Jan, I hear what you are saying about retreats. It always seemed very strange to me that dharma teachers often seem to ignore the fact that people have been on retreat in their dharma talks. Why don't they talk about the kinds of problems that might be showing up on day 1, ay 2, day 3? That would be much more helpful than generic stuff... an especially not the social/political stuff. Ugh!


Anyway,I though this might be useful as someone who trained with a few pragmatic teachers... For what it's worth, it is very very rare for a teacher to go into the nuances of technique, even pragmatic dharma teachers, because in theory, the techniques of meditation are very simple: pay attention, fully experience, notice where there is resistance, notice what the resistance feels like, and fully experience that resistance. And also because the whole point of meditation is to have a bunch of problems and then investigate the nature of those problems. 

Typically when you work with a pragmatic teacher (I'm not going to recommend any particular teachers, but everyone I've worked with is well-known and can be found with basic pragmatic dharma, personalized meditation googling), you schedule "check-ins" every week or two ot three (the better meditator you are, the longer between check-ins). During the week, let's say, you practice daily and do the best you can. Then when you meet, you describe how the week went and any particular problem you might be having. A lot of the time the teacher will say  "that sounds like good practice" and remind you about basic meditation instructions. Many times problems come from forgetting to do the basic instructions in the heat of a "bad" meditation. Sometimes they give encouragement, but they can also be kind of cold..

But then the most important thing happens after you have had a problem for a while yet continue to practice... only then will the teacher point out something very sublte, some kind of habit or resistance you have but never noticed, and here's the important thing: you needed to have the problem for a while for it to become noticable.

So my experience is that working with a good teacher is very much like an traditional apprenticeship -- you don't get a lot of hand-holding but you do get good advice when it's appropriate. But a lot of the time, it's you trying to figure it out on your own --- which actually trains you to be independent and own your practice. A teacher that tries to be helpful all the time creates a horrible dependency in their students, which is just about the worst possible thing for a meditator..

Meditation practice is like shooting free-throws -- it involves a lot of very simple actions, it's very clear when things are going through the hoop or not, and when they are not, you need to do more free-throws and "feel" your way to a better shot. No teacher can give you the feel.  But every so often, a teacher/coach will mention something simple "you need to soften your hand" or "don't tense your forehead" and it's only because you have done so many free-throws that those simple suggestions actually make a difference. 

To me there are a few real benefits in working with a teacher:

* owning your practice - you have to contact them, work with them, and decide if it is worth it. You have to take the steps to research, choose, work with a teacher for a while, and decide if it is worth it. You might have to say "nope, this isn't working for me. I have to end working with this guy". or "dang, she is really good. I can tell. I just need to trust this gal for three months try to practice exactly as she says". You cant turn off your critical thinking . It keeps you in the role of being responsible for yourself. 

* understanding "good fit" - the teacher will also decide if they think they can work with you. They know that a mis-match in interests and approach will simply waste both people's time.  You can learn a lot by being interviewed and rejected by a teacher. This often happens.

* accountablity.- it sucks to have a skype call and say you blew off practice for a few days in the previous week. For most people, this makes you practice more consistently.

* they help you adjust your practice or use a new practice that fits your interests, goals, and the types of problem you have. The worst teachers will force you to do their technique and assume any problem you have is because you are a bad student. The best teachers have a variety to suggest and if there isn't a good match, they may say "it's not worth it for you to train with me anymore. but you might want to check out..." -- they recognize there are thousands of ways to approach meditation.

* they normalize the difficult and wierd stuff that happens during meditation practice and during life as a meditator ("yeah, I had that problem for six months, it passed." "yeah, having images of eyes looking at you when you close your own eyes is strange," "yeah, it can be really blissful sometimes", etc.) 

* and lastly, they force you to work on your own problems -- the sign of a good teacher is they keep you struggling but interested. A bad teacher will spoon feed you intellectual answers or give you too many practice instructions. All of us have to (productively) struggle through meditation, the struggle is where we learn about how we create our own suffering. If a student isn't willing to struggle a little, traditional meditation probably isn't the best practice for them.

No matter what, meditation is going to be a struggle. A teacher can never take that away (and shouldn't). But it should be a productive struggle.


Hope this helps in some way..

Hi Jan,

I am nothing if not a nitpicky twat. I am not sure if you will take my pointing out the contradictions in what you are looking for as a service or a distraction, but here goes.



Not sure that that is how Daniel uses the word "hardcore", or whether it is a good definition to begin with, but if that is how you define the word, I will play along for the discussion at hand.

The problem with this definition is that different people have very different ideas about what Gautama originally taught. Scholars agree that the majority of the Pali Canon was written by other people than Gautama, and tend to disagree on what exactly in the Pali Canon is originally his teaching. So there is no way of knowing what the core teachings of the Buddha actually were... although Daniel's interpretation is extremely useful in practice, much of what he talks about is not in the Pali Canon. (And, again, much of what is in the Pali Canon is not Gautama's original teachings anyway.)

There is also obviously a contradiction between the fact that you say that you want something that is "the core teachings of the Buddha", and the passage that you quoted from MCTB, which says "purely secular, utterly devoid of any explicit reference to any ancient frameworks, totally scrubbed of anything religious, and free of any term that is in any way alien to the predominant linguistic sensibilities in the area of the world where I reside".




So, TMI. That distinction between attention and peripheral awareness, and the emphasis on that, is a (very interesting and useful) innovation by Culadasa. It is not in the Pali Canon. It is not a bad thing (just like it is not a bad thing that MCTB is probably not actually the original teachings of the Buddha).

Also, you are probably aware of the very deep disagreements between Daniel and Culadasa on the ñanas and what the Buddha originally taught.

So I guess that the TL;DR is that if you want to practice the Buddha's Original Teachings™, you will need to become a scholar of Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Buddhist philology, read the old texts, and come to your own conclusions about what those were, which will most likely be "we don't know". It sounds like a big detour to me.