Teachers, Groups and the Company You Keep

Begin with a group, and let the teacher come later. Find a community that sits together regularly and go back often enough to know the people. A teacher may come into view through it, or the group may turn out to be enough. Over the months, judge both by one measure: whether you leave more able to see and decide for yourself.

That order reverses the old picture, where a seeker sets out to find a master and the community comes afterwards. Circumstances changed. The teachings used to be scarce enough that people went on foot to find someone who held them. Now they sit in books and recordings, as Sister Chan Duc of Plum Village points out in her advice on finding a teacher. What stays scarce is company: people with the same aim who sit near you week after week and, without meaning to, show you to yourself. Buddhism’s name for this is sangha, a Sanskrit word for an assembly or community, and one of its oldest senses is company. Its history runs back to the order of monks and nuns the Buddha founded in the fifth century BCE.

What a teacher does that a book can’t

A book can’t watch you sit. Robert Aitken, the Zen teacher who led the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii and was called the dean of American Zen, described the job as holding up a mirror, telling a student what they are doing and saying, and now and then telling them it can’t be right. He argued that the deepest inquiry is where self-deception gets in most easily, so it needs a person you trust enough to accept a point provisionally and let it sink in before you see it for yourself.

A book can't watch you sit.

Guru carries the same sense of weight. The Sanskrit word is related to the Latin gravis, heavy, and the Buddhist scholar and translator Alexander Berzin reads it as a person laden with good qualities. Many people who teach meditation are not that, and don’t claim to be. In his practical advice on spiritual teachers, Berzin separates the scholar who explains the teachings from a distance, the instructor who teaches from personal experience, the trainer in the mechanics of meditation or ritual, and the mentor who guides a disciple toward liberation and confers vows. Only the last is the relationship the classical texts on guru devotion describe, and a newcomer at a centre, he says, is not a disciple in that sense. Even there, the instruction to see one’s mentor as a Buddha was never meant literally. Its point was to recognise the capacity for awakening in the teacher and be inspired to find it in yourself.

Blurring those levels caused a lot of trouble in the West. Berzin traces how Tibetan teachers began founding centres for lay people in Western countries from the mid-1970s, something Buddhism had never seen before. Some were junior teachers who would have gone unnoticed at home and now held authority with no peers or checks around them. A few behaved like lords of a small spiritual estate, and some Western students copied the devotion they had seen offered to the highest masters in India and Nepal. He warns against two opposite mistakes: lifting a teacher so high that abuse gets excused, and growing so suspicious that the good of a healthy relationship is lost.

Whether you need a teacher at all is a separate question. You don’t need one to start; a teacher matters more as practice deepens, and some paths only open through one.

Why look for the group first

Sister Chan Duc’s advice is to find a sangha first and meet your teacher through it, adding that the sangha may turn out to be teacher enough. She learned to lean on the community in 1997, when Thich Nhat Hanh sent her from Plum Village to a new practice centre in Vermont. A teacher without a sangha, in her view, is hampered, and she notes that Thich Nhat Hanh, who created mindful communities around the world, took refuge in his own and usually accepted its decisions.

Her picture for why is her mother’s potato cleaner. The potatoes go into a tub, the lid goes on, someone turns the handle, and the potatoes knock about and rub each other’s mud away. People who share an intention but come from different lives do the same to one another in a community, and the knocking brings out talents to grow and weaknesses to work on. She doesn’t expect roses. There may be some nettles.

A group is also where a teacher can be seen clearly. The writer of What I Wish I’d Known When I Met My First Spiritual Teacher, who first met Dainin Katagiri at the Minnesota Zen Center forty-five years ago, offers a rule of thumb: a community’s emotional and spiritual health tends to mirror its teacher’s. A sane and loving teacher mostly has sane and loving students, though not necessarily wise ones. A community gathered round a narcissist feels like a fan club.

The group needn’t be in your town. Plum Village keeps a global directory of sanghas and points people to online groups, and Lama Shenpen Hookam’s community sings a dharma song together each day, some of them in the room and some online. Whether a screen gives you the same knocking about as a shared floor is an open question.

How to look

1. Pick one group that meets on a regular schedule and go back several times before you form a view. Notice the room as much as the talk: the quiet that settles when the sitting begins, and how people greet whoever is new.
2. Watch the long-time students more than the teacher. A good teacher, in the Lion’s Roar writer’s words, helps you become “more of who you are”. If senior students talk and dress like their teacher, take note, because copying a teacher’s habits passes on none of their wisdom.
3. Bring a question of your own and press gently on the answer. Someone worth trusting expects to be tested and says “I don’t know” when they don’t. Notice too whether they answer what you asked or steer back to their own subject.
4. Ask how money works. Fees are fine when they are reasonable and open, since teachers have to eat too. A teacher whose wealth comes from the students is the sign the same writer says to run from.
5. Find out who teaches the teacher. A good teacher keeps practising and often has a teacher of their own, which is a mark of humility. See whether they admit mistakes in public and make amends.
6. Ignore fame. How many books a teacher has published and how many students they have tell you little, and charismatic frauds often draw the biggest followings.
7. Let it stay ordinary. Hun Lye, writing in Lion’s Roar about his two teachers, says both came into his life with no special dreams or signs, and the relationships grew slowly and quietly over years. Had anything else turned up, he writes, “I probably would have run away.”

Fit matters as well. Some people do better when gently coaxed and others when challenged hard; some want a teacher who speaks to the heart and others one who starts with the intellect. The teacher who suits you may not suit your partner or your closest friend.

The test that matters most

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk and long-time student of Zen, spent five days with Aitken in 1991 talking through authority and exploitation, and his test is easy to carry. Authority in its first sense, he said, is a reliable basis for knowing and acting, the way an Aunt Emily who always knows a remedy is the person you visit with a cold. Trouble starts when someone stops providing that basis and keeps the power. To tell the two apart, watch what the person does to you. The authoritarian holds a superior position by putting everyone else down. Legitimate authority builds you up and widens what you can know and do.

A teacher's authority

builds you upputs you down

From that he drew a duty: to question authority, respectfully and honestly. The Buddha gave similar counsel in the Kalama Sutta, as Brother Phap Bieu of Plum Village retells it. Asked how to tell true teachers from charlatans, he told people to trust those whose teaching works when they put it into practice. A good teacher, the Lion’s Roar writer adds, refuses to make the decisions that belong to you and hands them back.

Mushim Ikeda’s story shows both sides. In 1985 her first teacher, the Korean Zen monk Samu Sunim, called her to a candlelit attic in his Michigan temple and asked her to swear lifetime loyalty to him, naming two senior students who already had. She had no savings and no safety net outside his organisation. She told him she loved and respected him and could not make that promise. In 2022, about to turn seventy, she asked Lama Justin von Bujdoss to teach her and told him she was nervous about the Tibetan idea of the guru. His answer, as she remembers its gist, was “We don’t have to do that here.”

Signs to walk away

In that 1991 conversation Aitken said that over the previous eight years hardly any Buddhist centre in the United States had been free of scandal, and his own Diamond Sangha took in people who had been hurt by other teachers. He described the sangha as a family in which the teacher holds a parent’s place, so a teacher seducing a student is a kind of incest. The psychotherapist Diane Shainberg, asked about sexual relationships between teachers and students, said she had never seen one she would remotely call a benefit.

• An oath of loyalty or obedience. Ikeda met it twice: Samu Sunim’s request, and in 1988 a senior nun in Korea telling the newly ordained Ikeda that obedience was the first rule and that she must never complain, even if struck.
• A hand in your private life. If a teacher chooses a spouse or a career for you, or tries to run any large part of your life, the Lion’s Roar writer’s advice is to back away, because you may be dealing with someone dangerous.
• Money flowing one way. Reasonable, open fees are fine. A teacher living well off the students is a red flag.
• A platoon instead of a practice. Students who echo the teacher, and a mood closer to a pep rally or a cult than to a room of people sitting.
• A teacher who can’t be questioned. If a question is treated as disloyalty, the group has lost what Steindl-Rast says keeps authority honest.

If a teacher or group has harmed you, speak to someone outside it, and to a therapist or counsellor if it keeps weighing on you.

How a good community goes stale

Choosing well once doesn’t settle it. Brother Phap Bieu writes that while Thich Nhat Hanh was active he provoked and challenged his monastics, and that since he stopped pushing their buttons it has grown easier for the community to settle into fixed views. He hears it in a habit of speech. Starting a sentence with “Thầy said” often means the speaker already has the final answer and wants no dialogue. Conversation freezes, social pressure and mutual judgement grow, and practice turns from a pleasure into a duty.

the challenge stopsviews hardentalk freezespractice becomes duty

He thinks one generation can be enough to turn a lively community into a religious organisation, and points to the Council of the Five Hundred after the Buddha’s death, where a conservative faction declined to revise the monastic precepts as the Buddha had wished. He doesn’t exempt his own tradition: nothing assures, he writes, that Plum Village won’t be as dogmatic as any other in twenty or thirty years. For a newcomer this becomes a good question to ask of any group, old or new: who here is still free to disagree?

What the research says, and where it stops

The science on meditation tells you that a programme can help, and almost nothing about whom to learn from. Goyal and colleagues (2014) pooled 47 randomised trials with 3,515 participants and found moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation programmes eased anxiety, depression and pain, with small to moderate effects, and no evidence that they beat active treatments such as drugs or exercise.

On community, the cited evidence is broader still. Koenig (2012) reviewed quantitative studies of religion, spirituality and health published between 1872 and 2010, and sets out how that involvement might influence mental and physical health. Edwards and colleagues (2016) count social support among the psychosocial factors that shape how chronic pain develops and persists, a reminder from a distant field that the people around you bear on your health.

No study cited on this page compares one teacher with another, and none measures what a sangha adds to practice. The advice above comes from inside the traditions, from people who have spent decades on both sides of the relationship. It has been tested by long use and never by a trial, and is best held that way.

How much power to give

A teacher has only as much power as the students give, the Lion’s Roar writer reminds readers, and anyone can stop listening or walk away. The work is to give the right amount, enough to be influenced, perhaps deeply, and never so much that you are made smaller. Over thirty years back, at their first meeting, Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen Rinpoche told Hun Lye he had no students or disciples, only dharma friends and members of the centre. Now that others treat Lye as a teacher, he keeps Khenchen Rinpoche in mind as a heavy rock hanging over his head on a string, and the more people look to him, the more he needs the weight.