How to View an Enlightened Teacher Correctly so You Can Ultimately Benefit
1. First of all, do not have overly high expectations of an enlightened teacher. In our minds, an enlightened teacher must be saintly, wise, and compassionate. Little do we know that most enlightened teachers have merely perfected their view, but are not yet completely free from habitual tendencies and desires. This requires a complete physiological transformation. However, their view is fully sufficient to guide you on the right path in your cultivation and realization, keeping you from going astray.
2. Not every enlightened teacher is intimately familiar with the spiritual capacities of all sentient beings to speak the Dharma exactly according to each person’s needs. Do not dismiss a teacher just because they cannot solve the specific problem you are facing right now; instead, look at whether their teachings can benefit the majority of people.
3. Do not expect an enlightened teacher to know everything. It is very rare for us to meet a master whose cultivation and realization are perfectly complete in both supramundane and mundane affairs. Some monastic masters are actually quite poor at handling worldly problems. Enlightened teachers also go through a process of becoming perfect, and they too need understanding and tolerance from others.
4. If you are able to meet a master who is perfectly complete in both supramundane and worldly affairs to guide your cultivation and realization, you are truly incredibly fortunate. Please cherish your karmic affinity and merit, and practice diligently. Do not use your eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind to judge and discriminate against the actions of an enlightened teacher.
5. If, during our cultivation, we can constantly reflect on ourselves and look for our own problems and flaws, then we will never lack good spiritual friends around us. Although everyone around you has habitual tendencies and desires, their corrections of you are exactly what you need to become complete from different angles. If your capacity of mind is large enough to accept all kinds of criticism, then all sentient beings can help you achieve realization. The only difference is that sentient beings use their habitual tendencies and attachments to do this, whereas an enlightened teacher uses wisdom.
6. Enlightened teachers are not all compassionate, nor do they all possess spiritual powers.
The true arising of compassion is very difficult. When a person’s mind is already dwelling stably in its original state, if compassion does not arise, they will absolutely not want to save sentient beings or engage in the work of propagating the Dharma. Sentient beings’ greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt are far too heavy, and they are far too attached. An incomplete enlightened teacher does not yet have an abundance of skillful means; the endless desires and harsh demands of sentient beings would end up sending every such teacher to the cross. The mind of the enlightened teacher has returned to the ordinary, understanding the true meaning of being ordinary. Their demands on this world are extremely low—one meal a day, a scoop of water, and a thatched hut are enough for them to settle down anywhere in the world. Quietly passing through their whole life; this is perhaps the lifestyle that best suits their own “habitual tendencies.”
Therefore, if an enlightened teacher is not yet fully complete, they cannot yet truly experience the state of unconditional compassion and the Great Compassion of oneness. They cannot yet take the suffering of sentient beings as their own suffering, or the joy of sentient beings as their own joy. This is why, in this world, you cannot see true Buddhas and Bodhisattvas purely based on outward forms. Because even a fully complete master must bear the karmic hindrances for sentient beings and must display the appearances of birth, aging, sickness, and death. After achieving perfect liberation, they will truly become a sentient being. When sentient beings suffer, they suffer. They no longer discriminate between being liberated and not liberated, and they are unwilling or find it unnecessary to transform afflictions into bodhi. They truly suffer, but the root of this suffering comes from sentient beings, not from their own desires. If you do not look at their view, their outward behavior looks more like that of an ordinary person. The only difference is that, whether experiencing pleasure or suffering, they are completely at peace and entirely free.
As for a truly complete enlightened teacher, their manifestations of compassion take many forms. Sentient beings cannot determine whether they are compassionate or not merely by looking at their behavior. Sometimes, their compassion looks like beating, scolding, or even killing; it can look like any form of greed, anger, delusion, pride, or doubt. For a perfect master, this is merely a form of expression, entirely unrelated to habitual tendencies. True compassion is the equality of nature and appearance that thoroughly penetrates cause and effect. Any action that aligns with the Dao is called compassion. It is not something we can understand from the perspective of ordinary human emotion.
Spiritual powers are merely a byproduct of the process of realizing the Buddha Dharma. A person with spiritual powers is not necessarily an enlightened teacher, but a master who has achieved realization in their practice will definitely possess them. Do not become infatuated with or pursue spiritual powers, and do not judge an enlightened teacher based on whether or not they have them. Seeing the path, realizing the path, and attaining the path are the three stages of cultivation and realization. After *seeing the path*, one’s view is truly perfected, and they can already be called an enlightened teacher. *Realizing the path* means the body and mind have truly realized that emptiness; it is during this process that spiritual powers will appear. *Attaining the path* means being able to perfectly apply what one has realized into daily life, applying it in both supramundane and worldly affairs. Such a master is a truly complete enlightened teacher. In propagating the Dharma, they can offer sentient beings much more skillful means. Their mind resonates completely with all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and the blessing power of their body, speech, and mind is incredibly vast.
May every one of us who practices the Buddha Dharma accumulate great merit and virtue, so that when we encounter an enlightened teacher, we won’t let our greed, anger, delusion, pride, and doubt, nor our ignorance, become adverse conditions that block the path, causing us to miss out and walk right past them. In this Dharma-Ending Age, both an enlightened teacher and a good disciple are exceptionally rare to find.