Sufi advice from Rumi:
When you learn a craft, practice it.
That learning comes through the hands.If you want dervishhood, spiritual poverty,
and emptiness, you must be friends with a sheikh.Talking about it, reading books, and doing practices
don’t help. Soul receives from soul that knowing.The mystery of spiritual emptiness
may be living in a pilgrim’s heart, and yet
the knowing of it may not yet be his.Wait for the illuminating openness,
as though your chest were filling with light,
as when God said,
Did We not expand you? (Qur’an 94: 1)
Don’t look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don’t milk others!There is a milk fountain inside you.
Don’t walk around with an empty bucket.You have a channel into the ocean,
and yet you ask for water from a little pool.Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT. The Qur’an says,
And He is with you (57: 4).Barks, Coleman; Jalal al-Din Rumi. The Essential Rumi – reissue: New Expanded Edition (p. 255). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Zen wisdom holds that ‘face-to-face transmission’ of the dharma can only happen between one Buddha and another. Yet there is something strange about calling it ‘transmission.’ One buddha-mind is not a bucket into which another pours the dharma; rather your teacher, by means of a turning word or some other sign, triggers your realization of buddha-nature.
Some things can only be transmitted face-to-face, such as the ‘treasury of the true dharma eye’ (Dogen) – perhaps because the two buddhas playing the roles of teacher and student must read each other’s ‘body language,’ including verbal language, in ‘real time.’ But full-time occupation with transmission of the way did not stop Dogen from reading and writing, or from guiding his students in their own reading practice, as he did quite directly and forcefully in many of his recorded talks. He learned early on from his teacher Rujing that ‘It is a mistake to regard the scriptural teachings as outside of the ancestral path’ (Tanahashi 2000, 13). So even though Zen represents ‘an independent transmission apart from doctrine or scripture’ (Abe 1985, 105), scriptural teachings are not outside of the Way as Dogen sees it.