THE MASTER-DISCIPLE RELATIONSHIP

By Houston Smith

When I was invited to give this lecture to honor Victor Danner, I knew that nothing short of physical incapacitation could prevent me from accepting. For long before the 1976-77 academic year in which, together with our wives, Victor and I guided thirty students around the world studying religions on location, I had come to regard him with a blend of affection and esteem that very few academic colleagues have drawn from me, and that trip vastly deepened our freindship.

And when I was asked for the titel for my remarks, that too came easily. It was clear to me that I wanted to speak to the master-disciple relationship, for two reasons. First, during that round-the-world trip I came to look u to Victor Danner as something like my master--not in the full-blown sense of that word that I will be describing here, but certainly as my mentor in matters far exceeding his expertise as an Islamicist.

The other and confirming reason for choosing this title was that it brough to mind an essay concerning religious masters that I had read many years ago. It appeared in a volume of essays by Professor Joachim Wach titled Essays in the History of Religions, and it impressed me to the point that I promised myself that when I had time I would return to that essay, this time not just to read it but to study it. We all know, though, what roads paved with good intentions lead to--I never got back to that essay and I saw this lecture as providing the prod to do that. I found Wach's essay quite different from what I wanted to say; still I happily credit him with sparking many of the ideas I will be trying to develop.

Let me begin by staking out my trajectory. I will not concern myself with the conceptual content of what spiritual masters teach, which obviously differs from master to master. Instead I shall try to describe the character of the master's vocation, the kind of person that fits this role. Second, I shall not concern myself with whether the masters I shall be mentioning by name perfectly exemplify the type or only approximate it. Disputes over degrees are notoriously indeterminable; as someone remarked, we could argue all night as to whether Julius Caesar was a great man or a very great man. Instead, I shall be invoking Max Weber's notion of "ideal types."In the technical sense of that term which Weber moved into the terminology of sociaology, an ideal type resembles a platonic form; whether it is instatntiated is secondary because its primary object is to keep our ideas in order.

But regarding instantiation, I will say that the much publicized recent rash of fallen gurus who betrayed their vocation is no ground for deprecating the vocation as such, which I believe is the highest calling life affords. Religious masters have contributed immeasurably to civilizations, if indeed they did not launch every civilization we know about. I personally think that as channels for the divine, the greatest pace-setting masters did set civilizations in motion, but nothing in what I say here turns on that opinion. To come back to restate this second methodological point, it is the ideal type of the master that I will be trying to depict.

Third, I will range cross-culturally in my illustrations of the master's vocation. I found Professor Danner's descriptions of Sufi masters so mesmerizing (to reiterate the word the speaker who prceded me, Dr. Zaineb Istrabadi, so aptly introduced) that I started my preparations for this lecture thinking that I would concentrate on them, but as I got into the subject, I realized that those waters are too vast to allow for wading, which is all that I (who am not an Islamicist) could manage.

Any stab I might make trying to nuance the differences between the Prophet Muhammad, the prototypical Islamic master, may peace be upon him, and the masters who followed him--the first four caliphs and their successors; the Imams in the Shi'ite tradition, and masters who are known as Sufis (of which Jalal ad-Din al Rumi is the best known in the West) to mention only obvious subdivisions--would be unworthy of a lecture mounted by the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.

So I will fall back on my professional enclave as a comparativist and draw my examples from a variety of religious traditions, while noting that I will be skipping over China. Lao Tzu is too obviously mythological to be brought to focus, and though the high regard of Confucius's disciples shines through every page of the Anelects, the aphoristic character of their reports leads me to consider Confucius, as the Chines themselves do, as their foremost teacher rather than a religious master.

Nor will I cite Socrates, though Plato's portrait of him as master is as convinicing as any on record. And while I am mentioning exclusions, let me say that I place prophets in a different category from masters, although some prophets were also masters--I have already mentioned Muhammad. In juaism, it is the Hasidic rebbe, literally "master," rather than the bibilical prohpets or ordained rabbis (teachers) who come closest to the masters I am presenting here.

My fourth and final guideline is of a different sort, for it is really no more than a didactic device. Contrasts help to sharpen the contours of topics, and so--speaking as I am on a university campus, I shall profile the master mostly by contrasting him to teachers. It speaks well for the city of Bloomington to learn that there is a large community contingent in the audience this evening, but I assume that most of you who are here are either teachers or students, so as I say, I wille tch the master-disciple relationship--in Sanskrit, the guru-chela relationship and in Arabic, the sheikh-murid relationship--by contrasting it with the relationship between teachers and students. To keep from rambling, I will itemize the contrasts, but as there is no logical sequence in the order in which I will be discussing them, I shall not number them but demarcate them by placing a bullet before point.... To begin:

What brings students to their teachers is a body of knowledge or a skill that the teacher has mastered and to which the student aspires. Feelings, positive and negative, naturally enter, but they are byproducts of this central objective that brings them together...