There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.
—ALBERT SCHWEITZER
What brought me to Sarnath in the first place that year started with a nudge from R. S. Sharma. When I arrived in India for my year “abroad,” Mamu-nana had recently given the convocation address at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath. He held a very high opinion of the institute’s director and encouraged me to seek him out. As it happened, the Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche was visiting Delhi just then.
Elegant. My first impression on meeting Samdhong Rinpoche might seem odd for a monk, but it has held up over the years. I mean it not just in the sartorial sense, though he makes the simplest robes look smarter than a Savile Row suit. Samdhong Rinpoche is elegant in the way that a philosophical argument or a mathematical theorem can be elegant—pared down, effective, surprisingly original—with an integrity so finely honed it seems an aesthetic as well as a moral choice. He wears his authority with composure and grace, and at the same time with a disarming warmth and modesty. And he speaks a perfect classical Hindi that puts most Indians to shame. “Come to Sarnath,” he said. “Come to the institute.” Everything flowed from that.
Though he was a monk first and had long served as an educator, both in the Tibetan schools in India and at the institute, Samdhong Rinpoche was also a cabinet member in His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile. He was instrumental in the process of recasting Tibet’s ancient political structure into a modern, democratic system of governance for the refugee communities scattered around the world, and ideally for a future Tibet. The year after we met, open elections were held for the first time for the position of Kalon Tripa, the prime minister of the government-in-exile. He ran reluctantly but won by an enthusiastic majority. He led for two terms with such skill that there was a clamor to change the new constitution so that he could run for a third term. “You’re being ridiculous!” was his final response to his supporters. Retirement meant serving as the Dalai Lama’s personal envoy. I admired how he could hold the spotlight with authority in one moment, and then recede into the shadows the instant His Holiness appeared. He stubbornly avoided the fanfare and elaborate protocol that Tibetans typically lay on those they deem worthy of respect, even at risk of causing offense.
When I first met Rinpoche-ji, as I came to call him, all of this—Tibet, its diaspora and politics, and the unique flowering of Buddhism in that culture—was terra incognita to me. I knew the Tibetans had come to India as refugees, but we had refugees aplenty from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Myanmar, you name it, crowded into their own corners of every Indian city. After I ran away and the family was suddenly paying attention to Buddhism, the story came out that my Nana, the legendary Basawon Sinha, planned the route for the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet through Assam in 1959, enlisting his connections in the labor movement there. Or at least that’s what his wife Kamala told me, who was a politician herself and Minister of State for External Affairs. She remembered how they went to greet India’s esteemed new guest when he arrived at Patna station on his way to Mussoorie from Assam. Basawon Sinha was the leader of the opposition party at the time and was the one, so Nani said, who convinced Nehru that Mao was not to be trusted in the matter of Tibet, and that welcoming the refugees would be consistent with India’s tradition of offering asylum to troubled neighbors. But the stories didn’t really stand out in my mind from much other government gossip that my family talked about. They had met Fujii Guruji too, she said, and that seemed much more interesting to me at the time. I had no idea then that the Dalai Lama was any more significant than countless other religious leaders who called India home, and certainly no inkling that he would come to be important in my own life. The only time I had set foot in a Tibetan Buddhist temple, when I was exploring in Pokhara, it seemed an alien and incomprehensible world full of angry monsters with fangs bared and eyes bulging under flaming brows. What did these fearsome images have to do with Buddhism?
At the university in Sarnath, a door opened into this world, which turned out to be not so strange after all. I made friends with young monks from Tibet, from Nepal, from regions of India like Ladakh and Kinnaur that share Tibet’s culture, from different schools and lineages whose home monasteries were scattered far across the Himalayas and who had come together under one roof through the unique circumstances of the Tibetan diaspora. Before the Chinese occupation, monks from the Indian Himalayas had traveled to the great monasteries in Tibet for their higher studies, but that avenue was now closed. One of the reasons that the institute was founded in Sarnath was to accommodate these students. The culture of communal monastic life that they came from was new to me. It held a camaraderie and warmth that had often been absent from my own life. I learned it was possible to have fun in simple ways—hanging out, talking about movies and motorbikes—without feeling that I had turned my back on what mattered. These were friends who shared my vision of what mattered, who studied hard and were sincerely committed to their practice.
Because I had no obligation to follow the university’s standard curriculum, Samdhong Rinpoche took me in hand and set up an ideal program. He assigned me a teacher to begin learning Tibetan language. I already had some knowledge of Sanskrit, so he threw me into the deep end with the classical texts of Buddhist philosophy and logic, and I studied Hindu schools of philosophy for comparison. I found that swimming in these waters came naturally to me. The texts opened up with an ease that felt almost a familiarity.
This feast for the intellect was served up in a style that had been customary for centuries, and probably since the time these texts were first written. Instead of the large lectures and formal classes that are normal at a modern university, I sat with my teachers one-on-one, or at most with a couple of other students, reading the text as the teacher offered commentary and answered questions. The method demanded an intense focus, a total presence, listening with one’s whole self. Taking notes would have been a distraction, if not rude. You listened and you remembered. There was no fixed syllabus, no set amount of material to cover in a certain period of time. A text would take however long it took. A door seemed to open into another time, where monks had pored over these very same words. They had swum in the disorienting depths of these same ideas in just this way: side by side with an elder who was eager for them to experience an opening of the mind, a crack where the light could enter.
At first the elderly Sanskrit pandits were surprised that a young Indian was eager to study with them—even more so a young Indian of a certain class, who would be expected to aim for a career in technology or finance or some other lever of power in the modern world. Sanskrit had fallen out of fashion and they weren’t expecting a revival. But then this small world pulled its strings tight. It turned out that my relatives had been schoolmates of these same scholars once upon a time, and fond memories lit up for them, as they did for me of summer vacations spent learning Sanskrit poetry with my elders. A very warm and respectful old-world congeniality prevailed, which made studying even more of a pleasure, and they clearly took joy in teaching.
Of all these encounters I took the most delight by far in my regular meetings with Rinpoche-ji. Unlike the other tutorials he set up for me, we had no set agenda and our conversation roamed freely across philosophy, Dharma, and whatever concerns life had stirred up. Our starting point was usually questions that were sparked by the texts I had been studying, and in particular those of the great Buddhist philosophers of the Madhyamaka—the Middle Way—that flourished at Nalanda, and had a special link with the institute at Sarnath.
When Buddhism was wiped out in India as successive waves of Turkic invaders repeatedly attacked the great monastic universities, and Nalanda was finally destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1193, it was said that the books from its legendary, nine-story-high library fueled the cooking fires that fed his army for half a year. A vast body of literature was lost forever. All that survived was what had been carried by traveling monks to other lands or was already translated into other languages where Buddhism had spread. Tibet in particular was a storehouse of Buddhist texts. For centuries, Tibet’s kings had sent scholars to India and hosted Indian scholars in return, who translated Buddhist literature from Sanskrit into Tibetan with a systematic precision and standardization of terms that was unprecedented in the history of scholarship. China’s occupation of Tibet and the destruction of the monasteries during the Cultural Revolution once again threatened the survival of that treasure. Part of the mission that inspired Prime Minister Nehru and the Dalai Lama to found the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in 1967 was to retranslate back into Sanskrit as well as into modern languages the lost texts that had survived only in Tibetan versions. As a result, the institute attracted a very particular expertise. In its way, it was a portal to Nalanda, a conduit back through centuries to the world where these texts had originally been composed and studied.
As a child, I had seen the ruins of Nalanda when Okonogi had brought me along with some Japanese visitors for a day trip. The grandeur of what remains, however fragmented and lonely, made an impression. In those days nothing was fenced off, and I clambered up the stairs of the towering main temple for a bird’s-eye view. At that height, Rajgir was just over the horizon, a day’s journey for a monk walking at a deliberate and mindful pace. Below me, more than thirty acres of the campus of the ancient university had been excavated—the many monasteries that housed the student body, the lecture halls, temples, and stupas. Much more stretched beyond those stubs of brick walls exposed to the sun, acres still blanketed with farmers’ fields and villages going about their business on top of what had once been for most of a millennium an extraordinary center of learning.
I’ve returned to Nalanda many times since then, with a gradually deepening appreciation of what this place meant, and a growing sense of familiarity. I’ve closed my eyes and listened to echoes of another life, the splashing of water at the well, footsteps, laughter, the drone of recitation coming from one quarter, the clap that punctuates a point of debate. But the true legacy of Nalanda, the treasure that draws me back and seduces me into conjuring memories of a fellowship among these bricks and stones, is preserved not in the ruins but in the words of the great masters who lived and taught here.
It was Samdhong Rinpoche who first opened a door in my mind and invited Nagarjuna in. He did it without ever using his vast erudition to impress, without academic jargon or a snow pile of quotations and references. He was blunt and to the point. Where other scholars seemed too often like archaeologists on rewind, brushing layers of dust on top of ideas, Rinpoche-ji lit a fuse that ran straight to Nagarjuna’s dynamite. The gratitude I feel for that explosive induction is boundless.
Nagarjuna was probably at Nalanda sometime in the second century A.D., though even that minimal shred of information about his life is far from certain. Tradition pictures him circled by a halo of water serpents, the nagas who guarded the Buddha’s teachings on the Prajnaparamita—the Perfection of Wisdom—at the bottom of a lake until Nagarjuna could bring them up from the depths. The submerged mystery of the wisdom sutras, and the apocryphal status of so many texts that may or may not be his work, belies the hard brilliance of what we know for sure that he did write, and the force of his influence on everything that came after.
It’s all very well to wave a hand and dismiss this world as illusion, but what does that mean? What is real if not what lies at hand? Nagarjuna attacked the problem with logic. Rationally, rigorously, relentlessly, and sometimes playfully too, he deconstructed the concepts we take for granted. He drilled down until any attempt to place reality—things, persons, ideas, identities—in a definable box revealed itself to be absurd, self-contradictory, or incoherent at the end of the road. In the process, he knocked down every competing philosophical system of the time, but instead of offering a superior view to replace them, he pulled the rug out radically from any possible position.
He demonstrated that nothing at all exists separately and independently. Nothing is possessed of an inherent reality. The object in my hand may be a drinking glass, or a flower vase, or a pencil holder depending on how I ascribe its function, and its fragile physical nature is every bit as changeable as those labels. That same object would have a very different meaning if it were a gift from a dear friend, or an antique that’s been in the family for generations, or something I picked up yesterday at a garage sale—a meaning that will become all too clear when its fragility prevails and I feel its loss.
And yet, though the object has no inherent nature, I haven’t imagined it into being. This world remains very real. Causes have effects. Our actions have consequences. The only way this is possible, the only way that things, persons, concepts, and identities exist at all is as contingent lean-tos, temporary snapshots in an unceasing flux, as relational points on a map that has no hard underlying geography. The term he used to describe this interdependent reality is “empty”—empty of fundamental, inherent identity. That doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent. It’s not a metaphysical void, but it’s defined by virtue of convention and the concepts we designate as relevant.
Whatever ultimate reality stands outside this house of cards, its foundation and its sky, is entirely unknowable, because our knowing—our language, our concepts, our perception—can only touch what is, like itself, contingent, changeable, impermanent, and transitory. And even this rule, inviolable and without exception, that everything at all that exists in conceptual reality is “empty” is just one more concept and is itself empty.
Why does any of this matter? How is it more than an academic game? Because our natural impulse to see things not in all their fluid, temporary, relational contingency but as if they were inherently existing entities, separate and fixed, is exactly the same grasping at identity that is the root of all our suffering. If we can see through this illusion, we can let go of that grasp.
In some ways Nagarjuna was the perfect antidote to my questioning nature. Nagarjuna took questions, all right, but then he shredded them. You had to keep coming back with better questions. And then he showed you how ridiculous those questions were too. Instead of saying, “Don’t ask questions,” he would say, “No, the answer is not where you’re looking, that’s a dead end. Look further, deeper. Refine your question.” The practice was the refinement of the questioning.
I kept coming back to Nagarjuna in part because I had been studying physics with a deep fascination since high school. I was worried too about what I would face after graduating. Perhaps a career path in science would be cover enough to satisfy my parents while I tunneled down this philosophical rabbit hole. Like many others, I was excited by the way that Nagarjuna seemed to foretell the mysteries of quantum physics with all this relational contingency and mutual dependence, his statements that were contradictory and yet true.
Rinpoche-ji was skeptical that there was much to be accomplished with that line of thinking. Scientists would happily appropriate ideas from Buddhism as long as their own worldview wasn’t challenged. Nor did he see science more generally as a solution to the world’s problems. It wasn’t for lack of exposure or understanding. He was a regular guest at the private meetings where prominent scientists explained their work to the Dalai Lama and discussed how Buddhism and science might be relevant to each other. He didn’t question the validity of scientific knowledge, but he was profoundly skeptical about the value of technology to human flourishing. Those were two different tracks, he believed, and they didn’t necessarily converge.
His views had crystalized out of a deep study of Gandhi’s ideas, and reached far beyond his unshakeable commitment to a nonviolent path toward self-rule for Tibet. He believed that the solution to the economic imperialism of globalization and the challenge of environmental sustainability was a return to a purely local self-sufficiency. He was worried for the Tibetan farming communities in India, where technology has been used as a rationale to monopolize access to seed. Just as Gandhi’s challenge to Britain’s textile industry was homespun cotton, Samdhong Rinpoche was preaching small-scale organic farming as the answer to Monsanto.
I had doubts that a retreat from technology into a simpler life could ever be a viable solution on a global scale. It was not unusual that we had differences of opinion. As often as we came to different conclusions I always felt that his starting observations were accurate and insightful. We did agree that unless ethics was part of a scientific education, then science was likely to do more harm than good.
In any case, I owe it to Samdhong Rinpoche’s influence that I abandoned the idea of a career in science, though he also steered me away from a formal monastic education. In my enthusiasm for what I was learning at the institute, I was seriously considering the possibility of diving even deeper into the writings of the Buddhist masters and their Indian and Tibetan commentators. Notwithstanding the luxury of my tutorials with the pandits, the institute at Sarnath was cast in the mold of a modern Indian university. I had learned of an alternative that seemed like it might offer an even more authentic monastic education. The steady flow of refugees from Tibet and the destruction of Drepung Loseling, Sera, and Ganden—the great monasteries that had been continuously living centers of education since the fifteenth century—had led to groups of monks rebuilding those institutions from the ground up in south India. Their early years in the 1970s had been a time of hard labor, clearing the jungle plots that the Indian government had granted them, learning to farm in an unfamiliar climate, and surviving the disease and hunger that came with such bare subsistence living. By now they were well established and it was possible to study, to immerse oneself entirely in the traditional methods of a Tibetan monastic education leading to a geshe degree, which involved a tremendous amount of memorization as well as formal dialectical debate. It could take at least twelve years if not forty, but I saw that as more an attraction than a problem. My biggest problem at Le Moyne was that I was on track to finish far too quickly.
So I asked Rinpoche-ji very sincerely if he thought it would be a good idea for me to enter a monastery in the south to continue my studies. He answered, without any effort to be diplomatic about it, that if I wanted to become a karmakandi—a specialist in rituals—I should head south. The word he used implied a shrunken scope of aspiration, even if it wasn’t exactly derogatory. “But you were a Brahmin to begin with,” he teased. As if a preoccupation with ritual was pretty much the same wherever. “If you really want to study Buddhist philosophy, stay here with me.”
It hit me: He himself had been trained entirely within that monastic system and was one of its most stellar alumni. He had worked tirelessly to keep Tibetan cultural identity and language alive in the face of very real threats of forced erasure in its homeland and slow dissolution in diaspora. And yet he was entirely willing to question the efficacy and relevance of the education that lay at the very core of that culture. I came to understand that he is a uniquely original thinker in the world of Tibetan Buddhism, immersed in the tradition and one of its most knowledgeable scholars, but also standing outside of it, with a clear-eyed view of its limitations and a willingness to shed any portion that has outlived its purpose.
His openness, his iconoclasm, and much of his thinking about education were influenced by his friendship with Jiddu Krishnamurti, and that influence was mutual. Though Krishnamurti stood adamantly outside of any religious tradition, he was a ready if uncompromising teacher and receptive to a kindred spirit. From the time of their first meeting in 1971 until Krishnamurti’s death in 1986, they were frequent partners in conversation, and “K” came up often in our talks. From my seat on the couch in Rinpoche-ji’s office, or on our long walks together around the campus, I often felt like I had an ear to the door, listening in on echoes of those exchanges. It was both thrilling and humbling to realize that even as a student I was invited to participate in a similar genre of open-ended, informal, but entirely serious exploration with a brilliant scholar and practitioner. As a method of teaching, it inspired one to rise to the occasion and give one’s all, transparently and without reservation, to the topic in question. And each time I came away from our conversations with a lasting sense of warmth and welcome, as much as intellectual stimulation.
Beyond Rinpoche-ji’s advice against my pursuing a more formal monastic education or a degree in physics, we talked a lot about education more generally. He did encourage me to persist on an academic track, in spite of my doubts. I was disillusioned with formal education, notwithstanding the good fit I had found at Le Moyne and in Sarnath. My deliberate failing of the board exams in high school in Delhi was more than just a strategy to subvert my parents’ plans. At some deeper level it was also a determination to resist an education that served no purpose other than pushing markers forward on a track toward income and respectability. Rinpoche-ji understood my reservations. In his work with the Tibetan schools and the university, he had tried to design an educational system that was not just about employment—critical as that was to the refugee communities—but focused on character development and human values. He inspired me to think carefully about an ethical education.
I had long given thought to the ethics of the Vinaya—my conversation with Sasaki about spiritual pride happened around this same time. The problems of corruption and the toxicity of power, whether in religion, politics, or business, were a frequent topic of discussion at home for as long as I can remember. As children, my sisters and I had eyed with envy the spectacularly expensive toys that were given to our playmates on festival days. Like us, their fathers were government officials. How come we didn’t get any? My father sat us down and explained why he rejected the lavish gifts that others received, explained this blight of corruption that others blindly accepted. We should be proud instead of being jealous, my mother said. And we were. Better than fancy toys that would soon break was having a hero for a father.
I had pondered whether this blatant, pervasive, and entirely mundane evil was built into the human condition. Was it just the way the world works, or was it fixable? What kind of intervention, what policies, would it take to reduce the misery that those in power impose on those they govern? Samdhong Rinpoche had pondered it too, as a leader of what was for all intents and purposes a small displaced nation sheltering inside the Indian polity, obliged to negotiate its corruption as well as, hopefully, positioned to learn from the humanitarian ideals of its secular democracy. The fact that he had reflected on this as a monk, one who was highly regarded for the rigor of his own ethical discipline, inspired me, as did the clarity and maturity that he brought to bear in thinking about secular institutions from a Buddhist viewpoint.
We talked about how ethics could be taught, and what its rightful place in education might be. Should there be a formal code of conduct, something like a modern, streamlined version of the Vinaya for laypeople, that would articulate the unspoken norms of civility? Too often people adhere to a formal code of conduct only out of fear of punishment. What would it take to inspire a joyful adherence, where stick and carrot became irrelevant, where the egotistical pleasure of being seen to be good was eclipsed by the greater joy of doing good? Could one experience a self-driven motivation toward ethical behavior, like a student who is motivated to learn not by grades but by the joy of learning itself?
Perhaps adherence, no matter how joyful, to an external code of conduct, whether formally constructed or embedded in social norms, was an insufficient framework. What if the self-driven motivation that we were hoping to define was actually a form of self-regulation, just as all living organisms self-regulate? What would it mean for humans as a species, not to mention our impact on the rest of the world, if we understood ethics as the homeostatic balance of a healthy human mind, and learned to self-regulate the fear and greed that counter our deeper impulses to compassion and care?
Offering courses on ethics was not the answer, Rinpoche-ji believed. Defining a curriculum that treated ethics as a subject for study, whether traditionally as a domain of philosophy or in some more creative way, was too limited, too narrowly conceived. Instead, ethics should permeate all aspects of education. It had to be seamlessly integrated with sciences, history, literature, and every other aspect of the day-to-day conduct of scholastic life. The need for this was urgent, he insisted.
Those conversations planted seeds that continued growing in my own mind. Several years later, I was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I had first served as Buddhist chaplain to the institute. In 2007, I began collaborating with professors there, exploring how experiential training in ethics might be integrated into their courses. The disastrous ethical failure that manifested as the financial crisis in 2008 made the need all the more apparent. Talking to friends from high school and college who were working on Wall Street and in other financial institutions, it was clear how that hothouse environment had not only allowed but encouraged the personal greed, short-term gamesmanship, and opportunism-run-amok that then managed to latch on to every available lever of systemic weakness, the more obscure and layered in complexity the better. The players were disproportionately Ivy League graduates, or otherwise alumni of the most elite educational system that money and smarts could gain entry to. What had gone wrong? What was missing in a supposedly excellent education that had left them so ethically ungrounded? The urgency was burning.
Conditions aligned. At MIT I was in a place that was unusually open to innovation, and where the student body was moving at high speed through a pipeline to positions of influence and power in fields that would define our future. I began to reach out to colleagues, to start conversations and gather resources. What would it take to get ethics into the curriculum at the business school—not just as an abstract concept but an experiential training? How could ethics be integrated as part of best practices in engineering and in all of the disciplines where MIT so famously excelled?
Those questions, and their refinement into ever more precisely targeted questions, would evolve into the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. I’m proud that Samdhong Rinpoche supported it eagerly, and I’m grateful to him for planting seeds of inspiration.
Back in Sarnath, it was inevitable that our conversations turned to what it meant to be a teacher and a student together on the spiritual path. After all, there we were, like a couple of elephants in the room discussing education in broad strokes, when the most vital learning I could imagine was happening in the present moment of our exchange.
Recently, during a Q and A session after a public talk in the United States, an audience member asked Samdhong Rinpoche what it feels like to be friends with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The question might seem trivial, but his answer, given with the careful precision that marks his every word, shone a light on the multifaceted gem that we call kalyanamitra—“the virtuous friend.”
I was struck, first, by how very different his response was from what I’ve heard when Westerners who have a genuine personal relationship with His Holiness are asked that same question. They answer, however respectfully, by centering their own experience, the ego glowing in a borrowed light. After all, wasn’t that the question—what does it feel like?
Rinpoche-ji didn’t go there. Instead he began by noting certain aspects of their relationship that are formally defined by tradition. The Dalai Lama was his teacher, who had ordained him as a monk and conferred on him the ritual initiations that empower a student to engage in certain practices. These roles carry a weight of commitment that stretches beyond this lifetime. They preclude the equality that friends normally would expect of each other. At the same time, this particular teacher and student have also had a long collegial relationship, working together for half a century as leaders of the Tibetan diaspora and its government-in-exile. In that context, yes, he would call His Holiness a friend in the sense that we usually understand that word. He describes His Holiness with obvious delight, as easy to work with, open-minded, and flexible, and democratic in his respect for others’ ideas and opinions.
But the crux of their personal history is the special notion of spiritual friendship that is embedded in the teacher-student relationship he described first. The Sanskrit kalyanamitra translates as “beautiful, blessed, or virtuous friend.” It’s the friend whose influence moves you to be a better person, the friend who helps to create the conditions that enable you to mature spiritually. Sometimes that’s a straightforward proposition: A teacher embodies the qualities you aspire to and shines a light on the Dharma in ways that increase your understanding and help to integrate that understanding into your life. Sometimes it’s less obvious. A teacher may see your potential in ways that you can’t see yourself, may recognize conditions that are ripe for a change and strike a note that you didn’t realize you were ready to hear.
It’s not an exclusive relationship. Rinpoche-ji would have called Krishnamurti a kalyanamitra, as well as the Dalai Lama, and no doubt others too. His Holiness once said that at least sixteen different individuals fit in this category in his life. Thousands of his own students see him in that role. But the profoundly reverent way that Rinpoche-ji describes His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a kalyanamitra—that’s how I like to think of my own relationship with the Venerable Samdhong Rinpoche.
The special quality that sets this friendship apart from what we normally understand as friendship is that it is not driven by emotional needs—“pure” is how it’s traditionally described. Companionship, the security of belonging and connection, the validation of feeling seen and heard—all the normal expectations of friendship are irrelevant, and quite likely unmet insofar as those expectations are masks for attraction and clinging. Physical proximity might be part of how the relationship grows, but it’s not necessarily so. The relationship doesn’t fade with time and distance; it’s not threatened by the things that challenge a conventional friendship. You don’t feel impelled to call your teacher up and say, “Hey, it’s been a while, I miss you. Do you want to get dinner?” It’s not about face time and it’s not dose dependent. A kalyanamitra isn’t the kind of friend who’s there for you when you’re feeling down. There’s no need for physical presence; the mere thought of that friendship is sufficient to lift you up.
Whatever the circumstances, respect never falters. A teacher may be playful with a student, may engage with humor and wit, but that doesn’t mean you are buddies. There may well be times when you share your most personal concerns, but acting as your therapist is not part of a teacher’s job description. There are examples of such relationships that have matured with age into an intimate melding of minds, where a student can complete a teacher’s sentences, but even so, each one knows their place.
Respect doesn’t mean that emotion is absent from the relationship. A kalyanamitra sparks love, gratitude, and devotion, but then steps out of the crosshairs. The emotion is not personal. It might look like devotion to an individual on the surface, but at the heart of the experience it’s devotion to truth and love for the goals you share: enlightenment and alleviating suffering. It’s gratitude for the guidance, inspiration, and encouragement. It’s awe and gratitude for connecting with this extraordinary treasure that has been alive for millennia, with precious opportunities to engage and learn passed on in just this way from teacher to student. It’s love untainted by attachment or grasping, which means that it comes with at least an inkling of how this love is “empty,” as Nagarjuna would say. It’s real progress on the path.
The term kalyanamitra can also refer to a relationship with a peer as well as to a teacher. The “virtuous friend” is then a comrade on the path whose influence nudges you toward spiritual growth. You are companions in satsang—a fellowship seeking truth. Truth, however, is a slippery fish. In the Buddha’s most basic formulation of ethics—those first five vows—the vow to abstain from “wrong speech” is understood to include not just lying but also factual statements that are motivated by self-interest, as well as the idle gossip and flattery that sometimes motivate a facsimile of friendship. Our task is to learn how to engage with others without adding to the casually harmful noise of wrong speech, let alone any more malicious subversion of truth.
Sometimes the truth that is the most immediately relevant and powerful prod to growth is a truth about ourselves that’s hard to stomach. The way that social media has re-engineered our opportunities for emotional connection, confining us within bubbles of common interest and putting tribalism on steroids, has made it more difficult than ever to hear hard truths. Anyone who doesn’t share the opinions that define our self-image is sooner or later dismissed as a bearer of fake news and unfriended. Our flaws remain invisible in our own eyes until a trusted friend holds up a mirror and reveals our blind spots. But the hand that reaches out to a friend who is caught in destructive habits needs a skillfully delicate touch, free of self-righteousness and moral superiority. If it burns like a slap it provokes resistance that only creates further harm. This truth-telling is a two-way conversation, a willingness to receive as well as give criticism. A friendship of this nature that supports mutual growth is a fabric woven from interlocking patterns of caring and patience, because growth is often a very slow process.
That virtuous friend whose influence nudges you toward your better self may well be someone who is part of your life in an entirely secular context. The labels are not essential. I wonder sometimes at the strangeness of this world where we have learned to compartmentalize so many different shades of relationship—spiritual, professional, casual, buddies, with or without benefits, and who knows what else; where we have designed all sorts of technologies to feed our needs as social creatures; and yet we still hunger for deeper connection amidst the noise, and need to pay a therapist to fulfill the function that friendship has filled in older cultures.
The teacher-student relationship in Buddhism is not unique, except perhaps in the understanding of emptiness that throws the distinction between the role and the individual into high relief. Devotion to one’s teacher is deeply embedded in many traditional cultures, not only in a religious context, but also in music and the arts—in any sphere where learning needs a long commitment of time and practice, and where the teacher serves as a model, embodying what the student aspires to.
The forms and customs that express devotion, respect, and care in these traditions have evolved over millennia. Their complex, richly layered qualities are easily lost when the tradition is transplanted to the West. If a student parrots gestures and words of respect without sensing the deep structure they arose from originally, it’s like pulling on an ill-fitting coat. It’s tight in all the wrong places, and the fabric itches terribly. Discipline becomes a straitjacket that sparks rebellion. Resistance festers, and sooner or later the student walks away. We’ve seen how detrimental that has been to Western Buddhism. The remedy of an opposite extreme drops all protocol that seems foreign, but in the process abandons the respect and reverence that set spiritual friendship apart from emotional needs. The asymmetry (that smacks of patriarchy and rankles the Western mind) reminds us that this is not about the individual so much as it is about the larger role that the teacher embodies.
The essential piece that gets lost in translation is the experience felt in older cultures as an aesthetics of reverence. If the ideal of kalyanamitra is to survive and be carried forward successfully in the modern world, it will not happen by diluting and debasing the original. Instead we will have to create new forms to express reverence, love, and gratitude in ways that are true to the new culture’s own aesthetic. We will have to explore and understand the deep structure of spiritual friendship rather than borrowing a script to address a guru in ways that feel alien. We will need to unlearn the binary thinking that insists a teacher who is not authoritarian must obviously be a buddy. The friendship that’s called beautiful, blessed, and virtuous lives in a much more interesting landscape than either of those simplistic poles.
At one point Ananda, the Buddha’s cousin and attendant, offered an exuberant appreciation of this excellent friendship, “This is half of the holy life, lord: good friendship, good companionship, good camaraderie.” The Buddha corrected him, “Not so, Ananda, don’t say that. Good friendship, good companionship, good camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life.” The only thing that a teacher seeks in this friendship is the student’s growth and liberation through their practice. There is no other motivation.