way leaps from gain and loss, seams and no seams.

Thank you for your questions.

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