Filmmaker Lesley Ann Patten attempts to come to terms
with her Tibetan Buddhist guru, Dzongsar Rinpoche—the man
she has hired to “assassinate” her.
“If from anybody one should understand the
Doctrine preached by the Fully Enlightened One, devoutly should
one revere him, as a Brahmana reveres the sacrificial
fire.”
— Gautama Buddha, Dhammapada
“The number one [characteristic of postmodern
individuals] is an ironic defense against the possibility of
being duped. That's the main thing they don't want to happen to
them. And of course, believing anything with any great
conviction sets you up for making a fool of yourself if you ever
turn out to be wrong.”
— Thomas de Zengotita
Across the mystical traditions and over the course
of millennia, the enlightened teacher has been the holy grail of
the spiritual quest. “Through the blessings and kindness
of the guru, great bliss, the realization of emptiness, and the
union of samsara and nirvana can be obtained instantly,”
says the Chakrasamvara tantra. Indeed, history and human
consciousness are suffused with the almost mythical accounts of
those spiritual masters through the ages who opened the way for
many to enter sublime and transcendent realms. And aligned with
these great teachers, students often became legendary in their
own right, the “guru principle” having activated a
force of purification and love so powerful that the disciples
were irrevocably transformed.
Surprisingly, the revered tradition of the guru-disciple
relationship began to emerge in a secular society amid the
newfound freedoms and cultural pluralism of our postmodern
world. Beginning in the 1960s, as a steady stream of Asian
teachers made their way West, a generation of Western seekers,
untethered from their own religious and cultural traditions,
turned to embrace the medieval customs of Tibet or China or
India—colorful and novel delivery systems for enlightened
consciousness—that these teachers brought here. The gurus
themselves became highly magnetic objects of rapt
attention—seemingly miraculous, living expressions of
wisdom, compassion, love, and illuminated awareness. But the
story of Eastern gurus and Western students over the past forty
years has often begun as an idyllic honeymoon and all too
frequently has given way to a rocky marriage. Fraught with the
difficulties of bridging a vast cultural divide in a time of
increasing psychological and social complexity, the journey of
the spiritual aspirant and the Eastern teacher is an especially
challenging one.
In her full-length film, Words of My Perfect
Teacher, Lesley Ann Patten has perfectly captured both the
dilemma of the contemporary spiritual seeker and the dilemma of
the guru. The movie is a poignant and powerful portrayal of the
cultural, psychological, and spiritual difficulties faced by so
many who have been drawn to the promise of a transcendent
possibility, and to Eastern teachers and teachings. And it
evokes the question: In a twenty-first-century world, can the
traditional guru awaken the seeker to his or her own true heart
and catalyze enlightenment?
A student of the highly revered Tibetan Buddhist lama
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, Patten's documentary
chronicles her spiritual and intercontinental odyssey alongside
two other Westerners as she follows Dzongsar across the world.
She is pursuing him in the hope that he can fulfill her lifelong
yearning for enlightenment—that, in fact, he is her
“perfect teacher.” Filmed in the United Kingdom,
Canada, the United States, Germany, and Dzongsar's homeland of
Bhutan, Patten's colorful portrayal of her spiritual quest is
part autobiography and part travelogue. It grows out of her
attempt to come to terms with her own ambivalence about the
student-teacher relationship, as well as her ambivalence about
this jet-setting, enigmatic, and elusive Tibetan lama. He is a
man uniquely straddling two worlds, East and West, a teacher who
alternately inspires and exasperates her.
Patten opens the film by imparting the story of the Buddha's
awakening and explaining why, in Buddhism, the guru is so
important: “The Buddha said this enlightenment could be
realized in one lifetime or over many. It is the birthright of
every human being, but to perfect it you need a teacher.”
Her invocation of this central tenet of Buddhism accompanies
shots of the serene and mountainous landscape of Bhutan. This is
followed by a sequence of images that takes us from London's Big
Ben, to the faces of Bhutanese boys at a Buddhist ceremony, to
the hustle of urban streets at rush hour, to her traveling
companions, to the carefully folded fingers of Tibetan monks in
Buddhist ritual, to a game of street ball in Los Angeles, to
Dzongsar himself. This first sequence is a cinematic overture to
what will follow; it is postmodern pastiche as global odyssey,
where the episodic vignettes of countries, cultures, friends,
family, and the revered teacher alternate between East and
West—the two worlds Dzongsar himself inhabits, and the two
worlds that Patten, as Dzongsar's Western student, is trying to
reconcile.
Like many of her generation, Patten was driven by a strange
disaffection and isolation that had haunted her since her youth,
and she sensed some higher and deeper possibility beyond the
circumstances of family, life, and culture that she found
herself in. “As a child, I would escape to tales of
foreign lands. I longed to meet an extraordinary teacher, the
Merlin who could help me pull the sword from the stone.”
Her spiritual yearning eventually found a worthy object in
Dzongsar Rinpoche, who held “a strange attraction”
and whose background was clearly “not ordinary.” And
yet, while she was passionately drawn to him as the means to
fulfill her hunger for a transcendent reality, the film
ultimately reveals the perennial battle so often waged in the
mind and heart of the spiritual seeker—the battle between
that which fervently resists submission to the teacher and that
which deeply recognizes that surrender and trust can bring to
fruition a lifelong aspiration for enlightenment.
Born into a traditional feudal culture and recognized as an
incarnation of one of the most admired Tibetan Buddhist teachers
of the prior two centuries, Dzongsar Rinpoche is, indeed,
“not ordinary.” Raised among a family of preeminent
Vajrayana Buddhist masters, he is heir to an august
lineage—a lineage that rests on the inextricable
relationship between enlightenment and the living awakened
teacher, the revealer of that ineffable and peerless state of
freedom. As Patten explains, the Vajrayana tradition was brought
to Tibet from India in the eighth century by the great Buddhist
saint Padmasambhava. It emphasizes that the “most
important reference point a student has is a teacher who points
the way . . . [using] all means necessary to help students
awaken to their own inner wisdom and compassion.”
“The truth of the matter,” Dzongsar has written,
“is that the guru has all the qualities of the Buddha. He
is the Buddha; he is the dharma; he is the sangha; he is
everything.”
And yet, as Patten's film illustrates so clearly, embracing
this mythic ideal is particularly difficult for those born into
our contemporary milieu, where so many of the traditional
structures of hierarchy and authority, including spiritual
authority, have given way to a culture in which self-reliant
independence is held as most sacred. As her film also reveals,
the psychology of postmodernism is strikingly contradictory, and
the flip side of this heightened individualism can often be the
doubt, mistrust, and weak faith that undergird the vague
discontent so particular to our time.
Nonetheless, Patten is compelled to pursue a higher
spiritual calling—and Dzongsar Rinpoche. Together with her
two fellow “ducklings”—as she refers to
herself and her two companions, Luc Dierckx and Louise
Rodd—she follows him from London to Germany and finally to
Bhutan, “bedazzled” by his presence. “I don't
want to be a minute away from him,” says Luc, a computer
programmer from Vancouver. “There's never one instant that
Rinpoche is not teaching something, if you're willing to view it
as such.” At the same time, his enigmatic, outrageous, and
often unpredictable behavior seems to be deliberately designed
to cause them to doubt.
From the outset of the film, we witness Dzongsar's antics,
which are sometimes met with offhand comments by Luc and Louise,
a tarot card reader from London, as well as by Patten herself.
Dzongsar is shown stealthily disembarking from a London bus,
leaving Luc scrambling to catch him. Later on, he manages to
evade the filmmaker and her companions at the Munich
airport—despite having arranged to meet them
there—leaving them in the lurch for hours. Louise remarks
that “you're meant to see him as this great, great being,
and then on another level, you could think, 'Is this all my
imagination?' So you end up chasing your tail. It's like being
in a bizarre kind of comedy.”