The Fifth Dalai Lama’s Guidelines for Guru-Yoga

Review of the Qualities of a Spiritual Teacher

A guru is a great teacher, a great spiritual master or mentor, someone who is not only able to teach from knowledge of the texts but is also able to teach us by his or her own example. A living example of what Buddha has taught, a guru is someone who has sincere love and compassion. This furthers disciples’ and everybody’s ability to be happy, to avoid being unhappy, to get rid of their sufferings, and so on. A guru is someone who is totally motivated only by wishing to help others. This is very essential. It must be someone who is not interested in exploiting students for money, fame, sex, love, attention, or whatever. It’s someone whose behavior is ethical, though not necessarily a monk or a nun, and who has good concentration and good understanding of the teachings, particularly about voidness. As a result of that good understanding of voidness, the guru must have a minimal burden of disturbing emotions, since it is difficult to imagine that anyone would have none. Also, they should have some level of ability to teach, to explain things clearly with patience and enthusiasm, and not get discouraged by the slower students and by needing to repeat all the time. 

All the texts say that it is going to be very difficult to find somebody who has all the qualifications. The main thing is to find someone who has a maximum amount of the qualifications. We are not going to find somebody who is absolutely perfect, so we need to be realistic. The teacher, very importantly, needs to be honest about his or her own good qualities and shortcomings and not pretend to have qualities they don’t have or hide the shortcomings that they do have. The same thing with the students. Neither need to go into personal intimate details about their life; that is not the point. The point is to be open in terms of one’s character.

We see this with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His Holiness will explain very difficult things in tremendous detail. However, when he reaches a word or a passage in a text that he doesn’t understand, he says very clearly, “I don’t understand what this means. This is unclear.” Then, he asks the great masters around him when he’s teaching, “What do you think it means?” Sometimes somebody can actually answer the question and His Holiness will debate with him in terms of questioning what that person who answers says. His Holiness is always open to learning; he always admits when he doesn’t understand something. He is, and everybody agrees on this, the most learned and advanced of any of the Tibetans. That is clear. 

Because His Holiness will admit that, in this complicated and difficult text, there are two passages that he doesn’t understand, we – myself and others I have spoken to – are more confident that he does, in fact, understand everything else. Probably nobody understands those two passages. It could be a mistake in the text. A mistake often happens because of some copy error made centuries ago when it was all handwritten, or when the Tibetan translation from the Sanskrit is incorrect. We should not think that all texts are absolutely accurate and correct. If we check back with the Sanskrit text, we can still find mistakes, which could come either from a shortcoming of the translator or because they were using a different manuscript. There weren’t standard versions of these texts in Sanskrit. Serkong Rinpoche used to emphasize, “Always question anything that doesn’t make sense. Don’t just accept it; investigate.” Even if it is in a scripture, it is not holy. Don’t think that these are simply holy words, and we must never investigate deeper. There can be mistakes in them. 

So, when we speak about guru-yoga, “yoga” means to yoke ourselves or join ourselves with the authentic thing, meaning with the Buddha-nature qualities of the teacher. We are not yoking with the teacher’s shortcomings. If the teacher is not very well qualified, but still the person has more qualifications than shortcomings, we can gain a great deal of inspiration and help from us joining with those good qualities. “Joining” means to gain inspiration and strength from them, so as to move us to realize these qualities ourselves on the basis of the Buddha-nature qualities in the guru and the Buddha-nature qualities in ourselves. That is the essence of guru-yoga. 

If we see that we can gain inspiration from the good qualities of the teacher, then we can also understand how we can see everybody as our teacher. We can learn from everybody, including the dog. The dog, no matter how much we might yell at the dog for making a mess or doing this or that, and no matter how strongly we might discipline the dog, the dog remains loyal and loves us. So, we can gain inspiration from the dog as our teacher. Even if we learned from somebody not to act the way that they do, we learned from them not to make that same mistake. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and it is quite profound to see everybody as our teacher. There is no benefit to dwelling on the shortcomings or mistakes of our teachers. Likewise, we should not do that with anybody. There’s no benefit unless we are trying to help them to correct and to overcome their shortcomings, but then our motivation has to be proper and altruistic. 

I am repeating and emphasizing this because many of us don’t have the ideal teacher, one who can really inspire us very deeply. We do have other teachers, and we can still do guru-yoga in terms of them, and not only in terms of the founding figure of our lineage. That is one very standard and very helpful way to approach the practice also, whether it is Tsongkhapa, Guru Rinpoche, Drikungpa Jigten Gonpo, or whoever the founding figure might be. If we do the practice with a founding figure, we still need to know something about the biography of this figure. Otherwise, the figure really is not very meaningful or inspiring as an example. However, with our less-than-tremendously-inspiring teachers, I still think that we can certainly apply guru-yoga and gain some level of inspiration, because we certainly do at least learn something from them. If we are not learning anything from them, why are we going to the teacher? Just because they happened to be at our Dharma center and other people go is not a sufficient reason, if we are not learning anything from the teacher. I think Sakya Pandita said, “We shouldn’t be like a dog − when all the other dogs bark, it starts barking too.” 

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