Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 48-minute talk recorded in 1987, Alex Berzin addresses a fundamental challenge for Buddhist practice in the West: the ingrained Western habit of seeking one definitive truth, which conflicts with Buddhism’s embrace of multiple valid interpretations and approaches. He explains how classical Buddhist texts are deliberately written in a vague style requiring students to fill in meanings from commentaries, developing both intellectual rigor and mental flexibility. Berzin then turns to practical issues facing Western Buddhism: the need for clear preliminary explanations before initiations, dangers of oversimplifying teachings through technology or pre-packaged materials, the essential role of Tibetan language study despite its difficulty, the importance of precise terminology and translation, whether to conduct pujas in Tibetan or English, and the risk of draining India of qualified teachers through greedy expansion of resident lamas. Throughout, he argues that authentic Buddhism in the West requires patience with ambiguity, investment in rigorous study, and resistance to both sectarianism and spiritual consumerism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 B in the west .mp3
UUID: 59d9cd98-b753-456c-b679-408839b25792
Teacher: Alex Berzin
Collection: Buddhism in the West
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 48.3 minutes
Words: ~7,675
The different, commentaries. Now one of the things that, we have as part of our western heritage, is from, the, bible, the whole idea, the biblical thinking of there has to be one truth, one God type of thing. Because of that grasping for inherent one truth, then as westerners, we tend to get very uptight when we find that there are many different interpretations of things. And we want to, you know, seek and say, well, but what does it really mean? You know, what’s it really saying?
You know, if the lama says, well, from this point of view, it’s this and from that point of view, it’s that, and there all these different opinions where you get very, very frustrated and very angry. This is something which we have to see is, very much part of the, tradition, very much part of the way that the Buddha taught. Buddha taught that people are different, things are not inherently one way, but things depend on the person. They depend on the situation. So, you have, for instance, root texts.
Now root texts are, these basic texts that we have, you know, that you study in Buddhism, which are written in a type of language which is, goes like this. This is like that because of this and that. And you read a sentence like that, and as a Westerner, it drives us crazy. Can’t stand sentences like that. And, so what we wanna do is, you know, we wanna pinpoint.
Well, what do they mean? You know, it’s ridiculous to write like that. And so we, learn one interpretation of it, one commentary. And I know I myself have been guilty of this. You translate it according to that.
First edition, you put lots of parentheses around, what you filled in from a commentary. Then the printer gets disgusted with these parentheses. The second edition, they’re dropped out, and all of a sudden, you have a different text. You don’t have a root text at all. Now what are we doing in this?
We’re completely shortchanging ourselves and defeating the entire learning technique. Purpose of the learning technique of, you know, the Buddha or the way that it was put out as pointed out, the people who wrote these texts were no dummies. If they wanted to make it clear, they could very easily make it clear. They wrote it in this vague style for a purpose. Now what’s the purpose?
The purpose is that, all these texts have many different levels of interpretation, all of which are equally valid. And, you know, from this point of view, that point of view, this sort of lineage way of describing, that lineage way of describing, this tenet system, that tenet system, etcetera. And what we want to do is to be able to open our minds to be able to be aware of many different levels of interpretation that things can have at the same time. So, for instance, the way the Tibetans will approach it is you memorize a text. You know, every Tibetan memorizes.
Whether or not we’re going to get into that in the West, that’s probably another question. As Westerners, we really feel a great deal of hostility towards having to memorize things. But, you know, there definitely is a purpose to it. The but in any case, when the Tibetans memorize, you know, either you recite it from heart, by heart, or you can read it whichever, way we’re going to do it. But, you read it with all the this is and the that’s.
And the purpose is while we’re reading it that we ourselves fill in what it means. You know, it gets us to use our minds, you know, to develop ourselves, to fill it in ourselves. Otherwise, if you just read something that’s already filled in, you don’t even think about it. If you have to fill it in yourself, then you have to use your head, which is the aim of, the whole training, to develop ourselves. And not to just fill it in on one level, but to be able to fill it in with many different types of, commentaries, many interpretations, and to see them all as, you know, equally pertinent and equally valid.
These sort of things. So, likewise, it’s, you know, the way that Tibetans teach, and this you have to, you know, sort of get across, in order to understand it. Otherwise, we get very frustrated, is that Tibetans purposely will teach vague in a vague manner, most of them. Why? Because, you don’t wanna lay out everything in the first shot.
If you lay out everything in the first shot, then, a lot of people, you know, maybe weren’t really interested or, you know, weren’t really able to understand it and just, is a waste of words. If you explain things in a vague way in the beginning, then for those who really weren’t so interested, that’ll be enough. And for those who are really interested, they’ll come back and ask more questions. Then you explain to them a little bit more. And you know, still not everything completely.
And if they’re really interested, they’ll come back again. Because what you want to do is, you know, it’s not that you’re trying as a teacher to, win these people over, you know, by making, you know, a big fancy show so everybody will come. What you want to do is to develop their character so that the energy comes from their side to pursue things, to develop things. You want them to be able to develop enthusiasm, patience, tolerance, these sort of things. So, you know, in the various various texts, you know, the recitation texts, for instance, the sadhana’s.
Oh, the way they’re done in Tibetan, you have an awful lot that just will put dot dot dot after, you know, the first few words. And you have to fill it in from somewhere else. And, you know, it’s again a mistake, on western side to want to present things on a silver platter to everybody, ready made prepackaged Buddhism. Because if you do that, you don’t get the the, people to actually work. Now, of course, westerners, we’re spoiled rotten, and so people will complain.
I don’t wanna you know, why don’t you make it so that, you know, we can just practice it? Why don’t you make it so that, you know, instantly you can do it? But, you know, that defeats the purpose. If somebody really wants to do it, you give them all the materials, but they have to put it together themselves. You know, it’s like putting together a model boat.
You appreciate the model boat or the model car much more if you put it together yourself rather than, you know, somebody just gives it to you already made. And what fun is that? So the approach that the the Tibetans will follow is one like that. They’ll give us all the information. They’ll give it to you all at once.
They’ll give it in, you know, bits and pieces and give you the techniques of how to put it together, but we have to put it together ourselves. Now as I say, with westerners approaching this, we tend to be a little bit hesitant, you know, because we’re worried that, you know, well, the other person isn’t gonna like me. They’re not gonna come back. You know, all these sort of considerations that come into a westerner to westerner type of relationship. And these are things that are going to have to evolve, You know?
And you can’t just make it, you know, buddy buddy. You know? We’re all mates type of thing, with a a teacher, if that’s, you know, even if that’s a Western teacher. Because by throwing away some of these things that the Tibetans do, we really throw we would be throwing away, you know, what is a major technique for developing the character of another person. And so this is what, we need to be able to do.
Now when, one of the things that, however, is very helpful in the Tibetan tradition is that, everything has a definition. Everything does have an explanation. And if one, you know, wants to pursue it, one can find out what these explanations are. Now the fact that there are definitions is really great. I mean, is one of my big bones that I pick is that our vocabulary that we’ve used in English now doesn’t mean what the words mean that they’re supposed to be translating.
Our words that were chosen last century have completely connotations. And so it’s very important as Buddhism comes in not to leave it in jargon of the last century, but to, you know, try to evolve new terminology. This is what happened over the history of Buddhism coming into China, coming into Tibet. You know, there was a whole historical process of, terminology evolving, growing, different experiments were made. And this is something very important for us to do.
Now, we can ask, well, what are, you know, care what would be valid qualities or characteristics of Western Buddhism if we can speak about it in general covering all the different countries and cultures that it’s come in contact with. And, you know, as I say, there are, you know, within each of the countries, you’re going to have different different things appealing. You know, like the type of you know, because, you know, we can say, well, you know, who wants to do all this hundred thousand prostrations and these sort of things? You know, that’s pretty weird. But, in some countries and, you know, even within one country where there are many different types of people, if you have someone who is very sort of, flighty, very emotional, airy fairy, up in the air type of person.
Well, to get them into doing something physical with their bodies, let’s say a hundred thousand prostrations, is a fantastically clever clever isn’t the right word. Fantastically insightful, profound technique for helping that person because, you don’t want them to go on even more, you know, far out mind trips. You want them them to get grounded first. And to, help that person get grounded, one of the best ways is to have them physically do something like prostration, show respect, these sort of things, you know, not as a punishment, not as initiation into some sort of cult. But, you know, there are definite values which, you know, each of the different approaches has.
But if we speak in general, what is a a general type of approach in, what we could call Western Buddhism, it’s one idea is indicated from, what his holiness, the Dalai Lama himself authorized. And this was, in eighty five, his holiness was giving the Kālacakra initiation in Switzerland, and, a lot of people wanted to know beforehand some information about it. They wanted some explanations. And so his holiness, gave me permission to go around and do that. Now, this is something which is very non Tibetan.
No Tibetan would think of wanting to have an explanation beforehand of what was going on or what they were getting themselves into. You know, this, these initiations are part of their own culture, something which, is very much taken as, you know, part and parcel of what they do. Orientation also is even if we don’t understand, well, we’re planting seeds for future lives. You know, this is sort of your common everyday, Tibetan off the street, their type of attitude. But for western person, we like to know what we’re getting ourselves into.
We want to have explanations. We want to know what’s going on. And, that I think is going to be a general characteristic of Tibetan Buddhism as it evolves. People do like explanations. Now, of course, you’re going to have two different types of people.
It’s like, if you wanna go out on a trip, on a journey, there’s somebody who, is going to study the map completely before they go so that they, know what they’re doing. And there’s another person who approaches it as an adventure. Let’s sort of just go out and, you know, we’ll take the map with us and we’ll sort of figure it out as we go along. Now different approaches, you know, within different lineages and so on of Tibetan Buddhism will emphasize one approach or another. But both of them do, you know, as it’s coming into the West, entail clear explanations.
And, you know, it’s a matter of how much detail you want. But, that factor of clear explanations, especially beforehand, before we get into things, think is a very helpful thing for us westerners and one which, his holiness has appreciated and has given the go ahead for. But, you know, one thing that I think is not very healthy trend in, you know, thinking about what can become western Buddhism is to computerize it all and to have things like, you know, to help us do our sadhana, we’re going to have a hologram, you know, of the whole thing and, you know, we’ll make a video of it. And, you know, you just sort of switch on your video, and, there you have your Tārā practice or your Chenrezig practice. That I think is very dangerous because, the whole point of these visualizations is to train our mind, to train the imagination.
We have to put it together. Right? And that’s the whole point of it is to try to put it together and to stretch the mind to be able to figure it out and to do it. If it’s all done for you, it’s like being given the model car already assembled. What fun is that?
You know? It doesn’t develop us in, any way. And so, these sort of things, you know, is sort of a hasty thing, you know, of, well, we’re western. We have all our gadgets. We have all our technology.
Let’s just, use it. If you do that, it’s going to ruin the entire learning quality of these techniques. Another thing issue of Buddhism in the West is the issue of Tibetan language. Now, there are many things that can be said about this. First of all, in general, let me repeat what, his holiness the Dalai Lama has said and many teachers have said that, realistically speaking, we are not going to have all of the Dharma available in Western languages for at least another couple centuries.
That’s realistically speaking. You know, what’s been translated so far is, you know, just a drop in the bucket. There’s lots and lots, you know, hundreds of thousands of texts. So at this point in history, the only way that we can really, you know, pursue it in-depth, you know, and go into everything is if we do it in Tibetan. Tibetan is the only language that it’s, completely extant in.
So it also becomes an issue in terms of reading the translations because, you know, anybody who’s read extensively in the translations has noticed that each translator has their own terminology. And, sometimes it’s extremely confusing to know what they’re talking about and to be able to correlate what one translator has been talking about with what another translator has. And, often, you know, at least the Tibetan main terms are going to be there in the glossary. So even if we are not fluent in Tibetan, nevertheless, if we’re familiar with some of the technical terms, it’s going to help us to be able to correlate and put together all the different translators’ works. It’s very helpful.
Also, as Rinpoche pointed out, each syllable in a Tibetan term is full of meaning and full of connotations, which is very hard to convey in just a one English word translation. And by studying it in Tibetan, then you see the, you know, the richness of all the connotations of everything. Now that doesn’t mean that everybody has to go out and study Tibetan. Obviously, that’s difficult, and, most of us don’t have the time to do. But, the thing is that, if we really wanna go very deeply, it is something which, is going to be extremely helpful.
Certainly helpful in the sense that, you know, then you have wings. You can fly. You can go anywhere. You can read anything, anything, study with anybody. You don’t have to depend on translators who will vary in their, abilities, you know, how good they are at translating.
And again, as Rinpoche said, you’re never gonna find a lama who’s going to teach you every book and everything that you wanna study. The only possibility is that if you can read yourself, then you read, you ask somebody what you should read, they suggest books, you read it yourself, and then you go and you ask them questions on what you’ve read. You know, that’s the way that Tibetans do it. That’s the only way. You know, lamas don’t have time to go over a book word by word, you know, with you, you know, covering everything.
And, this is what, we’ll be able to do if we can read Tibetan. It’s a long haul, but, it’s a worthwhile, thing to follow. Also, in terms of, of Tibetan language, there are, certain terms which have come in, you know, which, into our English and use, you know, in the names of various programs that we have, which are really watering down the terms. You know, you have, this whole concept in Chinese philosophy of the rectification of names. You should use names to mean what, they actually mean, and, don’t use them in a sloppy fashion.
So for instance, I was speaking, yesterday about, the word meditation. You have Lamrim meditation. Well, what’s done is Lamrim meditation is really thinking about the Lamrim. It’s not meditation. Meditation is the next step after the verbal thinking about it.
And, you know, so I explained about just building up a beneficial habit by trying to see and feel that something is true that you’ve already thought about. So, like that, if you call, you know, thinking, meditating, then that means nobody’s ever gonna get beyond that step because they think that that’s it. That’s what meditation is. It’s just thinking verbally. We limit ourselves when we do things like that.
We we use the word retreat in a very sloppy manner. In the West, we use it just to mean, going off for a day’s retreat. It just means a period of time out from what we normally do and, doing something a little bit more intensively. Whereas the word retreat is used in a very technical way to refer to a very specific, very long practice. And so, you know, you want to not you you know, interchange the terms because then you water down.
You know, somebody says, well, I’ve done a Tārā retreat. You know, I spent the weekend doing, you know, repeating, you know, whatever practice. I’ve done the retreat. Well, that’s ridiculous. You know?
The actual retreat, you would have to say the mantra one million times and do, you know, a whole bit of practices, with it. That’s the retreat. So we have to be careful. You know? Either we leave the word retreat for the way that it’s come in already in English, and then we come up with another term for, you know, the actual specific, big practices of this.
Or, you know, we have to deal with it in some way. The same thing with, things like Geshe training. Geshe training is very nice. It’s very good. You have this in some organizations.
But, you know, what you’re doing in that is studying the text that a Geshe would study. But you’re not doing it the way that a Geshe does it. You’re not doing it you’re certainly not memorizing the text. You’re not debating. You’re not doing the whole bit.
And to, at the end of that, say that, you know, well, I’ve become a Geshe waters down what a real Geshe is. You know, there’s nothing wrong with the program. Call it by something different. Don’t call it by the Tibetan name, which is just gonna water down what, an actual Tibetan geshe does and how they train. Or the same thing, somebody finishes a three year retreat and they, get the title lama.
You know? Very nice. However, you know, any neurotic person can sit and do a three year retreat for, you know, whatever type of neurotic reason. You know, a real lama with the real qualifications, that’s something else. So, again, you know, we have to be a little bit careful in the usage of terminology.
And, we can’t you know, it’s a big mistake to say, well, Lama so and so called it by this name. And then, you know, well, they are an infallible god. They’re the pope, and therefore, we have to, you know, this has come from on high, and we have to use these words. Well, a great many of the, lamas and geshes who learned English never learned English terribly well. And so their usage of these words well, how do they know what the word means?
They know what it means because some of their students said this is what the word means. Alright? This is the equivalent of the word, so they use that. But, that’s again why I say you have to check up. You have to, you know, try to improve things, especially when it comes to language.
That’s important. You know, we don’t want to, have an example like, you know, the Spanish king who lisped? I don’t remember his name. There’s one Spanish king who had a terrible lisp. And after him, everybody in Spain had to speak with a lisp.
That’s why they say, you know, this type of thing. The Spanish accent, it’s an imitation of this king who lisped. Now, you know, for us to continue to speak in, you know, hippie dippie type of English just because certain lamas spoke that way, that’s, you know, really following the tradition of the Spanish, lisping after this king. It’s it’s silly. Mhmm.
The one meditation. Right. The Tibetan word for meditation is gom. And gom comes from the same root as the word to, habituate ourselves, to make a habit. And so I call it to build up a beneficial habit.
The Sanskrit word is, Bhavana, and, that, comes from the same root as the word to actualize. It’s to make something actually happen. So again, how do you make it happen? Well, the Tibetans always translated things with incorporating the explanation. And so, you know, you make it happen by building it up as a beneficial habit.
Well, they would know what it means because it’s, from the same verbal root as the word for habit. So they know that. It’s not intuitively they would know that. They would know it from grammar. Just as we would know to build up a beneficial habit Also, you know, implies the the idea of habit.
You don’t wanna say just build up any habit because you can build up bad habits. And it’s an active process building it up to make it happen. These sort of things. Also, you know, what I’ve been doing with vocabulary, presently, I think that, it would be very good for us to have as many different, choices as possible. You know, what I’m basically calling for is for the translators to experiment.
Let’s go on to the next step. Let’s try to find new terms that come closer to what the Tibetan actually means and take it out on the road and test it and see if it communicates. And, you know, what questions people have about it, how they respond, and so on. Because like I was talking about impulses, impulsive behavior for karma, but I was explaining that. Was teaching a course on that in New Zealand, and somebody pointed out, you know, in their questions.
Well, what about when, you have a reflex? You know, somebody hits your knee and your leg goes up. You know? And then we would say that that’s impulsive behavior as well. Is that karma?
And, you know, it’s obvious from you know, it came obvious from that that the English word impulsive behavior implies, you know, body reflexes as well, whereas the Tibetan wouldn’t. So there’s a limitation of the English term as well. That’s going to be a little bit misleading. Every word, you know, it’s like I was saying, you cannot find words that, in two languages. You know, it’s it’s not that you can’t, but it’s, especially difficult when it’s in different completely different language families to find words that cover the same set of things.
You know, you have five things on a table, one language, one word covers three, another language, one word covers four, and maybe one thing outside of that set. So, our impulse behavior in English as well is going to give a little bit of misleading things. You know, you’re never gonna find a word that’s completely not misleading. But, you know, by taking it out on the road, coming up like that, working with that, getting questions, and working with it for many years and all over the world, then you start to see what are the limitations of this vocabulary. And maybe you wanna correct it, and then you correct it.
And, you know, with a lot of people working, then, you know, maybe after, you know, many years, many decades, then we can figure out, well, what’s going to be the best way of translating it, at least misleading. It requires a lot of patience on the part of the students at this point because everybody’s gonna use different vocabulary. And but, it’s a period in history that we have to go through. And that as well is something that’s very important when we think of Western Buddhism. We want things instant, know, a five year plan or whatever.
We want them right now, and we have to look at it in a historical perspective and over a perspective of many centuries. And, you know, we are just at a certain phase now, and we’re gonna have to go through, you know, the problems of that phase of, struggling to come up with a vocabulary. These sort of things. Now further thing about Tibetan language is, about, doing our recitations in Tibetan or in English, doing our pujas in Tibetan or English. Now, you have every possible combination of how to do it, being done in all the different centers.
Some of them do it in Tibetan, some in English, some in half and half. There are places where, especially in Germany, where, they’ve been able to, get take some of the pujas translated into German in such a way that they can chant it in German with the traditional Tibetan tunes. You really have very musical, talented people there, doing things like that. And, you know, you have certain things which are a little bit adopted in English as well, for being able to do like that. There are many issues involved, many pros and cons.
First of all, we can say that, well, Tibetans translated everything Tibetan, and so, you know, they’re not chanting it in Sanskrit, so we should do everything in English. There’s a certain validity to that, and that’s one of the reasons why in translating, I don’t like to leave things in Sanskrit. One of the big limitations that the literature that we have now has is that I can’t give a book on Dharma to my mother, for instance, to read because it assumes a vocabulary of at least fifty Sanskrit words. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, Sūtra, Tantra, Mandala, nirvana, Dharma, karma, Buddhist, arhat, you know, it just goes on, mahayana, it just goes on and on and on. All these Sanskrit words, which again becomes, you know, jargon of almost like a cult, you know, to do it to get into it, you have to learn all this foreign language and jargon.
It shouldn’t be like that. One of the guidelines that his holiness gave me very early on when I was translating was he said to translate, and write books and explain things as if you were explaining it to your mother. And that I found a very, very useful guideline because, I don’t know about your mother’s, but my mother’s, quite a, a simple woman and, not very well educated. And, you know, you can’t just, you know, bullshit her to say to put it in plain English. Or if you were you were explaining something to your kid brother or your kid sister, also, you couldn’t just throw the bull with them.
You know? You’d have to say it in straight English, straightforward. And if we, you know, think and follow that type of guideline, then, you know, we can explain explain things, you know, more clearly, more simply. You know, anybody can write not anybody, but, it’s easy to write in very highfalutin sophisticated, you know, ten syllable long words that only maybe five or six people in the world can read. But, what’s the point of that?
You know? It’s much, much more difficult to explain something simply so that, your mother or your kid sister or kid brother could understand it. That’s far more difficult, far more challenging. And that, I think, is very important to be able to do. All the Sanskrit words, there’s no reason in the world why they can’t be translated into English.
There’s nothing wrong with the English language. They’re able to do it into set into Tibetan, into Chinese. Why not into English? But in any case, the point of the pujas is a matter of time historically of where we’re at. Eventually, yes, you have to say that everything needs to be done, eventually in English.
But if you look at, these times now, you’ll get, various, issues involved. One, most of the English translations aren’t terribly good. Two, most of the English translations are not at all poetical. So that if you try to chant them, you know, you just stumble and, you know, bumble through it and it’s very hard to say. It’s not very nice to say.
It gives us great appreciation for the great translators, the Tibetan translators. Not only did they translate the meaning perfectly, but my god, they translated everything into rhymed poetry and rhymed meter. You know, you try doing that in English. It’s tough. You know, the best we can get it coming out like, Mary had a little lamb.
You know, that type of, poetry, and, that’s quite, uninteresting for, us to do. So the issue here with translation of these texts is that, you know, the English has some limitations at this point. But there are also there’s also the issue of what should we say? Secrecy. Kalu Rinpoche, for instance, has insisted that all his centers do their pujas in Tibetan and in the Kagyu centers, particularly those of Kalu Rinpoche, there’s a great deal of emphasis on doing pujas, doing all these practices and they’re done in Tibetan.
And one person, one of the heads of their centers went and you know, after all also, mean if we’re talking in terms of the relation with the spiritual teacher. If the spiritual teacher is somebody who is, know, can make mistakes and they’re not infallible, then for sure the directors are not, you know, now the representatives of the pope or whatever and they’re infallible also. That’s ridiculous. You have to question and talk. But in any case, the this director of, one of Kalu Rinpoche’s centers went to him and said, you know, well, if we do these, pujas in Tibetan, you know, now we’re doing them in English.
We do them in Tibetan, then, nobody’s gonna come to our center. We’ll have to close it down. And Kalu Rinpoche said, good. It’s better to close it down than to, do it in English. Now one could, look at that and say, you know, hey.
That’s really heavy and, you know, question that. And, you know, obviously, you can question done in a respectful type of way. And one of the I don’t think I don’t know whether they in fact questioned him, but thinking myself about it, there’s a a great validity to what Kalu Rinpoche said, which is if you look in some centers, where you have things like protector pujas. Now these protector pujas are very heavy duty stuff. Very advanced just for people who are really, really into it because, it has in it, when it’s translated into English, all sorts of expressions like, you know, blood drinker and, you know, these sort of things which are really, really weird and far out.
And so what happens is a number of centers do these things in English. And they do it in English and anybody who walks in off the street can, go to their puja and they hear them, you know, talking about demons and drinking blood and these sort of things. And they think, my god, this is devil worship. This is really a cult. And that could ruin the entire thing.
And so for that type of situation, what Kalu Rinpoche says is really very wise because he’s saying, do it in Tibetan. Those people who, you know because if you if you can’t keep it private you know, if you can keep it private, then doing it in English is no problem. But if you can’t keep it private, which most westerners really are incapable of doing, without, you know, things becoming secret and, you know, oh, you know, we’re in the special club and you’re not in it and, you know, all these sort of games that we we tend to do as Westerners. If we can’t do that, then for, you know, the people who are just coming in off the street doing it in Tibetan, very nice. You know, it has nice rhythms.
There’s the music. You know, you can play the cymbals and the drum with it. Lovely. And, you know, and for some places, like in South America, they really dig that. You know, this is really fits into their culture with music and, fits into what they really like to do.
And, they’re especially into chanting in foreign languages. They might object to chanting in Latin, but, you know, they’re delighted to come together and chant in Tibetan. But, in any case, the, people who do want to know what it means, well, they will make the effort to find out what it means and to study it, and there are translations available. But for those who aren’t into making the effort, you know, it’s a big mistake to make it in English because it just is going to cause very, very weird ideas floating floating around about what they’re doing. And so, you know, these issues about whether things should be done in English or Tibetan and so on are complex issues.
You know, you can’t just decide it superficially on the level of, you know, well, you know, we might as well be chanting in Zulu or Martian, you know, than chanting in Tibetan. So these are, again some issues that come up. There are certain dangers also which I think are important to avoid in, our whole, bringing of Buddhism to the West. And, the biggest one of those is the brain drain from India. That’s really serious.
We have the brain drain. I I was going to explain it. It’s that, we have in India a very limited amount of fully qualified teachers. These would be the brains as it were. And to drain them means to take them all out because we’re very greedy, to the west and not leave any of them in India to train the young Tibetans.
Because, if we, look at, the future of Buddhism, Realistically speaking, the net in the you know, who’s gonna carry it on in the next generation. It’s not gonna be us westerners. We may have, you know, we do have one westerner who has become a fully qualified Geshe and, you know, the full Tibetan tradition. We may get one or two who, might be, you know, really qualified as a as a Lama who really can teach and things like that. But, that’s gonna be really rare.
And the ones who, are actually going to be able to carry on the lineages, carry on the initiations, you know, be the really great spiritual masters for the next generation at least, that’s gonna be the young Tibetans. And if we take all the best teachers and, insist that every tiny little place has to have its geshe or its lama and its translator as well, then, we’re really just screwing ourselves, you know, and screwing everybody for the next generation and in the future. Because you do have situations, I’ve come across dharma centers in which you have a very high geshe or lama there and the translator. Very high geshe, translator. And at the center, you have only two people living, both of whom have, two jobs that they were holding down.
That center met once a week for this, lama to teach, for one hour, and that was it. And, you know, why are you keeping the lama here? For the good vibes, they said. The good vibes to just I mean, you know, what could be more greedy than something like that? And taking that the type of teacher away from all the, you know, the their students in India who, you know, don’t have, such high caliber lamas to replace them.
So, this is something which I think is really quite important that we not be so greedy, that every little place has to have its teacher. I think that, solution is one of sharing facilities. You know, you can have there are certain places where, you have very intensive programs of, you know, teachings every day of the week and going through the major texts and major practices or having three year retreat centers where you do very intensive practice. These sort of things, it’s not necessary to have that in every little in every city. You know?
If you have it in one let’s say if we’re talking about Australia and New Zealand, if you have one for the region, that’s sufficient because, you’re not gonna have very many people who are going to be able to devote their full time to it anyway. And if they are able to devote their full time to it, they are are also able to move to, the place where they can do that. And so, you know, have one in America, you know, one in, you know, Northern Europe or one in Southern Europe or, you know, these sort of things, but it’s not necessary to have these repeated absolutely everywhere. And the same thing in terms of, you know, having resident teachers for non intensive programs. Now also, realistically speaking, in most places, you know, unless it’s really exceptional, most people are busy.
We don’t have, more than, you know, maybe one or two at the most three evenings, you know, maybe two evenings in a Sunday morning a week to be able to come to a center. What does this lama do the rest of the time? You know? It just sort of hangs out. That’s not very possible.
Now, again, you know, you have to take into consideration situations. If we’re talking Europe, it’s not so difficult to travel from one place to another. If we’re talking Australia, obviously, the distances are much further. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t share teachers. You know, it isn’t that far between here and Melbourne, for instance, or, you know, the other cities as well.
You know, you don’t have to necessarily have them come one night, this city and one night, that city. But you can share lamas in a sense and not, make this complete, brain drain. Because, in most cities also you’ll find that, there are going to be older students and these older students can help out. You know, not you know, because again, we have this weird idea of, you know, a guru and every guru has to be a Buddha and all this sort of business. But, there are simply Buddhist teachers, you know, older students who have more experience, who, are able to explain up to their own level of understanding.
Now, obviously, anybody who does that has to be humble, non pretentious. You know, if they pretend that, you know, they know more than they do, then, you know, everybody’s into a lot of trouble. But if they’re very honest, they say, well, this is my understanding. I may be wrong, but, you know, this is, as far as I’ve gotten, and I can share that with you. We can discuss it back and forth.
And, you know, if there’s something that we can’t resolve, then we ask the teacher, when they come. Or I mean, hey. This is the west. Here’s the telephone. You can telephone these, teachers in, other parts of this country, then you can resolve questions.
You know, things like that are a way of continuing even when there’s not a teacher present. Have a teacher come sometimes. Now, of course, there’s a disadvantage of having, you know, only teachers who come, once every two years. You know, obviously that also is a problem. You know, it’s a problem even, you know, I mean there are many levels as well of that type of problem.
You can have an organization of centers which you have one lama which is the head but they only show up every couple years and then there’s a resident teacher there. Well, who is the allegiance to? That becomes a big issue in, many organizations and many places around the world. And that’s something which, you know, one has to, try to think of not in terms of the model of the, army, but, rather in terms of, what is the reality of the situation, who is it that people can refer to. It’s only natural that whoever is, resident in a place, that’s the person people go to and the person that, you know, there’s going to be more reference to.
But, in I mean, it’s only natural. But, in, in the cases where you don’t have a resident teacher, you just have a lot of people coming through, you know, and they don’t show up again for another two years, that is difficult. Yes. I mean, that’s why I was saying if you have somebody resident in a geographical area who can go around and come about come around more repeatedly that, makes it a little bit easier. But, we shouldn’t think that it’s only necessary to have, you know, it’s only possible or permitted to have people from our own tradition or our own background or things like that.
Another big problem in the West, is that of sectarianism. You know, this whole football team mentality that this lineage or this lama within this lineage is my football team and everybody else is a different football team. And, you know, it’s war and competition and we certainly can’t let teachers from the other football team come to our center. You know, as if, you know, it’s a big threat and it’s competition and they’re going to somehow steal our students. That’s a very paranoid way of looking at things.
As, his holiness, always says, one of the big causes for sectarian feelings is lack of understanding. You know, Because people don’t really understand what’s going on in all the various traditions, then they tend to think that, you know, it’s our team against them, and they’re talking about something completely different. The only way that we can really avoid that is by knowing about the other traditions. Now, in a particular center, I mean, you can have Rime centers, and there are these around the world. Nonsectarian ones in which you have teachers coming in from all different traditions.
But, even in those, you’re going to have one sort of dominant one. Now, that you can have even if it’s not this type of center. You have one dominant way in which, you know, the program is carried out. However, you know, other teachers coming in from other traditions can only enrich that. It helps educate us so that we know what is the approach, you know, in other traditions.
How do they do things? If we want to be able to help everybody, you know, as a Buddha, obviously, we have to know all the different, techniques. And this would apply to, you know, even techniques in the non Tibetan tradition because, you know, you go to public talks or whatever and people ask you questions. Well, how does this fit in with Zen? And if you go, duh.
I don’t know. You know, that, is pretty dumb. It’s, very helpful to, have some knowledge of all these different, things, these different approaches so that, we can appreciate the particular tradition that, we ourselves might be following. And as I said, for anybody, you know, for a small place where you don’t have many options available, then, it’s unnatural to assume that, everybody’s going to, have a connection.