Investigate the teacher as well?

A combination of lack of internet access (Nepali loadshedding FTW!), pretending to study and general cynicism mean it's pretty rare for me to ever see anything online that makes an impact or impress me. This week was an excpetion however, and of all places it came from Facebook.

In a Facebook status update, already commented on here Kalu Rinpoche, a yangsi (an incarnation), of one of the most important Lamas of the last century, basically challenged the importance and relevance of titles. With the arrival in Kathmandu of an infamous fake self-decalred yangsi this week, I don't really want to make this into another one of my ill-informed rants about the tulku system, but rather against titles in a Dharma context in general.

People have since forever been using titles, this isn't going to change, not even an online petition has the power to stop this. This is actually something that happened a few years back btw.

It's not really the titles themselves which are problematic, but rather the ammount of gravitas that people put into them. As such there would be no issue of fake Lamas if people were a bit more reserved in the ammount of faith and trust they put into someone just because he or she has a title that sounds impressive. By titles here, I even include things like being "a student of such and such", not just titles like Lama, Rinpoche, Tulku, Khenpo etc.

This excessive ammount of faith in a titles is probably rooted in most of us not really investigating teachers properly. This was, and to some extent is, an issue in the Tibetan community as most people would simply deferr their spiritual careers to whomever was the family or geographically local Lama. This is something I've seen regularly in my own home.

In the West it seems more of an emotive issue, whichever Lama gives off "good vibes" or in some cases, makes our ego feels good, is quickly elevated to the role of Root Guru. There are huge issues with most uses of this term, but I won't go into it here.

The Buddha encouraged us to investigate his teachings "like gold" and Padmasambhava encouraged us to pay attention to karma "like dust". Both these imply not rushing headlong into something, or someone, just because it seems nice and convenient. This is applicable to all sorts of things from what toilet paper we buy, right up to receiving empowerments, however if we are going to be, in my case pretending, practicing in the Vajrayana, then the teacher is the foundation of this and as such must be genuine. Genuine doesn't mean famous, telling us what we want to hear or any number of other superficial traps.

The qualities and qualifications of a genuine teacher are found in numerous traditional texts and commentaries, and thus are easily available. Similarly the "hardships" undertaken to find a genuine teacher, and then developing a working relationship with him or her, are pretty limited compared with what most of the world goes through daily simiply to survive.