On Teaching

• When one has mastered his craft he should teach. [In the case of spiritual endeavors] teaching should be in the form of education that leads to freedom and excellence.

• We study a subject; this is not a pulpit.

• If you keep company with me, you become a better person.

• Naturally a conflict will arise between a teacher who wants to raise you up and your lower nature that wants to go to hell.

• My job is to describe evil correctly.

• The best students of meditation are illiterate women.

• One of the best things that happened to me in America was being told by a woman who took my class, “I no longer steal.”

• Experience should be found in the school of life – outside.

• Personal problems should not be brought to Desani. The only method of overcoming all kinds of suffering is the 4th Aryan Truth – the 8-fold path. Yes, you can momentarily ease suffering, but it will arise again. However, [short-term] solutions may be forthcoming throughout the course … perhaps in a few more classes the problem will have been dealth with and solved.

• The emphasis is on training. A teacher might ignore a pupil … not speak to him. This is 'killing' him. He’s not worth bothering with; a waste of time.

• There are periods and subjects where you say nothing as a teacher. A noble silence.

• It is wrong to tell anyone how to dress. However, when you deal with other people and accept their standards then you must act in a prescribed way. There are rules about duties of a guest and host. It's an unwritten understanding; similarly you accept the laws of the schools.

• The information given in this class might cost you years of effort. Here it is just handed to you.

• Some fools only learn from a blow.

• Students must rise to [the instructor's] standard … he cannot come down to their standard … he can’t think like a fool.

• Other than the foregoing [teaching the subject competently], a teacher owes nothing to a student. No politeness, no emotionality.

• A good teacher would almost have a compulsion to correct people.

• This subject matter might shake a person’s faith. However, it's purpose is not to make an emotional problem. If there are any concerns about this, please take another class.

• At times you need to make a person feel small, it stimulates them to progress.

• You go crazy if you go about correcting fools … there are too many of them.

• Not at all sure that Engineering should be taught in a university. Philosophy? Yes, Letters, certainly, but craftsmanship (or draftsmanship)? I’m not so sure at all.

• Don't have the time or impertinence to interface with anybody’s fate.

• Any full professor can be sacked if you don’t attract students? … Deplorable. This leads to the [absurd] situation that if you don’t get enough students, the subject is not worth teaching.

• Might be kind to strike a person on the head, this would let a person know that blows might come from anyone at all. Suffering is to be endured.

• A true teacher is a director: guides, admonishes a student. Buddha was that kind of teacher. An adjuster who makes you shift your position. The teacher directs you to a profitable field of experience.

• Modification of the listener is purpose of education.

• What is being taught here is mental culture – not meditation. Meditation is a misnomer because it has religious implications. Two results are intentional from mental culture: (1) calming of the mind (remove agitation – become still); (2) develop insight - penetrating vision to see things as they are.

• Accept Buddhist philosophy as tentatively true and see if the ideas work for you.

• In the venture of replacing one authority with another, Desani will not cooperate. Only thing you know is your own experience. It is poor manners to question a man’s experience.

• You should never rely on untested belief.

• Thought of renunciation. If a thought is full of grasping, even if a principle is involved, this is a problem. If a thought is inspired by hatred it is a wrong thought. This is true on a mundane level. If there is cursing-imagining of a person being injured, or imagining speaking bad words to him or imagining doing physical violence to him, these are all thoughts that are wrong ones. We have indulged in these thoughts before … the technique is not to struggle with unwholesome thoughts. It is for this reason that in some Zen disciplines one never tries: the struggle, the striving will keep you away. One should just know that there is ill-will present in me now. To know it. The moment you know it, indulgences cease. Enlightened mindfulness is to not be carried away by a stream. Observe all kinds of thoughts arising. If one becomes aware – aware of the importance of mindfulness in this course one has gained much, should be grateful and will remember Desani when we are his age.

• Can the inexpressible be expressed? Only if you have a similar experience. Shakespeare … great suffering … then he writes about a crystallization of that experience.

• Man cannot be a perfect artist unless he knows the minuses of human nature as well as the grandeur of human nature.

• Leonardo – expressions not seen on human face ever.

• Great art … takes you away from your mundane life.

• Artistic necessity: If Romeo and Juliet do not die, in old age they get involved with collecting stamps.

• On cartoons: Peanuts: lowest level of intelligence. Little Abner: high art.

• Shakespeare is an unconscious genius. Only a few of his words indicate that he know he has immortality; he had no religion.

• Writing gossip to entertain people is a contemptible waste of human life.

• Writers are mad people with a devil of a lot of ego. All very sick. Publishers are terrified of them. Writers hate publishers for ruining their book.

• (Writing about occult without experience) Journalistic. Promises. Author assumes position of adept speaking with authority.

• A good novel must lift you up out of the world.

• Mozart … that sound is not of this earth.

• Income comes from writing books, not from teaching morals; there is no demand for the teaching of morals.

• There was a man who used to send articles to a magazine editor. The editor would turn him away again and again. He thought that his stuff was not being read so he stuck the 5th and 6th pages together. Came back rejected but unstuck. “In order to know a rotten egg, you don’t need to eat all of it.”

• If they want your money they will be very polite; good gurus are harsh teachers.

• Not part of a teacher’s job to prevent a pupil from thinking for himself.

• Beware of a teacher who assures you that the work on the way is pleasant and easy. Work is unpleasant and hard. A good teacher inflicts suffering.

• One must pray for a [good spiritual] teacher. So much better to deserve than to have.

• Some teach about the 'ultimate reality' then they come across a little problem and go to pieces.

• Many people sentence themselves to intellectual ideas and ideals, become attached to them and experience further suffering.

• Teacher must be without self-interest. Cannot have normal relations with such people – sex or other. (Of a teacher who has sexual relations with a student: "These people came to him for spiritual guidance – an unforgivable act.")

• Disciple of a man, so-and-so Bodhisattva. Never heard of the bastard. 1952 found him living like a hippy in Banares. Then seen wearing a sari in Australia. Must be an unconscious clown.

• Q: Can your described experience of hearing a bell in Sarnath compare with the Zen experience of Satori?

A: The question is valid but does the questioner know Satori?

• Q: Could a place be found in Austin where serious students could retire for a number of hours or days to benefit from an atmosphere of quiet and devotional mediation and mindfulness. This would certainly be a blessing to Austin and a wonderful outgrowth of the course and your teachings.

A: Very difficult. All serious people practice in unfriendly environments initially.

• Q: Am I virtuous?

A: Might be a false position for a disciple because truthful answers are founded not on belief that they are virtuous but on knowledge founded in direct experience. Hence “Save us from temptation.”

• Q: If you speak the truth in a place where untruth prevails do you cause disharmony?

A: If a monk comes across an unworthy person he may decide not to accept an offering from them. In such a case he turns his begging bowl upside down and refuses alms.

• Q: I can’t sleep for hate of my mother, what can I do?

A: Do me a favor and go and forgive her. [Desani related that it took four days for the restlessness to disappear.]

• Q: Does the incarnated spirit enter the body at the time of the fertilization of the ovum by sperm?

A: A bad question. No incarnate spirit allowed for in Buddhist doctrine. Also, there is no abiding self – just processes.

• Q: What should a good Buddhist do for lepers, etc.?

A: We should help others according to our capacity. Helping a leper has nothing directly to do with enlightenment but seeds of merit – (lokiya results – can be sown by helping unfortunate, lepers, monks, etc.

• Q: If one perceives beauty in a flower – is that a false perception?

A: A good question. This might be a platonic concept. Is there a principle for such beauty. Not in Theravada texts. Beauty recognized by Plato and others should not be compared with Theravada ideals. It is a judgment that a flower is beautiful.

• Q: Does meditation help memory?

A: Large doses of B-complex might help memory; meditation does not. There are European techniques whereby one might be able to remember 200 things at a time.

• Q: What should one do if you saw a person with an object you needed that had been stolen from you previously?

A: Several approaches: 1) You might ask if this object is stolen; (2) if hard to say that in person, you might write that person a letter; (3) you might let him keep object but resolve to no longer be his/her friend; (4) you might feel morally responsible to report the theft to the police; (5) you might use the incident as a ladder for forgiving, forbearance and charity, testing sila and thereby growing as a person.

• Q: Is it possible for a cause in the present life to affect a past life?

A: No. There is 'reality' for all intents and purposes. In certain Mahayana texts it is suggested that everything happens in the here and now. In Theravada Buddhist texts the answer is a matter of increased perception.

• Q: Can you define 'happiness'?

A: To answer this question we might need to refine our perception. An example of that is a sexual pervert has a different idea of happiness than most other people.

• This is the time to experiment with life.

• The energy of young people should be put to use.

• Akasha means mind; universal mind. Content of all memories. All things. If Mozart had not written it, it would have come to someone else. If I’m not able to write some books I'm predicted to write, it is alright. Someone else will do it.

• When he was young, people used to get headaches listening to Desani … he talked 70 words/minute faster than Hitler.

• Believe that most of his success started when he conquered smoking because the habit was preventing him from going on a pilgrimage to India or a lecture tour of the U.S.. It was a struggle between lower and higher nature.

• [Desani] threw away the name of the hotel he was staying in while on a subway in New York. Asked police for help. Dialog included, Desani: “Is it not true that Einstein stopped the N.Y. police to ask where he lived?” Police: "There are 1,400 hotels in Manhattan."

• Dr. [Sarvepalli] Radhakrishnan said Desani would bring nations together.

• Desani recounted the occasion when he had gone into seclusion in the forest during rains. A man kept leaving offerings of flowers till it troubled Desani so much as to inquire why. “For the love of God,” he replied, “to seek the grace of the Lord.” Desani liked his answer and offered the man a mantra to recite 1,000 times. “And what is the effect of this mantra?” the man asked. Desani told him that his wife would turn him out, that he would be shooed away from all houses of all villages, and then he would be free to worship without hindrance. The man replied, “But we are very poor people, this is not the grace I want, I need a son.” Desani gave him a different mantra and he got two sons.

• If you inherit gifts you inherit curses. Desani suffers from overactive brain, sleeplessness.

• Words are rupa. Desani heard a radio in a place where he was meditating. He heard about Princess Margaret and he learned she was to be married. He had listened for a while – then realized he should not be listening because he was in meditation. (He was interested because he had known Princess Margaret when she was a small child.) When he went back into meditation he still heard the sounds of the radio and he felt as if his face was being slapped. Therefore he knew that sound was rupa. Since sound is rupa it belongs to the lokiya world.

• Desani is concerned with the method or technique to find these [spiritual promises] out. Thomas William Rhys Davids didn't practice the technique. In accordance with scriptures, the truth cannot be had without attainments.

• An old solution to being pestered was for a wise man to get two prostitutes and a bottle of wine and walk down the street … then he is free of the problem and would be able to go about his business without having to live up to a particular ideal. Desani would do this, but does not want to reflect on the staff and university institution.

• Desani told the chairman when he resigned from the department's budget council that he was not competent in administrative matters and therefore did not wish to participate. He also told him that if he had understood that administrative decision-making was a part of his job he would understand why his salary should be correspondingly reduced. He also asked that if he was ever found to be remiss or lax in his teaching duties to please let him know as this is where he thought of himself as able. He also said that he had lost interest in the budget council duties when competition resulted in discussions such as "This is a [John] Silber man" or "This is a [Frank] Erwin man."

• Desani has an enormous lot of worries but not a major one. He is now contented. If he should die tonight – everything would be done. Comes to one by effort, cultivation or former effort. Greatest effort is to refine our mind.

• Using mindfulness Desani resigned from the experience of being given a vaccination shot. During mindfulness he was able to feel not only the needle within his body but also the rust around the needle, which normally could only be able to be detected with a microscope. He reported this to the nurse. Normally, Desani doesn’t have this kind of mindfulness without effort.

• Desani has no quarrel with any philosophy. It's damned impertinent to tell people how to live; that’s trespassing on a particularly sacred freedom.

• Listening to Desani is an act of merit.

• Desani described himself as "a very pleasant object" to others. Any person who has the means of communicating certain dhammas is bound to be a pleasant object.

• Desani will not meet with a person in whom he causes anger.

• Also in right speech is harsh speech. Some become so sensitive that some become unhappy with Desani’s way of talking. Children have cried when Desani has told them to sit down. He should not need to be polite to them. Their crying reflects on their poor upbringing by their parents.

• It is said by some that the whole of Buddhism is anti-cultural, anti-success. Desani: No, look at me.

• Desani knows of nothing at all that is not subject to change in the mental or material world. If one attains something unchanging, that is his personal belonging. If he does so, Desani is happy for him and receives merit for wishing him well. The discoverer should have compassion for Desani and will get merit for the compassion. Therefore merit accrues to both sides.… But it should be borne in mind that someone could be wrong.

• If you can’t lift up a piece of Desani's luggage with your mind then how can you solve the problem of how the world began?

• There are ants in the classroom. They do not know that Desani is talking. They do not know…. We are so dependent on perception: human perception. We have this kind of perception. Desani did not have time to reply to the girl who contacted him and who later committed suicide because she was afraid to give bad grades to her students because she did not want to hurt them. I might have told her that her sensitiveness might be related to suffering; or a problem of perception.

• Indian diet is so bloody awful. Desani got healthy with milk powder.

• It helps to have a reputation for eccentricity.

• Desani made fun of Buddhism in his book; made fun of the Sage of Rangoon. At time whole thing was folly to him.

• Miracle of the book is that it is tangible, believable, human, very human. Otherwise it would be an out and out farce.

• Hatterr was just a ruffian. Took seven years to perfect his English. He carries with him a kind of optimism.