What is a teaching? -- 3

This summer's series has been transcribed from a talk

given by Roger Lipsey in Cambridge in 2011.

What kind of thing is a teaching? What makes a teaching different from other cultural phenomena? An authentic teaching is rigorous and demanding, an epiphany, and it asks us for time and engagement. What more is true of teachings?

Teachings are a conversation

The initial conversation is with whoever is there, and that conversation enlarges because, in any valid teaching, you acquire colleagues. You become part of a large or small cohort. At first, you don’t know these strangers, but gradually you come to know them, and they become your “litter mates”—that is how it can feel. You have a unique shared experience of the teaching. No other cohort will ever have that experience. Why? Because of impermanence. Because life is moving on, people are aging and changing. The cohort that feels so solid, so timeless, is in fact moving on, and its experience will differ from the next in significant ways.

The Regensburg Astrolabe, 1052-1065

The conversation of the teaching is a gradual enlightenment and a stirring of all the elements of the teaching. The task of the teacher or teachers is to make sure that all the elements—of which there are many—gradually come up. They do this partly by plan and partly by instinct. An experienced teacher knows when something has been neglected or overemphasized. This represents quite a responsibility. At best, all cohorts experience the teaching in something like a sensible order. And yet because of the movement in time, the movement of people, that order is unlikely to be the same from year to year.

I often think of Sen no Rikyu, the sixteenth-century Japanese tea master, who said of the tea ceremony, “Ichi-go, ichi-e”—“One time, one meeting.” What he meant was that each occasion of the tea ceremony was unrepeatable: who attended, how they were, what was served, the light, the space, all of that would never be repeated. This is one of the true and poignant points about teachings.

While in the Gurdjieff teaching, there are books—an impressive canon of books written not only by Gurdjieff but also by his pupils—the real teaching is a moment-to-moment situational event. You would think that all you have to do is memorize this book over here and say it over there, and all would be well. That is not in the least true; that is how teachings die.

 Everyone knows the notion of “be here now.” The root of it is this acknowledgment that only “here and now” will the teaching disclose itself in surprising ways.

Teachings live situationally when people come together for an event, a class, a meditation, a conversation, a craft. When such situations begin, the teaching is virtual, undisclosed. It is somewhere but who knows where. The attention and seriousness and care of people together summon the teaching from wherever it was. This is why you hear so much emphasis on “here and now” in teachings. Everyone knows the notion of “be here now.” The root of it is this acknowledgment that only “here and now” will the teaching disclose itself in surprising ways.

A group can have a general plan, but what you do is to draw a perimeter around an hour, or a place, or a group of people, and you wish. What you wish is that what will occur within that perimeter is a new disclosure of the teaching. There is a marvelous, never-settled creative tension between the text and other encoded materials of the teaching and “here and now” rediscovery.

A teaching is a basis for a search

If you look at all the words in that assertion, you might say: Isn’t the teaching the search itself? Doesn’t the teaching provide all the materials for the search? Doesn’t it guide the search? Isn’t the teaching flawed if it doesn’t fully guide the search? In response to this array of questions, Gurdjieff says, "Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West, and then seek." The established understanding of the East and the magnificent knowledge of the West are not enough. They are the basis for a search. Thus the search is still open.

The established understanding of the East and the magnificent knowledge of the West are not enough. They are the basis for a search. Thus the search is still open.

We, the current generation, often try to recapitulate what our predecessors accomplished, trying with a haunted sense that we can never be what they were because they were so great. All participants in teachings feel this. Every Tibetan Buddhist poem or book begins with homage to the guru, which is acknowledgment in advance that one is tiny relative to the guru. This custom is a very fine acknowledgment, but the search is open-ended. There is a formidably interesting tension between reverence for those who came before, who set the standard in a stunning way, and what one is now, what is needed now.

This tension is mobile. Sometimes one goes back to those who came before—to what they wrote, to what they were, to anecdotes. You can bathe in that. You feel at the same time their greatness and your smallness. And sometimes you have to forget them completely. This is reflected in the famous “Burn the Buddha” koan in Zen. Sometimes it’s even too much trouble to “Burn the Buddha”—you just walk by, forget completely, or act as if you forget completely. You strike out onto new ground, and you don’t know what that new ground is, but the search is open-ended. The beautiful thing about this gesture, when it’s real, is that the circle is fulfilled: the founders want nothing from us but an open-ended search based on eternally true principles.

Where there is a teaching there are teachers

This is a more difficult topic than you would think. Participants in teachings who are deeply impressed by those who came before—by the founder and by subsequent extremely impressive students who became teachers—may look at a current situation and lament that there is no teacher now. But the conditions of the teaching—the way we meet, the kinds of things we speak of, the practices—are the teacher. There is here again an extraordinary, fruitful tension to be noted and lived: knowing the greatness of those who came before—of Lord Buddha, of Meister Eckhart, of Jesus, of Rumi—one is really nothing.

... the conditions of the teaching—the way we meet, the kinds of things we speak of, the practices—are the teacher.

A grain of sand does not capture what one is. And yet feeling that, one continues with self-respect, and the teaching itself grants a certain dignity.

Teachings are histories

Teachings have their own histories. They have heroes and villains. They have thousands of anecdotes. They have books published and unpublished. When one enters a teaching, some people will embrace that history. They cannot help but feel that this is my history and I must know it well. This is my spiritual home, and I intend to know the history of my spiritual home. It’s a long, long work when a teaching is as old as Buddhism, even as old as the Gurdjieff teaching—more than a century and a half now. It’s a long work to assimilate the history, and a transforming effort for those who are interested.

The fourth and final post in this summer's series will appear on August 15th.