Ripening the minds of others

• Forming Dharma relationships with others
• Understanding the relationship with spiritual mentors

LR 118: Gather disciples 01 (download)

“Ripening the minds of others” is like you have a green tomato and you need to ripen it, make it red so that it’s tasty and delicious.

How do we ripen other people’s minds? Sometimes they call it “How to assemble disciples” or “How to gather disciples,” but it basically means how to ripen other people’s minds. What they are specifically referring to is forming Dharma relationships with people. We want to ripen all sentient beings’ minds, but not all our relationships come in the form of Dharma teacher and student, or even as Dharma friends. But when it says “disciples,” then it’s talking about a teacher-student relationship.

It is difficult to find an English word that fits what we are talking about. Using the words “master and disciple” don’t quite fit, because we have all sorts of weird ideas about masters and disciples. When you say “student and teacher,” that doesn’t really fit either, because it implies a similar kind of relationship that you have with your first grade teacher. But a relationship with a Dharma teacher is totally different from that with a college professor or a high school teacher. So when we say student-teacher, we don’t really get what that relationship is. In a relationship with a spiritual mentor, many buttons get pushed, because if we do have issues with authority, they will all come up. Even if we consider somebody as our spiritual friend, we’ll still have issues of authority. Issues of authority come up even with our regular old friends. Even with a cat, I have issues of authority. [laughter] They just keep coming up.