Recently a friend who I will call Mike reignited a debate about the value and purpose of prostrations as done in various schools of Buddhism. His unwavering view is that a Master that allows a disciple to prostrate before him is manifestly lacking in the qualities he believes a Master should have, namely humility. In fact Mike has no problem with prostrations as an expression of devotion on the part of the one prostrating. However, most people, he says, do prostrations because there is massive social pressure within especially some Tibetan Buddhist Dharma communities to prostrate before the Master, rather than out of a personal sense of felt reverence and understanding. With this I largely agree. People like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche understood the problem and modified the approach to the practice of prostrating: I am told that in the Shambhala tradition, the teachers and students bow to each other at the same time.
Mike asked the question: wouldn't Buddhism be fine if the practice of prostrating was eradicated? How would Buddhism as a set of practices be harmed if prostrations were removed? His issue is that prostrating suggests the inherent superiority of one person (the Master) over another (the one who prostrates), something he finds completely unacceptable.
Devotion and reverence expressed through prostrations according to Mike perpetuate an unpalatable subservience, and he related the habit of some Canadians of kissing the ring of the Pope and other high level clerics as a similar cultural manifestation. He went on to say that this habit has mostly died in Canada thanks in his view to better ideas conveyed through secularization. He finds it further incomprehensible that Buddhists would prostrate to a human. He claims that Jesus would never have allowed anyone to prostrate to him. Was it merely a cultural habit in the Buddha's time?
In the palette of physical expressions of devotion and gratitude we sometimes seem to think such expressions entail developmental or psychological ineptness. If you compare, gestures of disrespect and normalized cruelty are rather common. For example, we can flip the bird, make exasperated gestures with hands, arms, voice, and face; we can grimace, cuss, whine, scream, shove, push, grab, pass another car and cut off another with unnecessary acceleration, say or text others mean things, break up over email, hurl insults, etc. On the other hand physical or verbal expressions of devotion, respect, and gratitude, things that make daily life less fractured and tormented, are sometimes pathologized because they are no longer the "norm," and no longer being the norm they must therefore be an expression of disease.
For me personally prostrating is very simply an admission and expression of the belief that the carefully selected Master possesses qualities worthy of my placing myself on the ground in gratitude and recognition toward. I don't feel that prostrating is somehow admitting any inherent superiority in the Master or inherent inferiority in myself.
Sometimes in fact the way a prostration is done is with an air of terrific superiority. I am humble enough and egoless enough to prostrate before you. I see in Dharma contexts how some people do a full length prostration before the Master, raising the flag of their ardent devotion while others in the same group do half prostrations. The "who could be more devoted than me" tendency that manifests in the form of in-your-face externalizations of piety is simply a mark of unseasoned inner and outer practice, and we can forgive it. A seasoned practitioner will not make a fuss of himself, will not do things that make him or herself stand out especially with respect to religious or pious physical actions; something one Master I know calls: spiritual decorum. To turn an activity that once had as part of its intent expression of humility into a spiritual ego trip is a sorry distortion of the act and should by all means be dispensed with for that individual. But I digress...
In fact superiority and inferiority are as ever moving targets based on what your terms and parameters are. What I do when I prostrate is to recognize the arduous training that a Master undergoes and completes in order to be skilled enough to deal with another's precious real estate: mind. I recognize the extremely precious qualities in the Master that very really serve to inspire my mind in a direction opposed to the reactivity, contractedness, misery, and instability borne of the ignorance of self-absorption and samsaric inertia.
The Master teaches something I did not previously know about how my mind works. That knowledge serves to transform and inform my choices for physical, verbal, or mental action from one moment to the next. How profound and impacting this is requires a bit of knowledge about the nature of the causal nexus we live in conventionally.
Anyone who has undergone even a day of ethical, meditative, or wisdom training can get a glimpse into what is involved in actual Buddhist training, regardless of the vehicle adopted, and in what way it is transformative with respect to one's subjective, moment to moment experience. To find a Master who is a true embodiment of the qualities the Buddha himself understood to be liberative is incomprehensibly rare in this world. When you see that, you want to express your reverence and appreciation. Prostrating works for me to express that felt sense of acute awareness of the preciousness of a person of exquisite humanity. Humaneness is vastly underrated. Compassion in action, wisdom in action are things that serve as circuit breakers in our kneejerk reactivity to the world around us.
Mike was incensed when he went to a Dharma center a few years ago and saw people prostrating to the Master and monks, saying, Why isn't he stopping people from doing that? I admit that when there is a herdlike or a personally unreflective quality to prostrating, there is no point, especially if some of the monks carry themselves with the arrogance of entitlement and authority that tend to feed into and therefore justify Mike's resistance. On the other hand, if we are deeply aware of the true Master's qualities and what he or she had to do to develop them, and we feel moved to prostrate, that's a different story. Feedback welcome.
