“When the student is ready, the teacher will come.” I have been intrigued for years by the notion that when the teacher is ready, the students will come. Lately, it seems that when the teacher is ready to work with students toward succession that those students will appear.
Until now, I haven’t been ready. Not that I didn’t notice that. Not that I wasn’t jealous when my Dharma sisters and brothers announced their new successors. Bernie had told me: The job of the teacher is to transmit the Dharma. Bernie must have heard it from Maezumi because Maezumi’s other successors say the same thing. I had no successors. It seemed like everyone else did. What was wrong with me?
I drew courage from Chao Chou, a late bloomer who didn’t start teaching until he was 80 years old and then taught for 40 years. There was hope for me. I was a late bloomer too. Although I’d discovered Zen in high school – perhaps at the same moment that Bernie was discovering Zen in college -- I didn’t manage to begin sitting regularly until I was nearing my 50th birthday. What made Chao Chou even more special was that he had no successors, and yet, to this day, all Zen students study with him. More than a thousand years after his passing, we’re all still mu-ing.
I tried to justify my lack of successors in endless discussions with myself. I argued that my Zen practice was in the marketplace, not the temple, not the zendo. I fantasized that one or more of the young leaders I was working with closely might be successors, not only in the network of charter schools we were building but Zen successors as well. A couple of them tried sitting, but their Zen practice didn’t take. But after retirement – my second retirement – from social entrepreneurship, what then was my excuse? Some students had been sitting with me for almost twenty years. Was it that none were ready? Was it that I wasn’t ready? What was I waiting for?
I got tangled in picking and choosing. How could I single out just one? How would the others feel? I imagined “transmitting” to the group, the half dozen who had been with me so many years. There was a time when Bernie thought he would no longer give transmission to individuals, only to groups. For me anyway, at that moment, group transmission felt like a coward’s way out. Here I was again, sitting atop a 100-foot pole. For years, this has been a koan to which I returned again and again.
It was perched on a pole that I understood, “Don’t tell me; show me,” the classic Zen teachers challenge to koan students. On my poles, I had learned how we frighten ourselves. The 100-foot pole is high enough. We don’t need to make it a 1000-foot pole. On a pole again, I had another aha moment: I didn’t have to decide who was ready to be a teacher. The step in front of me was to make someone a Dharma Holder. Making someone a Dharma Holder signals the teacher’s expectation that the student is likely someday to be a successor. Bernie made me a Dharma Holder in 1999. He didn’t pull the “transmission” trigger until 10 years later. “Someday” was not so scary, but I had another koan, who’s ready to be a Dharma Holder? How did Bernie decide to make me a Dharma Holder? He gave me no explanation.
This koan was not as difficult as I feared. Just sitting, my answer appeared: when a student has turned the corner on “Don’t know,” if they keep practicing, keep deepening, down the road, they’ll get there, wherever “there” is. What am I looking for? It’s not what the student says. Not knowing was so important to Bernie; we’ve been talking about it for years; everyone in our sangha can talk not-knowing. Is the student beginning to embody not knowing? That’s what I want to feel before taking the Dharma Holder step.
As it turned out, I felt that two members of our group had made the turn. I bit the bullet. I stepped from my 100-foot pole. Will they keep practicing, keep deepening? Don’t know.
But this step is turning out to be a tremendous opening. The Universe is leading me, and I am learning so much. The Universe chose two Dharma Holders. There's magic in the number. There’s an equality in our study together which wouldn’t be there if we were working one-on-one. With three students – I learned this in grad school from Georg Simmel -- there’s the inevitable problem of “pairing.” A larger group would have been a “class”. The three of us are studying together, and it’s all fresh.
Some things I’ve studied deeply. In one of the best study years of my life, a life-changing plunge with Jishu, I learned to use the precepts as mirrors with which to study the self rather than as weapons for judging others or for self-flagellation. I have been teaching the precepts that way ever since, but now we are wondering together if some of the baby wasn’t thrown out with the bath water. Did we lose too much of the ethical component? Can we bring that back in without losing the precepts as mirrors?
Some things I barely studied: the Five Ranks. When Bernie sent me to Bob to do koan study, I was to finish the four collections before returning to Bernie to do the Five Ranks. When the time came, Bob and I made the trip to Montague to spend a day with Bernie and other seniors studying the Ranks in Bernie’s backyard. That was it. I am looking forward to digging much deeper with the Dharma Holders into the Five Ranks (and fortunately we have Shishin’s book now as a guide).
There is so much that I have never really studied, The Identity of Relative and Absolute although I did chant it often, and stuff I dug into but want to go deeper such as the Heart of the Perfection of Great Wisdom Sutra.
I am enormously grateful that this step is occurring at this time in my life. All these years I have felt like a late bloomer. I am feeling now like a just-in-the-right-time bloomer. It feels so right that this dharma holder practice is occurring for me at a time in my life when I am ready to begin again fresh. I am so grateful that I didn’t do this earlier. I wasn’t ready. I would have been sucked into coming from a place of knowing. Now this work of succession study feels like the perfect culminating practice.