| An American
Yoga teacher and friend of mine, who also studies Tibetan Buddhism, told me once that he
was given a great new secret and powerful meditation teaching from a Lama, unlike anything
he had gotten from his Yoga teacher, who stressed Hatha Yoga, though he had lived and
studied with him four years in India. This practice was meditating on a Tibetan deity and
doing a puja to it. When I told him that such puja
and devotional meditation was the main practice of Hinduism and was much more developed in
the Hindu tradition than the Buddhist. Which had largely adopted it from the Hindu, he was
shocked.
Why had he not heard of this from his own teacher ? When he
had asked for religious instruction from his Hindu teacher, he was told to stick to
Christian approaches, which was particularly disturbing to him as his own religious
background was Jewish ! The point of all this is that culture is not necessarily a
detriment to the spread of spiritual knowledge, any more than it is a detriment to its
arising. |
