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The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to
Truth
Natalie Goldberg
Harper San Francisco, 2004. ISBN: 0060733993 (hardcover), $23.95 ($15.57
Amazon.com).208 pages
Reviewed by
Katherine V. Masis, M.A.
Idealization of spiritual teachers can be so strong that
news of their ethical misconduct is just as shocking after their death as it is
while they are alive. In her latest book, The Great Failure: A Bartender, a
Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (Harper San Francisco, 2004), Natalie
Goldberg poignantly reveals her dismay and disappointment at finding out,
several years after his death, that Katagiri Roshi, her Zen teacher, had slept
with some of his female students. Similarly, Goldberg shares her dismay at
finding out after his death about her father’s extramarital affair.
Clients, patients, students, or employees might view their
psychotherapists, doctors, school teachers, college professors, and supervisors
at work as parental figures from the past. These current relationships may evoke
in the clients, patients, students, or employees yearnings and expectations that
might or might not be met. “I needed to be reflected in another,” Goldberg
admits. (p. 101) This is what Freud called transference. The
relationships between spiritual teachers and their students are fraught with
potential for sticky transferences that can become difficult for those involved
to work through—especially since these dynamics are rarely, if at all,
acknowledged or commented on in the spiritual teacher-student relationship. As
Goldberg notes, “Unknowingly, Roshi became my mother, my father, my Zen
master.” (p. 102, emphasis added)
Spiritual teachers represent not only parental figures for
their students; in a very real sense, they represent, for want of a better term,
the Divine. For example, Zen students may believe that their Zen teachers are
deeply enlightened individuals. With their many years of meditation and
training, and the authority vested in them by virtue of ceremonies that sanction
the transmission of the Buddha’s teachings, they become infallible spiritual
heroes. “I had made him [Katagiri Roshi] perfect,” Goldberg confesses. “I was
driven to get what I had longed for in my family.” (p. 101) “He spoke to me
evenly, honestly. My hunger was satiated—the ignored little girl still inside me
and the adult seeker—both were nourished.” (p. 118)
As Goldberg looks back on her six years as Katagiri Roshi’s
student, she identifies moments when her idealization was weakened:
I had a glimmer then of the chasm
between the Zen master and the lonely, insecure man. That moment was an
opportunity to hold contradictory parts of him, to understand life doesn’t work
in a neat package the way I wanted it to. I could have come closer to his
humanity—and mine. But I wasn’t ready or willing. I had a need for him only to
be great, to hold my projections. In freezing him on a pedestal I had only
contributed to his isolation. (p. 115)
As a former Zen student of fifteen years, I recall how I,
too, needed my former teacher of eleven years to “be great.” Would I have
idealized her less if my own personal needs had been less, or if I had acquired
enough perspective of how the Zen institution contributed to mythmaking through
the centuries? Goldberg was fortunate to have that glimmer. Was she an unusually
perceptive student, or did her Zen teacher allow himself to be revealed in some
ways, however small? Many Zen teachers in the West put on a façade impossible to
live up to, hide behind their role, and discourage students’ reading and study
about Zen. That learning, though, is a necessary element for them to place the
Zen institution and the teachers who represent it in an appropriate historical
and cultural context.
Intense, long-term idealization is rarely sustainable, and
one would expect that sooner or later it would come to an end, or at least be
compromised. As Goldberg explains,
Eventually, as the
teacher-student relationship matures, the student manifests these [projected
spiritual] qualities herself and learns to stand on her own two feet. The
projections are reclaimed.... We close the gap between who we think the teacher
is and who we think we are not. We become whole. (p. 91)
One would hope. Goldberg describes the best-case scenario,
and rightfully points out the student’s role in growing up spiritually. But
spiritual teachers themselves have a part to play, as well. Zen teachers, for
example, would do well to provide opportunities for students to air their
concerns, to disagree with them, and to solve problems with both teachers and
fellow practitioners in a fashion agreeable to all concerned parties.
Unfortunately, these opportunities are rare in most American Zen Centers. Many
longstanding Western Zen students are unable to acknowledge and work through
their projections, precisely because their Zen teachers, perhaps threatened by
such acknowledgement, prefer to ignore, invalidate, or dismiss them in true
authoritarian fashion.
Goldberg describes her struggles with deep loneliness and
lack of a sense of purpose after having lost her Zen teacher and her father.
Years after the death of Katagiri Roshi, she realizes that the “regimented
practice” of formal Zen meditation no longer fit her (p. 97) and, eventually,
turns to writing as spiritual practice. Goldberg goes on to share her ongoing
process of making peace with her Zen teacher’s and her father’s past, a process
that she is clearly committed to, despite its difficulty.
Although at times Goldberg leans a bit too heavily on the
individual student’s role in idealization and subsequent disappointment in Zen
teachers, The Great Failure offers solid insights into the often
problematic transferences that develop in students with respect to their
spiritual teachers. Written with honesty and sensitivity, this book is
recommended reading for anyone who has ever left a spiritual teacher for any
reason, and for those who wish to understand the nature of the relationships
between spiritual teachers and their students.
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