Is it necessary to have an enlightened teacher or anyone who has reached a certain level can be a teacher?
You don't even have to have reached a level.
I mean, if you compare it, what your teachers teach, I talked about this last week a little bit,
If you take the Visuddhimagga as a guide, it says anyone can teach.
The more knowledge they have of the Buddha's teaching, the better they'll be able to teach.
And even better than having knowledge of the Buddha's teaching is having the realizations.
So the best is to go to the Buddha, then go to an arahat, then go to an anagami, then a sakitagami, then a sotapanna.
If you can't even find a Sotapanna, then go to someone who has memorized the whole Pitika.
If you can't find such a person, go to someone who has memorized two Pitikas, one Pitika, has a good knowledge of the Pitikas, and so on.
But there's a story that we give of this monk who taught all of his students and they all became enlightened.
And he himself was an ordinary worldling.
Actually the Visuddhimagga has a few such monks.
But this one, he thought he was a great teacher and he was totally oblivious to the fact that he hadn't gained anything until one day one of his anagami students came in and said to him, hey, how about a lesson today?
And he said, oh, I'm too busy today.
My schedule is full.
And he said, no, no, I didn't mean you giving me a lesson, but here's a lesson for you.
And he sat cross-legged and floated up into the air and said, you don't even have time for yourself.
How can you give lessons to other people?
And he flew out the window.
He said, I don't want a lesson from you.
And this really perturbed the worldling monk teacher.
And he went off to practice meditation and eventually became an arahant.
So there's no need to be... The story goes on, actually.
I should finish the story for those of you who haven't heard it.
He went off into the forest where there was nobody.
He said, in that case, this monk is correct.
Or he was just horrified by the fact that, geez, here my students are totally enlightened and they can read my minds and know that I'm not.
How can I possibly stay here?
He was ashamed.
And so he went off into the forest where there was no one and he just practiced on his own.
And he did such strenuous walking meditation, pushing himself really hard.
And this is what happens when people learn too much because they feel these expectations on them and they have this desire to become enlightened, these expectations, and pushing themselves to become enlightened, which is hopeless.
It's atta, it's self.
Meditation has to be...
It's natural.
It's about coming back to nature.
So the walking and the knowledge of the walking has to come naturally, slowly, slowly.
Not pushing, but probing and nudging the mind and easing the mind into place.
You can't force the square pegs to fit into the round holes.
And so he got nowhere, and he was totally, he wound up his clock, and eventually it sprung, and he got fed up, and he sat down and totally overwhelmed, and he started crying.
And as he started crying, suddenly this angel appeared beside him, sat down beside him and started crying as well, and he looks over, and here's this angel, because of course it's a forest with nobody in it, there's this angel sitting crying beside him, and he's like, who are you?
And he stops crying and he says, I'm an angel that lives in this forest.
What are you doing here?
Well, I knew you were a great meditation teacher, so I wanted to come and practice according to your teachings.
Well, why are you crying?
Well, I saw you crying, so I figured if he's crying, he's a great teacher, it must be the way to become enlightened.
So the guy's like, oh.
And he, you know, again, totally ashamed of himself.
But crying like that can be useful sometimes.
Not the crying itself, but the giving up.
The feeling how hopeless it is.
Because that's the realization of non-self.
The realization that you can't control.
And that's what allows you to finally give up and really start practicing.
Some people have to reach that again and again and again, like banging your head against the wall until you realize how futile it is.
And so this is what he did, and after that, then he became enlightened.
So this story is a really good example of how this works.
You don't need to be enlightened to teach, but that's not saying anything.
It's not saying, great, sign me up, I'll become a great teacher.
It's saying, don't be, as I said last week, don't be too attached to the idea of being a good teacher or this person being a good teacher.
It doesn't mean quite as much, anyway, as we think.
There are great teachers outside of Buddhism who are able to convince their students of their views.
Now, of course, meditation, having its beneficial side effects, allows you to be a better teacher, but it's not required to be a good teacher.
I guess the only proviso is, whichever is probably going through everyone's mind, is that without the meditation practice and without meditative realizations, it's incredibly dangerous, isn't it?
It's not dangerous if the person goes by the Buddha's teaching, but if the person still is a putu jhana, a person with full greed, anger and delusion,
How can we be sure they're going to go according to the Tipitika?
How can we be sure they're going to go?
So what generally happens is people throw out the commentaries, throw out different suttas, throw out various conflicting ideas, take a part of the Tipitika, interpret it in their own way, and teach some sort of lopsided dhamma.
instead of going by the accepted interpretation.
This is much more common.
People are much more inclined to do this based on their own views and opinions and ideas.
This is a sign of the noble people, from what I've seen, if you're asking me, and you are asking me.
the most noble thing that I've seen and the most noble people that I've seen from my point of view as being noble from my observation the people that I have seen and feel that I feel are the most noble and enlightened turn out to be the people who have the least opinions
will give their observations when they say, well, this is kind of... Like Mahasi Sayadaw, for example, there were at times where he would point out and say, well, you know, this is kind of conflicting, so we're really not sure here.
And it may be that there is a mistake here.
He would say that.
But otherwise...
Almost always he would go according to the Tipitika, the commentaries, the Visuddhimagga, all of this without interpretation, without trying to change it.
He would try his best to fit his meditation into that as best he could while still going according to the observations.
And from my point of view, from what I've seen, that seems to work.
So it takes a certain amount of enlightenment, I think, to do that, to give up your own views and opinions and to just go according to the standard interpretation, which, from what I've seen, turns out to be not perfect, but a good enough shell to fit what might be the perfect meditation into it.
so there may be times where you have to kind of finesse it and kind of say well you know don't take that too seriously or that's just one interpretation which oftentimes especially the commentaries are
But why I go to this depth to explain is because the danger of not having enlightenment is that you will misinterpret the teachings.
One.
Two, that you will misuse the teachings.
many many examples of this where a teacher becomes gets a guru complex and begins to encourage this attachment to their person and taking them as refuge and so on like that even to the point of abusing it as far as taking advantage of one's students
We take advantage of people.
These sorts of teachers, who I claim I am not one, will try to get money from their students, for example, a very common thing to do, but less common, but that does still happen, is they will, and sometimes it seems they're just unable to control themselves, but they'll actually have relations with their students.
They'll start to have sexual or romantic relations with their students.
still trying to be a meditation teacher and at the same time fooling around with their students because they just can't control themselves.
So these are the disadvantages.
The best thing is to find an enlightened being, but it doesn't mean that we should denigrate a person who is not enlightened but is able to teach.
And more importantly, it means that we should not...
we should not consider just because someone is a good teacher means that they're enlightened just because they talk like an enlightened being because when I first started teaching it's kind of embarrassing but it's also kind of encouraging encourages us as new teachers that I was able to sound like Ajahn Tong my teacher so when I taught in Thai I would speak and have the same nuances that he had
And it worked.
It did make me a good teacher fairly quickly.
It doesn't make me a good person.
It doesn't make me an enlightened person.
But, you know, it really, you could say even it fooled my students.
And you could say that probably some of my students were fooled into thinking that I was more than I was, thinking maybe he's an arahat.
There was actually one man who
that's maybe a different story but there was one man who thought I had told him that I was an Arahant and he misunderstood what I had said I think it's a different story but you know at the very least I would say try your best to get
an enlightened teacher, but don't be too concerned about it.
Be concerned that they're going according to the tradition, both from the Buddha and the commentaries.
People are going to argue with that.
There's a lot of people who will immediately be turned off by the idea of going with any sort of commentaries, as they prefer to make their own commentaries.
But that's my suggestion.
But on the other hand, once you find a good teacher, don't be too sure that they're going to always be in line with the suttas and the Buddha's teaching, because they may not be enlightened, even though they might be able to teach.