Lineage is not a finished product

These days, within the Kagyu tradition in particular, we seem to suffer from an overly Mahayana perspective—we must spend a long period of time practicing before we become realized. Very infrequently, we are told (or shown) that liberation can come in this moment, on this very seat, in this very session—despite the many supplication prayers we perform that make us yearn for such experiences. A practitioner may be given a practice and generally told that it will take an incalculable (or at least unknowable) amount of time before enlightenment occurs. We venerate past masters who were exemplary and are also taught that we are nothing in comparison to them—we are mere shadows of such people. But is this really so? Why are we not taught to take greater responsibility for our realization? Why are we not taught to be creative in our practice, to take our seats and settle into our own pastoral authority? In fact, more often than not, we are presented with a specific lineage that is more like a line we shouldn’t deviate from; yet when we look, we find that most of the great masters struggled to challenge and confront such preconceived ways of being. Every lineage has masters who did whatever they needed to do to effect realization—if it meant breaking the rules, they did so. Lineage is not a finished project, but a process that can be messy, and not without its problems, accidents, and mistakes.

Justin von Bujdoss. Modern Tantric Buddhism: Embodiment and Authenticity in Dharma Practice (pp. 42-43).

I’ve been really enjoying Ken McLeod’s classes on the Diamond Sutra. Last week in discussing a wonderful story of Mullah Nasreddin, McLeod offhandedly made a comment about the arc of religious institutions. He said (paraphrasing) that religious institutions start organized around a kernel of true realization, but that over time the social function of institutions take over and these organizations lose their spiritual potency. David Chapman has made similar-ish arguments in his essay about how subcultures die more broadly. As practitioners looking for the real deal this presents a challenge for us — it’s a bit like the old joke about the club that nobody goes to, because it’s too crowded. It’s like we are looking for some kind of spiritual arbitrage - find the opportunity before it gets swallowed by the market. The above quote from Justin von Bujdoss (a Vajrayana teacher based out of NYC) from his thought-provoking book illustrates both the dangers of ossifying lineages as well as the antidote - that we must take responsibility for our own realization and embrace the idea that we can awaken in one lifetime.

There’s another aspect of this too I’ve been thinking a lot about recently — from the perspective of would-be institution builders or preservers. I see a lot of discussion online around this question of “how to scale awakening”, and how to build sanghas and bigger lasting organizations (companies?!?) that enable transformation. What are the organization builders meant to take away from all of this? Perhaps one obvious one is that, if the goal is awakening, that small groups and individual teachers are most effective. Moreover, if the goal is to scale, perhaps a federation of smaller groups is going to work better than a large umbrella organization. Though even with such a federation there is a danger in creating gatekeepers and credentialing mechanisms that become politicized and drift toward being poor signals of value. It’s also almost a certainty that all groups will stagnate over time¹ - we have to be open to leaving groups and forming new groups as necessary, despite the pain involved. Maybe when a teacher dies we should shut down their sangha. We will have to dance with the lineages and not simply be led by them. When I think about how we will scale awakening, it’s like this — more and more small groups , more and more awakened beings reaching out to others heart to heart. Over a large enough timeframe that will scale.

This has a further implications, though, for spiritual seekers. If the best groups are small and actively eschew scale, finding them is going to be difficult. If there’s no certification or obvious signal that will tell you whether a group is good, then we are in danger of falling prey to bad teachers, and we have to be careful and use discernment our evaluation of them. The alternative to risk-taking is being stuck, like that old line from Bill Hamilton about people teaching mushroom dharma - “keep them in the dark and feed them shit”.

However, I want to end on a more positive note regarding where we can take advantage of scale. We live in a time where most teachings and individual teachers are widely accessible through the Internet. For every bullshit spiritual coach and fraudulent teacher out there, you can easily find dozens of real ones. There are so many amazing resources out there; we truly are living in a golden age of dharma, which is the other side of the coin of living in the age of Kaliyuga, this charnel ground of a civilization. If you aim for liberation with all your heart-mind, you will succeed! When I think about the bodhisattva vow — that beings are numberless and I vow to liberate them all — I am heartened by what I perceive is a growing tide of yearning for liberation and of individuals that can help. Like a pointillist painting, each of us little dots helps to bring the whole picture into focus.

1. Sticking this hot take in the footnotes, but it seems to me that most of the Buddhist institutions that came to the West in the wave of the 1970s have already stagnated. No need to name names; but let’s just say that if your retreats consist mostly in watching videos of long dead teachers, that’s probably not going to work.