The Wise Woman & The Zen Master
Posted by otryba | Filed under Uncategorized
This morning I went for my walk. The lesson for me was about teaching. Although it may appear that the teacher invites the student, it is really the student who invites the teacher. Both are teaching, both are learning, but to “be” the teacher in the ceremony is different from “being” the student - for the ceremony of learning and unlearning. If, to use the Lakota term, we cross ceremonies, then there is no power in the ceremony. If we’re both the teacher and both the student, then little is taught and less is learned and unlearned. If the distinction between teacher and student is clear then both can learn, both can teach. If the student tries to be the teacher, then teaching doesn’t happen.
Of course, we can speak of Learning Circles, which are also powerful. But that is not what I am speaking of here. I am talking about one person transmitting to another. Mentorship. Guidance.
When Great Teaching happens, it requires a Great Student, someone who has not simply accumulated the hodge-podge of impressions, experiences, methods, aphorisms, and practices that we all gather over a lifetime. The Great Student realizes the importance of Emptying. The Great Student doesn’t show up with a cup half-filled with Pepsi, coffee or orange juice when they come to taste the water at the fountain. The Great Student also realizes it doesn’t matter if the cup is fancy or simple. What matters is that the cup be simply a cup; clean & empty, ready to receive.
In the United States and in Europe this teacher-student role has lost its sacredness in most instances. We are conditioned over so many years to “learning” from so-called teachers who never asked our permission to teach us, that when we finally choose someone to learn from, we often continue in the same dynamic of resistance. Because we don’t know our hearts as organs of knowing and connection, our relationship to teaching is mostly mental. We think about the ideas being presented. We sift through the ones that appeal to us and the ones that don’t. Essentially, with this kind of “learning,” nothing changes. We take away and leave behind everything that reinforces our already-established prejudices. We want to feel “good.” We resist feeling our existence deeply. With this approach, we not only become even further estranged from our own experience, we now have new vocabulary to use to reinforce this estrangement and redecorate it as “knowing something.” There is no real invitation on the part of the student to the teacher. Because the teacher is seen as an “authority,” in the Western sense, she is also seen as a threat, as someone to be challenged. There is no sense of creating a sacred relationship. When we are stuck in a mental approach to life developed under an authority model that operates with threat and withdrawal, our primary approaches to a teacher is to either submit or to challenge them. Neither of these approaches invites true learning. And, of course, we have questions. With time we get a sense that Life is an invitation into mastery, which is why we seek out teachers.
Typically, when we go, we have a sense of what we’d like to “get” from a teacher. We not only have the “illness,” so to speak, but we also have the “remedy” that we want the teacher to apply. In essence, we want the teacher to do with what we have accumulated what we have not been able to do with it. If the teacher shows us that our “illness” is not an illness and that perhaps our “remedy” is the only illness, we often object. We want the teacher to understand what it is that we want to “get.” But to get something is very different from receiving. Getting is very linear and predatory; I want to USE the teacher to fulfill MY need, and I KNOW what it is that I need, although I can’t figure out why I’m still so confused!
True teaching, true learning, and true unlearning is not about getting anything. It is just like true love: if you love someone because of what you “get” from them, your love is already doomed from the start. So the proper relationship to a teacher is what we can GIVE to them. And the greatest gift that we can bring to a teacher and a relationship is Emptiness. This giving is what allows us to receive beyond the dimensions of our preconceptions.
This emptiness is simple like a clean cup. This is the Grace that the Student bestows to the Teacher. It is the very Essence of Great Teaching, Great Learning & Great Unlearning. This is the way in which the student teaches the teacher and invites the teacher to be Great and learn and unlearn with the student. Then something greater than “teacher” and “student” can appear in this Emptiness.
A Zen Master once told me about his time in Japan:
There was a Japanese woman in her nineties who had devoted her entire life to practicing Zen. She had studied with two of Japan’s greatest Zen masters and, when her second teacher died, she wanted to find another teacher. She was very wise, kind and sharp. She embodied the essence of Zen. She could have been a Zen master herself. In Japan at the time, women were not ordained as “Roshi,” the term for Zen masters. She personified the highest level of awareness. Any Zen master at the time would have been honored to receive her as a student. To be around her was to be blessed and encouraged. So the Zen community was very curious as to whom such an esteemed Zen practitioner would pick as her teacher after her late teacher’s death.
Much to everyone’s surprise, she picked one of the youngest and most-recently ordained zen masters and asked to become his student. This “zen master” could have easily asked to become HER student. The young Zen Master’s teachings were simple and some people even complained that he lacked an understanding of the finer nuances. Some Zen students asked the older, very experienced and wise lady how, after so many years under the tutelage of such amazing, fierce, wise and funny teachers as her late Zen masters, she could stand for such simple teaching. She replied, “The greatest gift that I can bring to this teacher is to receive him fully. And I desire to receive him fully.”
Indeed, the young Zen Master’s teachings deepened tremendously and with great speed, to the extent that even seasoned Zen Masters began to hear of the power of his teaching and the speed at which it matured. The Wise Lady also felt rewarded in studying with him. Eventually he was asked by the community of Zen Masters to lead an important ceremony for other Zen Masters, that usually only very old and seasoned Roshis were asked to lead. Before it he spoke of those who had initiated him; his Zen Masters. He honored them, their teachings, and their communities over the years. Then, to everybody’s surprise, he explained how this elderly lady had been his greatest teacher and that even though she had said very little to him over her years of studying with him, she had taken him to the next level of learning, unlearning and receiving. He explained how, at first, he was somewhat embarrassed that such an esteemed student would have picked him to study with. He, too, had studied under her teachers and was well aware of their power, insight, directness and ferocity. He also knew that he could not imitate them. He knew that this woman was of the same caliber and temper as his teachers. He, too, wondered at how such a sage woman could tolerate the simplicity of his teaching. He explained that although his teachers had led him to Realization, the Wise Woman had shown him how to Make it Real and available for others.
He learned to open to life as fully as she opened to him. He credited her with teaching him how to ripen into Being Alive WITH everything.
So we can learn the power of not crossing ceremonies. Learn to “catch” the medicine from where you are at. If you are a student then YOU are in the position of power. Know that the greatness of ANY teaching you receive is limited by YOUR Emptiness, YOUR willingness to receive with a simple, clean cup. The power of Great Teaching rests with you! The power of Great Teachers rests with you! Thus, if you have the good fortune of running into someone willing to teach you; have pity on them! They are at your mercy. And without your mercy for them, without your emptiness, there is no place for any treasure that they might offer you to be recognized and realized within yourself.
This way of Emptiness is at the heart of all ancient cultures and medicine ways. The Great Circle of Life is not only whole, it is also Empty. She who brings the Emptiness invites Life to Flower Anew.
Tags: Circle of Life, Emptiness, Indigenous Wisdom, Invitation, Japanese Zen, Learning, Realization, Roshi, Student, Teacher, True Teaching, Unlearning, Wisdom, Wise Women, Zazen, Zen
6 Responses to “The Wise Woman & The Zen Master”
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October 28th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
O, we talked about similar things in Diva Mentor training tonight. The question evolved from what is being the Hollow Bone in a healing or teaching relationship. Speaking from the perspective of healers, we are often taught to be the Hollow Bone or Hollow Reed, or in Nut’s words, a vehicle for revelation.
I like that the student learns by bringing a clean cup of Emptiness to the teaching relationship. I like that this kind of student can teach the teacher.
Now I wonder if that is what I am feeling–the basic cellular restructuring that I spoke with you about today. Could it be the Emptiness of readying for the teacher? Or the healer? If not, I choose to let it be so. For the time being, every person I meet is my teacher, and I am an empty and awake student.
November 1st, 2009 at 11:42 am
BigO! Thank you for being with me, even as I’ve been bringing a cup in each hand, each full to the brim. Thank you for laughing uproariously as I spill hot coffee all over myself as I try to manage my life and bring in the new, without a hand to spare. Thank you for being there with me in my pain. Thank you for helping me to drink my own medicine, and make room in my cups for the wisdom of a brother who’s pain runs deep too. Thank you for your willingess to be with your pain and to love me.
November 1st, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Dear Carla, It is the emptiness and the open spaces that give birth to new life. In the West we learn to manufacture a fictitious, social “Self” and then spend most of our waking hours preoccupied with the “life” of this fiction. When we begin to actually use our senses to taste, feel, see, sense and move with the felt experience of Being, we discover that there’s way much more Intelligence alive in us than that which manufactures a Self as a defense mechanism, with all the concomitant neuro-muscular holding and rigidity that accompanies that defense.
When we allow the Emptiness, then Life restructures Itself and we don’t have to “do” it. We begin to allow. Then the entirety of our Life rediscovers Play, Delight, True Intelligence.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Michael, you’re welcome. Look in your life. Look in the world. Pain runs deep, doesn’t it? But what is it? Pain is the avoidance of our experience. It’s the illusion that we, as individuals and as a culture, can transform out of the defense mechanisms of the manufactured “self.” This is like having a rotting house and applying a better coat of paint. A day comes when we face the pain, we face the rot, we face the reality of our lived experience. A day comes when we notice that we have held the man who shows up in our mirror hostage to our ideas of him - and that he is none of those ideas. He is dying trying to breathe life into those ideas, and dying in a way that feeds little else but the fiction of himself. That is the day that we divest ourselves of our own hype and drop the search for a bigger, gentler, wiser hype. That is emptiness, brother, and it devastates the fantasies a lot of us, of all colors and cultures, are running around in. That day is a painful day, brother, and it’s the day that True Healing begins, it’s the day when we’ll learn to live out of something larger than a 1 inch area of our left Temporal-Parietal lobe. Suddenly we notice that there is a body, that there is a heart, gut, genitals, legs, the backside of our bodies, and that they are not just there to be used, they have their own intelligence, they have been sensing and feeling our lives all along. That can be painful, brother, but it is profoundly enlivening. Our entire civilization is heading toward that day. We know that not only our imagined world, but also our imagined selves will be undone. There is a Deeper Intelligence inviting us into a Deeper Freedom. Human beings living in cultures of conquest are almost wholly defended from that Deeper Intelligence, and our lives are largely devoted to making images of that intelligence so that we can avoid experiencing it. There is a Beingness that we are made of and which does not require us to manufacture it. Our very Being is the product of an intelligence that spontaneously and continuously BIRTHS what we cannot manufacture - and yet we persist in manufacturing part-by-part while we wallow in the toxicity manufactured out of our ignorance of Whole Intelligence. We want to take and get, even though our rapaciousness leaves us with much less than what a simple stopping, noticing, connecting and receiving is offering us continually.
November 1st, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Dear Michael,
You’re welcome. My next post is in response to you.
November 7th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
‘and I desire to receive him fully’ ……that wise woman made a good choice!