Warring Gurus

Dangerous Megaphones

Bitter cross-winds Views, like dung defile the path: Teachers who disagree

The bane of the now far-too-well-informed and multi-sourced spiritual path is that today everyone has an opinion.

One hundred years ago the left hand of Buddhism had little to no inkling of what the right hand was doing. Yes, there were local conclaves and some international visits, but on the whole, no meaningful communication passed between the various Buddhist schools.

Travel back another two thousand years or so and I believe, like Sue Hamilton, that one Buddhist monastery was probably too far removed from the next for much exchange of views and information to occur. As a result, the consensus is that within two hundred years of Gotama Buddha’s death, nineteen (at least) individual and different Buddhist schools had formed, all with their own “take” on what Gotama really said, or — more to the point — what he really meant.

Many of these early school died (I guess “fizzled out” describes it well), while some up and migrated before the opinion-wielding Muslims virtually extinguished all of Indian Buddhism: north, to Tibet, south-east to Burma and Thailand, north-east to China, and farther east still, to Japan.

Only one strand of Buddhism made it out of India intact and alive: Theravada (and its Pali Canon) migrated to Sri Lanka very early on where they remained in relative safety — we still have the Pali Canon.

We humans are never short of opinions. We all form them, carry them, nurse them, and disseminate them — sometimes we even kill those who refuse to share them, those who refuse to see things our way — the Indian Muslim invasion and the Christian Inquisition serve well as examples).

A true guru barely has enough of an ego left to even feed himself. At times, he (or she) could care so spiritually less about physical survival that others have to keep the body alive: the young Ramana Maharshi comes to mind.

A false guru is so much ego that he (or she) can barely stop talking, preaching, exhorting, arguing, convincing, and yes, sometimes: killing.

The old Indian saying that an empty gourd makes a lot more noise than a full one is, I think, a brilliant and very apropos metaphor.

When we consider that two thousand years ago, a trip (trek) from India to Tibet, say, was not only extremely dangerous but would also take months at best, we can understand how a teaching like Buddhism would (and did) take on another flavor with its own local gurus (both true and false) as it slowly so slowly made its way across East Asia.

Thus, China grew its own flavor — Chan.

As did Japan — Zen.

My guess is that, at that time, the ratio of empty gourds to full ones would have run something like ten-to-one (figure grabbed out of thin air, I admit). And for something like a thousand years, different areas sprouted and nursed their own versions, interpretations, convictions, flavors of Buddhism, strands that neither conflicted nor met. The twentieth century changed all that, and now, the twenty-first has gone completely overboard.

Today, I think the empty gourd to full gourd ratio is a hundred-to-one, at best. And all these empty gourds make a lot (a real lot) of noise. George Saunder’s wonderful essay “The Braindead Megaphone” comes to mind.

I would have loved to have been one of Gotama Buddha’s personal disciples, with no competing Buddhas around to contradict and argue. Yes, there were the Jains, and we had the Brahmins, and a countryside quite well-stocked with wanderers and spiritual recluses, but there was only the one Buddha, and he taught only the one Dhamma, and he knew what he meant and he said what he meant and we needed no “brilliant” gurus to interpret for us or to tell us what Gotama really meant.

Now, twenty-five hundred years later, every empty gourd has its own take on things (and its own Twitter account and Facebook page).

Still, when it comes to truth, there can only be the one Ultimate one.

Yes, you can come back (cleverly) and say that there might be two ultimate truths — one viewed from this end and another viewed from that — but, I say, should that be the case then that is the one ultimate truth. End of ultimate story.

I believe that the Buddha not only experienced the ultimate truth at his enlightenment, but I believe that this experience is also what he taught.

I also believe, to be fair, that many of his apostles (as it were) were also enlightened and taught the ultimate truth (and the path to it) to the best of their abilities. But I also believe that a lot of gourds did not understand the Buddha and instead of delving deeper within to fully see and understand both life and themselves (the same thing), settled for what they thought was right (and, perhaps, profitable) and then spread that gospel as far and loudly as they could.

I believe this is a pattern that holds for all religions, throughout all of our little planet’s history.

And today, with the advent and proliferation of first the Internet and then upon its heels (and foundation) Social Media, this trend has, as I said, spun completely out of control, i.e, overboarded.

That’s why the little Wolfku above: Bitter cross-winds: Views, like dung defile the path: Teachers who disagree.

The ultimate contradiction: Disagreement about the ultimate. It’s terribly noisy and confusing and dispiriting. Someone should dump all these fighting ego-views on a desert island somewhere and not let a single one of them off until they all agree — that would serve mankind much better than the current spiritual cacophony.

All these Me-Me-Me-gaphones.

© Wolfstuff