Rev. Danny Fisher

While writing about Reggie Ray yesterday, I enjoyed a little stroll down memory lane and decided to highlight another of my former Naropa professors today:  Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown, Ph.D.

An acharya (senior teacher) in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage of her teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Judith is the author of Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism and co-author of Benedict’s Dharma: Buddhists Reflect On the Rule of St. Benedict–one of Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2001.

A thirty-one-year faculty member in the Religious Studies Department at Naropa University, Judith serves on the board of the Society of Buddhist-Christian Studies and is a member of the Lilly Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter. She also directed the first Buddhist-Christian dialogues held on Naropa’s campus in the 1980s. The results of those dialogues have included a tremendous book (Vajradhatu Publications’ Speaking of Silence: Christians and Buddhists on the Contemplative Way, with a preface by Judith) and a second conference with many of the original participants in 2005.

While I was a student at Naropa, I took several classes with Judith and served as a teaching assistant for her three times.  She is one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, and has been a vitally important spiritual friend to me.

Here’s the quote, taken from my 2005 interview with her for Eastern Horizon:

My teacher talked about three kinds of materialism. He talked about physical materialism, the materialism of speech, and what he called spiritual materialism. Physical material is accumulating stuff just because you can, and not for the purpose of giving it away. The materialism of speech, or “psychological materialism,” is when you are constantly trying to improve your credentials, your career, your livelihood for the purpose of ego-enhancement, which he could also see a lot here. But he thought the most serious thing was something that he saw in his own culture, as well, and that was what he called “spiritual materialism.” This is using spirituality to enhance personal ego, whether it’s in order to be a kind of prominent teacher with lots of students, building an incredible gompa [monastery], going away and performing ceremonies for money—personal aggrandizement through spirituality. He also saw that this was a big problem in the West. So for him, the core of his teaching from the very beginning was what he used to call “Buddha-dharma without credentials”—practicing the Dharma not as a self-improvement campaign, not in order to be a better person, but just to realize the truth.

What he had to say was—and still is—so radical, because many of us, when we started practicing meditation, did so in order to become a better person. But having that kind of agenda has an ego quality, so we have to get over that and instead surrender to our yearning for genuineness and the truth of things. We have to acknowledge the choicelessness of giving up this constant acquisition approach, and instead be connected with the nakedness of authentic spirituality…For [my teacher], overcoming bias and getting down to the fundamental nakedness of our experience was the main motivation for practice. And he felt that for his students and for anyone practicing the spiritual path, that’s the most important thing.