Dear friends in Dhamma,
I have a question about some teachers’ behavior and spreading the Dhamma and it’d be great if you could send me some references to EBT about that as well as share your experience/thoughts on that matter.
What would you think about a teacher (lay person) who offends his disciple because they dared to share some guided meditation recorded by them and announced there that they are open for questions and wish to record some more stuff? (in general, they simply wanted to share the Dhamma with people who are interested and already asked about that a few times). The teacher took it as a form of stealing, behaving as if someone wants to depreciate him, even though the teaching was not shared with any of his disciples, but with a completely different, let’s say “target”.
Shouldn’t the teacher be glad that the Dhamma is spread wider? That their disciple is able to do that?
What’s more, the teacher was treating the disciple as a friend for a few years, asked for their advice often etc. The disciple always did what they could to help the teacher, even if in return was not treated with respect, but still did that because wanted to help the Dhamma grow and that teacher seemed to be the best one to support (also because they felt that they should because he was the first one who introduced them to the EBTs and always felt that they owe a lot to the teacher, often emphasizing how grateful they are).
I think it could be that the lay teacher feels not secure in his/her teachings so he didn’t want to risk spreading wrong dhamma to more people in case he/she taught it wrong? That’s my guess. Anyway, since there’s so many other teachers, there’s no need to get so hung up about teachers who doesn’t want their teachings to be made available to more.
Actually on second thought, another guess based on my experience with some other monastic teachers who also requested not to share their recorded teachings is that some of these teachings maybe super high level and can easily be misunderstood or misquoted (selectively quoted out of context), or too deep for the general audience. They want to make sure that the people who receives the teachings are monastics and thus can have other monastics to easily ask questions to and clarify things.
Anyway, it’s just a mark of respect to the teacher to not simply share things that the teacher specifically asked not to share. If that lay teacher wishes to keep his target audience as personalized as possible it’s up to him/her to make it clear.
The thing in EBT which I see some tangential relevance to this is that Anandapindika asked Sariputta to share deeper dhamma to the lay folks, not just monastics.
Third possibility is that the lay teacher charges for the Dhamma. Then of course, any recordings which goes out for free goes against their business model. Although freebies are a good way to advertise their skills and knowledge as well, many authors releases some books for free and make the subsequent sequels not free. Hook them to lure them in. So lesson to learn: Don’t read free books, it can always be made into first in a book series.
Maybe I pointed it wrong, but it’s not about sharing the teacher’s recordings but recording something new by the disciple, who of course is not only listening to that teacher, but also to many monastics, reading Buddha’s words etc. And the disciple just wanted to share a simple meditation and talk a bit about Buddhism from they point of view as a dedicated follower.
