Suzuki Roshi's Zen 6. Relationship with a Teacher

A close and loving relationship with a teacher...

Almost everyone who came into contact with Suzuki-Roshi was deeply affected by the experience, and I find it inspiring to listen to the warmth and immediacy with which his students speak of him even now, many years after his death. He himself had several important teachers in his lifetime, and he trusted them all completely. His root teacher So-on, was, as I said, more or less a mean person, and very often denied Suzuki Roshi those things that Suzuki Roshi very much wanted, but Suzuki Roshi always accepted his instructions, and saw that surrender to his teacher was the best way to train. He also knew that So-on, despite his gruff manner, loved him very much. In Suzuki Roshi's way there is emphasis on the teacher-student relation as a mysterious and yet a warm necessity. Without this relationship, the alchemy of transformation cannot occur. The teaching takes place not in words, but in some much more subtle imprinting, an almost physical communication that occurs in the midst of living daily life together.

A Zen teacher is not a guru. He or she is an ordinary person to be grappled with. He or she will have various rough edges, because of karma, and at the same time, the relationship to a teacher is not the same as an ordinary human relationship, it is our opportunity to develop deep faith and trust in the dharma. We trust our teacher, not as a person but as the dharma itself. When the teacher throws his or her life into Buddha's house and when we make that effort too, then we meet each other in Buddha's house, not in our own house. So we might have all sorts of personal problems with our teacher or not, but if the teacher is true and if our effort is good these personal problems don't matter too much. We ourselves find trust in our buddha nature through the relationship to a teacher. When we trust him or her unconditionally, not as a person, but as Buddha, in other words, as our own truest self, then we have completed our work, and we will always be grateful to our teacher, even if, as with Suzuki Roshi and So-on, there doesn't seem to be much overt affection.