I found this information while browsing the internet looking for people to interview for my BlogTalk Radio Show.  Finding interesting and appropriate guests is turning out to be the hardest part of doing the radio show! (I had no idea the rest of it would be so easy, or come so naturally.)

Here are some interesting things I found:

QUALIFICATIONS FOR A SPIRITUAL TEACHER

      1.      Proper ethical behavior - a teacher should not harm others but try to help
2.  Single pointed concentration
3.  No self-grasping or egoistic thoughts
4.  Having love and compassion as main motivations to teach
5.  Realized emptiness, at least have a proper intellectual understanding
6.  Perseverance in teaching
7.  Wealth of knowledge
8.  More learned and self-realized than student
9.  Skilled speaker
10. Given up disappointment in the performance of the students

(The student should find a teacher with at least the first five qualities; these may be hard enough to find.)

(Rare is the teacher who has totally mastered all ten of these, but the closer one comes, the better. )

 

 

QUALIFICATIONS FOR A SPIRITUAL STUDENT

Just like a teacher requires certain qualifications, so should a proper student fulfill some criteria.
A student should consider him/herself as a patient, the teacher as a doctor, the Dharma as medicine and should take the medicine by practicing. Like His Holiness the Dalai Lama says: "There is no substitute for hard work"

A proper student should avoid the so-called 3 faulty attitudes:

- being like an upside down vessel: refusing to learn and skepticism
- being like a leaking vessel: forgetting everything and showing no interest
- being like a polluted vessel: being very prejudiced and believing to know everything better than the teacher

A proper student should fulfill the 3 requisites:

- lack of prejudice, being open-minded
- intelligence and a critical mind: not blindly following orders
- aspiration: wanting to practice and experience results (not just scholarly study)

(This part about faulty attitudes really hit the nail on the head...and explained why occasionally I have  released certain people as students. )

And here is something else I found, which is really interesting.  It focuses on Buddhism, but the concept can be applied to all aspects of spiritual student/teacher relationships. This teacher violates rule #1 above.  I found it here:

http://www.wisdom-books.com/FocusDetail.asp?FocusRef=29

Spiritual Pathology


Individually we have personal responsibility for our spiritual distortions and self-deceptions and must at some point address the consequences of our actions. An example of an individual's capacity to turn pathology into a religion was extremely painful for me when I was younger. I was in a relationship with a woman who made friends with a man who was an experienced practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. He was very charismatic and lived with his wife and two children, having turned his home into a kind of Buddhist centre. He was an enthusiastic follower of the Indian saint Padmasambava, who brought the Dharma to Tibet and who had two consorts one called Mandarava and the other Yeshe Tsogyal. My partner went to study with this man who had offered to be her teacher. She was very attracted to his rather theatrical charisma and gladly took up his offer. She went to stay with him and over a period of time started to learn more of his practice.

It was on her return from one of her visits to him that I learned that part of the nature of her stay with him was that she would also be his lover. He had convinced his wife that this was important because the relationship he had with my girl friend was so special it was a deeply spiritual experience. Although it was painful for his wife, she agreed that part of the time he would sleep with my partner and part with her. When I began to ask my girl friend what was going on she told me that I should accept it as part of her practice in the same way that Padmasambava had two consorts. They both tried to tell me that I could never understand the spiritual heights to which they would go in their sexual relationship and that it was so pure there could not be any fault in it. My problems, they insisted, were because I was so attached and that I should really let her go to this higher love. I was told that she saw him as her guru and as such she must be with him, irrespective of the pain it caused his wife or myself, after all pain comes through attachment.

At some later point the man, who was increasingly presenting himself as a so-called Lama, wearing exotic robes and the regalia of a yogi, came to visit us. I was shocked and hurt one day when he came to me and said that he was going to sleep with my girlfriend and that I should allow it as it was good for my practice of generosity. If I should object it would show that my practice of Bodhicitta, the aspiration to always work for the welfare of others, was hopeless. I was sufficiently young, naive and feeble to take all this seriously and found I had no grounds to question the validity of what he was saying. Whatever pain I was in was entirely because of my attachment. He tried to convince me it was best for my practice and that his love of my partner was so pure and what they were doing was right.

I tell this story because it is typical of the kind of delusion we can conjure around our self-beliefs sufficient to create the conviction that we are entirely right in what we are doing. The grandiosity, for example, of this man made him utterly blind to the delusion he was caught in and the consequence of his actions. I was somewhat intrigued several years later when the same man came to me devastated because the woman had left him for another man. He wanted someone to talk to in his distress, and was surprisingly apologetic for the way he had treated me. I did not find it easy to contain my sense of vindication.