Why You Need a Teacher

I have to be careful how I write this, because the sentence you need a teacher is the sentence a certain kind of religious website uses to sell a specific teacher.

Not what I am doing. I got the answer wrong for several years and would like to save another practitioner some time.

What the apps do

The best of the modern meditation apps do useful work. They teach the posture. They walk a beginner through the sensation of a wandering mind. They lower the threshold for someone who has never sat quietly in their life. Friends of mine sit ten minutes a day because an app told them to and are, measurably, less anxious for it. I am not the person who calls this worthless.

For a certain slice of what practice is, an app is fine.

What the apps cannot do

There is a specific piece of Buddhist practice that does not transmit through media. In every tradition — Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana — a formal transmission passes from one qualified teacher to a student in a specific meeting, on the basis of a specific relationship. The relationship is not decoration. It is the mechanism.

I mean this technically, not devotionally. The teacher is the one who can see what the student cannot see about their own practice. Most of what a serious teacher does in the first years of the relationship is corrections. The student calms the mind and thinks calm is realisation. The student reads The Words of My Perfect Teacher and thinks reading is practice. The student sits every morning and thinks the sitting is what the tradition is asking for, when in fact the tradition is asking for something the student has not yet noticed.

An app will not catch any of these drifts. A book will not. A video, however good, will not. The corrections come from a specific human being who has seen the same drifts in themselves and knows what to look for. This is not mysticism. It is how any long apprenticeship works — carpentry, medicine, seamanship. Nobody learns to run a fifty-metre boat from a book. Nobody learns to run their own mind that way either.

Lineage is a chain of specific meetings

Lineage in Buddhism is not a family tree. It is a chain of these transmissions. Each holder received something specific from the previous holder, verified it in their own practice, and passed it on to specific students under specific conditions.

Nyoshul Khenpo’s A Marvelous Garland of Rare Gems is the book that made the concept concrete for me. Biographies of the masters of the Dzogchen lineage — read for who taught whom, under what conditions, and what specifically was transmitted. The masters are not the point. The relationships are. That is what lineage is. Not a genealogy. A chain of meetings.

The practical answer

Use the app if it helps you sit down. Do not confuse sitting down with being on the path.

If the tradition draws you, find a living teacher of a recognisable lineage — Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, whichever school has qualified teachers within your reach — and watch them for a long time before you commit. Read what their students at ten years in are becoming. Read what the teacher has written. Ask yourself whether the people around them are the sort of person you would want to become. If yes, and if you can, ask.

There is no organisation to hand you a teacher. The tradition is old enough and international enough that a teacher can usually be found by anyone patient enough about it. My own search took time. Books first, then teachers I sat with once and did not return to, then teachers I sat with several times and did not return to, then, in September 2011 in Nepal, the person I did not leave. That is how it happens. Not glamorous. Slow.

Everything on this site is a signpost. Signposts are the beginning.

— Оргьен Йентен Дордже