What are these inquiry groups?

As my teaching style has developed in recent years, I have evolved a way of offering the dharma in a form I call Inquiry Groups.  This general way of teaching is not new of course, and there are many versions of spiritual inquiry or satsang offered by many teachers from a variety of traditions, each reflective of their own experience, insight, and particular talent in sharing the dharma.  Recently, I came across a short piece adapted from the forthcoming book by Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology (Bantam Books, April 2008) which resonates so closely with my perspective that I thought I might share it here.  This piece was printed in the Fall 2007 edition of Inquiring Mind (a semi-annual journal of the vipassana community).

On any day of the week, I encounter students from all ages arriving at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where I work.  They each come with their problems and their genuine search for happiness.  To my eye, the students entering Spirit Rock are not very different from the stream of visitors who came to the forest monastery where I trained in Thailand.  Every day, Ajahn Chah would sit on a wooden bench at the edge of a clearing by his forest hut and receive them – a rice farmer whose son had died, a devout old nun, a semi-corrupt government official.  As a young monk in the monastery, I found myself marveling at the range of questions and human problems addressed by Ajahn Chah.  It was like watching a master psychologist at work.  Ajahn Chah made no distinction between worldly and spiritual problems.  To him, anxiety, trauma, financial difficulties, physical difficulties, meditative struggles, ethical dilemmas and community conflict were all forms of suffering amenable to the medicine of Buddhist teachings.  Ajahn Chah and other Buddhist masters like him are practitioners of a living psychology: one of the oldest and most well-developed systems of healing and understanding on the face of the earth. (p. 4)

No matter what the tradition of the teacher and no matter who the students are, they eventually meet in exactly the same space – human intimacy.  You can call the encounter spiritual or psychological.  You might take on a role in this meeting as a teacher or therapist, student or client.  You might look for a spiritual friend you can hang out with or a guru to follow.  You might think of the relationship as very ordinary and friendly or quite special and challenging. But in the end, one person meets another person in this tender, vulnerable place. Most people come to such a meeting because they are yearning for the guidance that real wisdom can provide or the healing balm of true compassion.  So to hear about an old monk making himself so available, meeting whoever and whatever arrives, reminds me of sitting in the Inquiry Groups receiving who ever comes forward. 

In the Zen tradition in which I trained, this relationship is called “guest and host.”  If the meeting was real, immediate, and intimate, one could never really know who would be the host and who would be the guest; who would end up being the teacher and who would be the student.  It is the same in the Inquiry Groups.  I may be the one in the front of the room, “sitting on a wooden bench at the edge of a clearing… receiving them,” but this is just a function.  Making that function into a solid thing is a fiction. I am not merely “a teacher” or defined by any role or title.  I am an impermanent responsive function.  Participants in these groups are able to see that whatever wisdom emerges, comes mostly from the people asking their questions. Any real nourishment available in the time spent together comes through the presence in the relational connection, not from the words.  This gift can only appear between two people as they meet openly and honestly.  This is where truth shows itself most clearly and where emptiness dances most freely.  That meeting and that space can be called love.