Forever a Student

Sarah Ruhl: I mean, I think that’s the task, is to go about our business and view obstacles as teachers and to view ourselves as students at every point in our lives so that we don’t become ossified and we don’t become smug and we don’t become automatic. I think having the curiosity of a student forever is something to aspire to and to see even the most irritating, pesky, awful life events as an occasion for teaching is a good way to go about your day if you can.

​James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Sarah Ruhl. Sarah is a playwright, poet and professor based in New York. Her new essay collection, Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present, is an ode to the teachers she has had over the course of her life, both inside and outside the classroom. In my conversation with Sarah, we talk about the teachers and tasks that have helped her learn how to listen, what it means to look at grief sideways, whether devotion is teachable and why she views her writing as an offering. So here’s my conversation with Sarah Ruhl.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with playwright Sarah Ruhl. Hi, Sarah. It’s great to be with you.

Sarah Ruhl: Nice to be with you too.

James Shaheen: So Sarah, we’re here to talk about your new book, Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present. To start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Sarah Ruhl: So I teach a class at Yale called “Lessons from My Teachers,” and the inspiration for the class was that I wanted my students to know there wasn’t one entry point to write a play. There wasn’t one way in. There wasn’t a guru mentality that I was trying to communicate to them about how to write a play. And as I tried to envision multiple entry points for them, I taught the work of my teachers, and also I tried to teach how they taught. I tried to teach their pedagogy. At one point I thought, “Maybe there’s a book in this class somehow,” and I started thinking about all the magnificent teachers I’ve had from preschool to the present, and I started doing little portraits of each of them.

James Shaheen: So you start the book with some of your earliest teachers, including those who first introduced you to writing, and you say that over time playwriting became something of a religion for you. Could you say more about that?

Sarah Ruhl: Yes. I think theater is quite religious to many of its practitioners, and I don’t know if it’s partly being cut off from religiosity. You know, the idea that theater is in a secular domain in say, New York City, but that the zeal with which we pursue it is quite religious. And I think it has to do with the ritual aspect of it, the fact that you’re all coming together, a group of people is ideally feeling something at the same time, and you’re sort of conjuring an invisible world through the seen world. I think all of that is a spiritual practice. So when I say it became something of a religion for me, I guess I mean that, and also it became a profound practice for me. It became central to my life.

James Shaheen: Mmm. So one of the threads that runs through the book is the art of listening, and more specifically the teachers and tasks that help you learn how to listen. You mention, for instance, a theater teacher who first taught you to listen to the spaces between the words. So can you say something about that?

Sarah Ruhl: I was talking about Joyce Piven, who is an incredible, or was an incredible, theater teacher in Chicago who I studied with, and Joyce herself was a beautiful listener. She talked explicitly about when you’re on stage, the importance of listening to your scene partner. So it was always about being focused and present and focused on your scene partner and listening to them, not planning how you would respond, not planning and rehearsing your next line, but really listening so that you could react in the moment and not theatrically performing the art of listening, but really, really listening. I have reflected years later about what a spiritual practice that is.

James Shaheen: So you quote the director Anne Bogart, who writes, “Listening is a basic ingredient of attention, and it can be learned and practiced…It is a discipline and an action in the world, and the results are nearly magical…To be heard, really heard, by another person is to be healed.” So what have you learned about listening as a discipline?

Sarah Ruhl: I think Anne Bogart says it all. I mean, Anne is quite an enlightened person. It’s funny, when you read that quote of Anne Bogart’s, I also think about my husband Tony, who’s a psychiatrist. Outwardly, our professions don’t have that much in common, and his listening is so private. But I do think Anne is right that with the right kind of listener, there’s a healing that takes place. With theater, there are so many different kinds of listening. There’s the writer listening for the idea at inception. There is the act of listening to the actors as they first say the lines out loud, and even just the act of that deep listening and reflecting back to the actor is a way of directing them without saying a word. And then there’s the listening that the audience brings to bear on the production. And then there’s the listening of the playwright to the audience to try to massage what’s not working in the play, when you notice the listening getting attenuated.

James Shaheen: Yeah. Related to this, there’s a phrase that I really liked in the book, and I believe it was a description of the relationship between you and the director or the director and the actors. I don’t remember exactly, but the line was “in relation, but not in conversation.”

Sarah Ruhl: Mmm.

James Shaheen: It was a nice line. I mean, I just thought of it in terms of so much being communicated in silence merely by these two people in the presence of each other.

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, absolutely, and I’m kind of obsessed with silence and the parameters of silence and silence that speaks.

James Shaheen: So in a similar vein, you talk about the importance of presence, which certainly has connotations in the Buddhist world and in the theater world. So what do you mean when you talk about presence? You use the lovely phrase “sanctuaries of presence.”

Sarah Ruhl: I don’t always know how to talk about presence, and in a way, when I wrote this book, I wanted to write a whole book about presence. And yet I found it so hard to talk about that it made more sense to me to talk about my teachers. Theater’s always conjuring a kind of presence, which is a focused attention, which is like meditation. You know, we talk about someone’s stage presence. What do we mean? We mean a kind of charisma, and we mean a kind of sustained focus on the task, on whatever task they’re doing. I think finding a way to be truly present in the present moment is something that a Buddhist practice helps you with and I also think a really good theater teacher can help you with.

James Shaheen: You talk about an actor’s presence on stage having everything to do with their relationship with the audience, while at the same time they’re pretending not to see the audience.

Sarah Ruhl: Yes. I find it so interesting. I mean, it feels like an amazing paradox: You’re being watched, you’re being listened to, you’re pretending you’re not being watched, you’re trying to get out of self-consciousness, but at the same time, if you don’t let the audience in, there’s an involuted kind of carapace that’s on top of the performance. So you want a porousness, you want to let the audience in, but at the same time, you’re not looking at them half the time. You’re not directly addressing them half the time.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, you mentioned technology as one of the primary obstacles to presence, and more specifically the smartphone. You write, “Our phones can give us facts, not story; information, but not relation.” Can you say something about that? Our alienation from the people around us when we’re sort of sucked into this world that the smartphone presents to us.

Sarah Ruhl: I mean, I feel like we all know it. We all experience it. I had a moment where I was shocked when my son, who was then maybe 10, was asking Siri what the meaning of life was. And he’d been asking, and I’m sure people ask ChatGPT that now. He had been asking all kinds of factual questions before that. I mean, we’re constantly going to our phone to ask a factual question, and then I found myself going more and more to my phone to ask questions of opinion. Maybe I wasn’t asking Siri or ChatGPT, but I was on the New York Times website looking for the opinion section to tell me what was wrong with the state of the world and what was the way out of it. And on YouTube, you have all these how-to videos. You can learn to do nearly anything on YouTube theoretically, or you can go on MasterClass and they’re these master teachers, but funnily enough, they’re just making videos of themselves talking. They’re not in relation. And so that fascinates me that this entire part of a teacher-student relationship is gone when you’re accessing it through YouTube. I mean, I think you can still learn a lot from a lecture of a really great teacher, even if they’re not responding to you. But the lack of feedback, the lack of presence, the lack of real-time modeling removes I think nearly all, not all, but nearly all of what is really sacred between a teacher and a student.

James Shaheen: Yeah, there’s no substitute for live presence, and I think often the mistake we make is to think that there is. You know, you also write several times about slowing down, mostly in the context of privileging process over destination or end product. Can you say something about this? You know, I’m a dog lover, so I really enjoyed your mentions of walking the dog with your daughter and alone and encountering neighbors, and you talk about walking with your daughter, walking the dog with your daughter down Fifth Avenue, and she wants to look at everything, and you’re like, “No, we got to get to where I think she’s going to enjoy,” something like a bookstore.

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, it was a very clear memory I have of when Anna, my daughter, was maybe 8, and I wanted to take her to this place, Books of Wonder, and I was determined to get her to the destination. She was pointing in shop windows and stopping on the sidewalk, and I was rushing her, and then I thought, “Oh, this walk together is just as fascinating for her, just as pleasing to her, as getting to the bookstore.” And I find that my mother, who’s 82 now, reminds me of that emphasis on the walk as opposed to the destination. She’s completely in the present tense, looking around her and not rushing to get somewhere. And my dog is similar. I feel like dogs have so much to teach us about presence, and when I’m walking my dog and I’m really in a hurry and I’m desperate to produce an effect, if I’m desperate for her to go to the bathroom, the more I focus on, in my mind, the fact that I want her to pee, the less quickly she will do it.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I remember those freezing cold nights when I was walking my dog, and he just wouldn’t do his business, almost as if he knew that once that happens, we’re going home, you know?

Sarah Ruhl: Yes. And once you release that, they seem to be like, “OK.”

James Shaheen: Yeah. They seem to be more aware of what’s going on than we give them credit for sometimes.

Sarah Ruhl: Yep. Always.

James Shaheen: Yeah, so one of your biggest mentors was the playwright Paula Vogel, and you say she taught you that sometimes you have to look at grief sideways or upside down in order to be able to write about it. You talk about this in particular with regard to the loss of your father. So what does it mean to look at grief sideways?

Sarah Ruhl: Paula talked about just as you wouldn’t look at the sun directly, don’t look at grief directly. She was really influenced by these Russian formalists like Viktor Shklovsky, who talked about defamiliarization and making the familiar strange and sort of looking askance at something. She would talk about driving and how it’s this automatic function after a while and you get in the car and you’re driving and suddenly you’re at your destination, you don’t remember how you got there. And she would talk about the function of art being to wake you up and notice those processes that have become automatic. So Paula would give little writing prompts that would help you turn yourself upside down. So she would say, “Write a play that’s impossible to stage,” which is kind of like a Zen koan because once you do the assignment, you realize that anything really is possible to stage, depending on how you parse it, or she said, “Write a play in which a dog is a protagonist,” and she gave me that assignment when I was 20 and had just lost my father, and so I wrote a play about the family dog waiting for him to come home, and it was a way of accessing that grief from a different point of view, which let me write about it, whereas at that time, if I tried to write about my own self in relationship to the emotion, I just couldn’t even begin.

James Shaheen: So would you mind reading a passage from that essay on Paula Vogel? It’s on page 55.

Sarah Ruhl: Sure. The question of whether playwriting is teachable begets other questions, like: Is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? Is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe that these things are teachable mostly by example, and in great silences. There is the wondrous noise of the classroom, the content, the liveliness of the teachings themselves, the exchange of knowledge, and then there is the great silence of relation. Of seeing how great people live. How they eat, how they love, how they drive. When I reflect on all the things Paula taught me—among them bravery, stick-to-itiveness, how to write a play in forty-eight hours, how to write stage directions that are both impossible to stage and possible to stage—the greatest of these is love. Love for the art form, love for fellow writers, and love for the world.

James Shaheen: That’s so nice. You know, I’m curious about the role of devotion and love in your work.

Sarah Ruhl: Hmm. I feel like love is always the animating force. It’s funny, my kids will tease me and say, “You need a new theme, mom. All your plays are about death and love.”

James Shaheen: Those were the big two big ones.

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah.

James Shaheen: What else is there?

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, exactly.

James Shaheen: So another lesson you learned from Paula Vogel is the importance of gifts and acts of generosity. So can you say more about how you’ve come to understand generosity? And I’m curious, do you think about your writing as an offering or a gift?

Sarah Ruhl: I do, and a couple things affected me in terms of thinking of plays as gifts. The first was Paula’s incredible example of generosity, which is to a whole field. You know, it’s not just me. She has modeled this for a whole generation of playwrights. And this specific example was when I had just finished grad school, I got pyelonephritis, which is a painful kidney infection. I didn’t have health insurance anymore because I was done with my MFA, and I was reluctant to go to the doctor, and Paula was like, “You look really sick. You should go see my acupuncturist, and you should go to the doctor.” And I went to the doctor finally. I got some antibiotics. I still wasn’t well, so she said, “Go to my acupuncturist, you still don’t look well.” And I said, “Oh, I can’t really afford it.” And she slipped a check for $500 under my door, and I was definitely not going to take it. And then she said, “Look, when I was your age, my partner had MS, and we had no health insurance, and a woman in our building gave us $500 for healthcare, and she said, ‘Don’t give it back. Just keep it going.’” So that story allowed me to take the gift, and then I’ve recirculated that gift, which just keeps going and going. And the other thing that influenced me thinking about gift giving and art making is the book The Gift by Lewis Hyde, who’s a wonderful writer and poet, and he writes about poetry in the capitalist economy and how you make sense of yourself as a poet, and he says basically you’re in an economy, a gift economy as an artist, as a poet, and yet you’re in this larger economy that’s very different. And so sometimes I’ll have my students read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift or the first chapter at the beginning of the semester and write what I call a gift play to a fellow student in the program, and I find that reorienting. The art making toward gift giving as opposed to the personal catharsis of the artist has been helpful to me in terms of staying in the field. I think as a young person, I was content to have my own personal catharsis. And the older I get, it doesn’t feel as satisfying for a life in the arts. And there’s a solipsism, and it’s harder for me to stay in that kind of personal bubble, and I feel like it makes the art more voyeuristic too when you’re watching someone have a catharsis as opposed to watching an artist give someone a gift. And I guess the more I learned about meditation and classical foundations for meditation, it was really interesting to me that some teachers would emphasize, well, yeah, you can meditate, but if you really want to do a good job of it, you should start with generosity, you know, that there are these ethical practices that you begin with, and then it’s much easier to meditate once that’s in place.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, in one chapter you quote the Dalai Lama, who once said that the only measure of a work of art is how much it changes the artist. So how do you understand this quote, and how does it relate to your own experience of writing and making art?

Sarah Ruhl: I can’t remember where I heard that story. It might have been Sharon Salzberg, or it might have been Elizabeth Gilbert or someone who quoted the Dalai Lama saying that. But I love this idea that the measure of the art is how much it changes the artist. You know, it’s not the critical reception. It’s not how much money is made. It’s not some objective goodness. It’s how does the artist grow and stretch aesthetically or ethically or in terms of their own wisdom. And I think it’s very hard as an artist to reflect on that yourself. It’s hard to know how you’ve changed, how writing a piece of art has changed you. But I know in my bones that writing different plays have cost me or changed me or helped me move from one place in my life to another place, and I think it’s incredibly valuable.

James Shaheen: So you quote a line from Khenpo Pema Wangdak, who told you, “Art and religion aren’t very different,” something you referenced earlier, “and someone’s got to do it.” So can you tell us about this line and what you’ve learned from Lama Pema?

Sarah Ruhl: Oh, I love him so much. I met him when he was advising this production of a play, The Oldest Boy, I was doing at Lincoln Center Theater. And the play involves the concept of reincarnation and the relationship between teacher and student and a student who loses their teacher looking for the reincarnation of their teacher. And I remember he laughed so hard after he said that, you know, “Religion and art aren’t very different. Someone has to do it,” and then just laughing. I feel like he meant someone has to contend with the meaning of our lives, you know, suffering and death, mortality, someone has to make sense of it, or if not make sense of it, at least contend with it. And I think that’s the overlap in my mind between art and religion.

James Shaheen: Some of your essays are dedicated to formal teachers, but a number of them are about figures who came to occupy teacher-like roles. There’s a chapter called “When Your Babysitter is Your Dharma Teacher,” for instance. So can you tell us about your babysitter Yangzom and the Dharma lessons you’ve learned from her?

Sarah Ruhl: Of course. So Yangzom is this incredible woman who happens to be our babysitter, and I met her when my daughter Anna was about six months old. She has always been so kind and so calm in the household and with the kids and with me. She’s taught me so much. She’s Tibetan. She grew up in Nepal and has been active in this country helping other people get resettled in New York in the Tibetan community. And so sometimes she would give me formal dharma teachings, and I would be totally unaware of it. I’d just be making tea while writing, and she’d tell me a story that had great wisdom in it, or she would tell me about her incredible bravery in what she went through getting to this country. It was the explicit lessons and the implicit lessons. The explicit lessons were these stories she would tell me, and the implicit lessons were watching how patient she was, watching how she never would yell at one of the kids, watching, you know, there’d be total chaos erupting everywhere. I at one point had three kids under the age of 4 because I had twins, and she just was so patient. And so at a point, I think I thought it’s partly temperament, but it partly I think was clearly that she had a cultural inheritance with Tibetan Buddhism and was a very serious and is a very serious practitioner. And so I thought, I want to know more of what Yangzom knows about how to be patient, how to be compassionate.

James Shaheen: So how did your time with Yangzom eventually lead to your taking refuge?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, she told me this story about a friend who owned a restaurant in Boston and how a monk came from India because they thought their child was a reincarnation of a high lama. And I said, “Oh my God, what did they do?” And she said, “Oh, they sent the baby to the monastery to be educated.” And I was so fascinated because from a Western perspective, it’d be so hard to give your child up in that way, and from her perspective, it seemed quite like, of course that’s what you do. So I wrote a play about it called The Oldest Boy, and in doing so, I just read troves and troves of books on the subject. And I think it was that reading that really altered my thinking. And then I just happened to be at a teaching with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, who was teaching in New York, who just was offering refuge at the end of her teaching, and so I took it.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s funny, a lot of things that you describe happen unexpectedly by chance or through synchronicity. You mentioned, for instance, taking refuge. You hadn’t expected to, but that just happened. There are also eerier type coincidences, like the gift you dreamt about and anticipated from a friend who in fact was giving you that very gift. You couldn’t have known. Or reading a Tibetan text by a teacher whose student happens to either be on the train or appear at Penn Station. I don’t remember. How do you see these things? You know, I was interviewing Ocean Vuong, and he was talking about the eerie, or what he described as things that hadn’t quite manifested or couldn’t quite fully manifest. I wonder how you see coincidences like that.

Sarah Ruhl: I think they’re not coincidences. I think they’re synchronicity that points out that the universe is much more quantum than we care to understand or admit. And I remember someone telling me, you know, once you start on this meditation path, you’ll find it just happens more and more. And I have found that to be true. The $2 bill dream was kind of fascinating and amazing. It was my friend Polly Noonan who’s an actor, and she was coming out to an opera of mine, and she was helping me by flying with my mom from Chicago to New York to see the opera. My mom was having mobility issues at the time. And I dreamed that Polly gave me a $2 bill as an opening gift for the opera. And in the dream, we had this whole conversation about money and labor and friendship and art, and she apologized for giving me money because she thought, well, that’s a strange gift to give for a piece of art. And we talked about whether money was valuable or not, and what happened when two artists make a different amount of money in a year, how does that affect a friendship. We had this whole conversation in the dream. And then the next day I texted Polly and said, “I had a dream you gave me a $2 bill, or two $2 bills.” And she was like, “Oh my God, that’s insane.” And she just texted me a picture of the two $2 bills that she was planning to give me for opening night. And I told her about what we talked about, and she’s like, “Wow, OK. Message received.” I don’t know how to explain that. I mean, Polly and I had never discussed $2 bills or the symbolism of it. I somehow received some kind of message about it, and it went through the porousness of my brain while sleeping. I don’t know how to explain these things, but I do think there’s something about meditation and lucid dreaming that offers some fascinating insights where truth seems stranger than fiction.

James Shaheen: Hmm. You know, you dedicate a chapter to your student, Max Ritvo, who died of leukemia. So can you share a bit about what you learned from Max as one of your teachers who was formerly a student?

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, Max Ritvo was an amazing poet and human being, and he wrote two books of poetry before he died. He had a pediatric cancer that came back when he was my student at Yale, and we became really close friends when he graduated. I learned a lot from Max about not waiting to be demonstrative to people who you love. I mean, I think my Midwestern family’s very warm but also a little taciturn about demonstrations of love or affection. It’s, you know, a little Scandinavian in that respect. And Max knew there wasn’t time. So he did exactly what he wanted to. He wrote exactly how much he wanted to. And he loved as many people as he could, and he told them so with the time that he had. He had a wild imagination and a wild open heart. And he also taught me to share my poetry, which is something I did not do before I met Max. I wrote poetry my whole life. But at a point when I moved over to playwriting, I thought, well, the poems are private. The poems are separate. And Max was like, no. Read your poems out loud, share your poems with me, read your poems out loud with me. And maybe you could say that Max had a genius for living life out loud and volubly, and I tried to take that to heart when I lost him.

James Shaheen: It was especially fun to read the part about how voluble on stage he was and how he dressed and how he shouted, and he said, “Oh no, I’ve embarrassed you.”

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, I mean, Max would wear these amazing outfits, pink kimonos, when he read his poetry out loud, and he had a big booming voice and he would circle. And one time we were at a cafe in Brooklyn and he’s like, “I wrote a poem. Can I recite it to you? Can I read it out loud to you?” And I was like, “OK.” And he’s like, “Will you stand to receive the poem?” I was delighted and mortified. Completely mortified. There was like a person I knew in the corner I was standing receiving this poem. And then when I expressed a slight degree of embarrassment to Max, he was so sort of heartbroken that he had embarrassed me and so apologetic. And what a wonderful thing to stand and be read a poem. What a wonderful thing.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I think you said you were the right kind of embarrassed, if I remember right.

Sarah Ruhl: Yeah, I tried to explain to him that I was the right kind of embarrassed, but he was like, “No, no, I, mortified you.”

James Shaheen: You know, the book also explores your own health challenges and your eventual diagnosis with Lyme disease, which I hadn’t known about last time I spoke with you. I don’t believe you’d been diagnosed. And you say that when you were sick, you continued to write because writing had become a form of prayer. So what does it mean for writing to become a form of prayer?

Sarah Ruhl: I think you’re right. I think I didn’t have that diagnosis then when I last spoke to you.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you had just written Smile, and I think it was that book that this doctor read and realized, “Oh, she has Lyme.”

Sarah Ruhl: It was crazy. Yeah, it was. I had to write a book to get a diagnosis. This doctor called out of the blue and said, “I think you have neurological Lyme disease.” It hadn’t shown up that way in my blood work, and he told me to get better blood work and then a spinal tap. And indeed I had Lyme disease. So I was very grateful for the diagnosis. And I guess your question about prayer, I guess for me, it wasn’t necessarily that I was writing to get better or praying to get better, but I was trying to commune with the invisible world when my body was not so fun. You know, the embodied world was not so fun. And so this other world of language and thought and prayer, the quiet of that and the focus of that gave me a direction and a ballast when other things in my life felt really like they were disintegrating.

James Shaheen: You know, in a similar vein, you discussed the importance of ritual, and you write that through repetition, rituals that anchor a week become an anchor for a life. So can you say more about how you relate to rituals? You spoke a little bit about it, but I thought that was interesting. Rituals that anchor a week become an anchor for a life.

Sarah Ruhl: That particular sentence was written in an essay about Shabbat. We started going to our neighbor’s Shabbat during the pandemic and formed a little bubble with them. We’re not Jewish, but they kept inviting us and we kept going and it became such a beautiful ritual, a family ritual for us. And again, a ritual about stopping and about demarcating, OK, here’s the beginning of ritual time and the end of ordinary quotidian time, which is also what theater is. You know, as soon as the curtain goes up, it’s the beginning of ritual time, and when the curtain comes down again, it’s the end of ritual time, and I find that in our digital world, we have fewer and fewer of those demarcations. You know, a text can reach you anywhere and work can reach you at all times and you forget to make thresholds to pass through, to say, “Now is ritual time. Now is not work time.”

James Shaheen: You know, it’s funny, I’m thinking as you’re talking, it’s true. You can text anybody, anywhere, at any time. The other side of that is interesting is that I no longer simply call people. So I have a friend and we just call each other without warning.

Sarah Ruhl: I love it.

James Shaheen: And that spontaneity is also gone. And you text somebody and say, “Do you have time to talk?” when we used to just pick up the phone. It’s like a neighbor used to knock on the door. That seems to be gone. I miss that.

Sarah Ruhl: I miss it so much, and yeah, sometimes someone will, say, try to make a date to talk. And I said, could you just call me when you have time? Like in the old way that we used to do? Or you think something’s terribly wrong when someone calls you out of the blue.

James Shaheen: So a friend of mine and I have agreed that we will just call each other, and it’s funny, if he calls, I always answer because that’s kind of the agreement, you know?

James Shaheen: One question I thought was very interesting is this: Can one be one’s own teacher? So how do you answer this question?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, I was torn when someone first asked me that. My first thought was, yes, of course I believe in autodidacts. I believe in reading. I believe you can be your own teacher. And then I thought about it and I thought, no. The whole point of my book is that you can’t be your own teacher, that you need to find the other person, the other being who is reflecting back to you, who is in relation with you, who is correcting you or asking questions of you or just listening to you. Now, it could be a therapist or a neighbor, a partner, not a teacher proper, but I kind of think we need other people.

James Shaheen: So this is also a question that often comes up in Buddhist circles: Does one need a teacher? And you discuss your own experience of searching long and hard for Buddhist teachings from books rather than a physical teacher. So what made you decide to formally seek out a Buddhist teacher? It seems to me that it was another one of those synchronicities. 

Sarah Ruhl: It was. It was a series of synchronicities that led me to find Lama Pema again, who I had run into at an Amtrak station in Penn Station. He was on his way to Vermont to do a teaching, I was on my way to New Haven, and I hadn’t seen him in a couple years. He had been this advisor on The Oldest Boy, and he said hi, and I said hi. I was reading a Thomas Merton book about his journals in Asia and he said, “What are you reading?” And I said, “Thomas Merton.” He said, “Oh, that’s so funny. My teacher’s handwriting is right on this page.” And it was right where I was in the book, and somehow Merton had come across his teacher, and his handwriting in Tibetan was right there on the book’s page. It was bizarre. And I thought, this is probably not an accident.

James Shaheen: Probably not. And so you say that in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, if you treat your teacher as a Buddha, the more like the Buddha your teacher will be, and the more blessings from the teacher you will receive. Can you say more about this? How can this form of devotion in itself be transformative?

Sarah Ruhl: I think that’s from Words of my Perfect Teacher, and it’s a really interesting concept that I think, you know, the pitfall is, in my view, treating people like gurus who then disappoint you, you know, treating people as perfected beings and then, oh, actually they’re human and they disappoint you. But the other part of that I think is really to do with looking at the perfected nature of other people. It’s endowing everyone, including your teachers, with something that hopefully they already have. I’m not doing a good job of explaining this. but it’s less, I think about idealizing your teacher and more about acknowledging the perfections that all of us have, and that when you can endow people with that brightness, that goodness, I think it redounds back to you as an observer. I think someone else should explain it, not me, because it’s a little esoteric and if I’d had better Buddhist training, maybe I could explain it better. Maybe you could explain.

James Shaheen: Well, no, I was just talking to Lama John Makransky, and he was talking about not mistaking what the teacher awakens in you for the teacher, so understand that it’s in you, and along those lines you quote a line that your friend shared with you: “Whatever arises for you there, that is the perfect teaching.” So to turn your own question back on you, how can we be attentive students to the teachings unfolding at every moment all around us? 

Sarah Ruhl: I mean, I think that’s the task, is to go about our business and view obstacles as teachers and to view ourselves as students at every point in our lives so that we don’t become ossified and we don’t become smug and we don’t become automatic. I think having the curiosity of a student forever is something to aspire to and to see even the most irritating, pesky, awful life events as an occasion for teaching is a good way to go about your day if you can.

James Shaheen: You know, that line, “Whatever arises for you there, that is the perfect teaching”—before we began, we were talking about Rilke. That’s very much along the lines of his advice, I mean, telling the young poet what arises in you from the depths, and that was your guide. OK. You say that in Sanskrit, the word for teacher and the word for learning have the same root, and you suggest that the best teachers keep teaching because they want to keep learning. So can you say more about this? How do you view the relationship between teaching and learning?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, I think there’s a wonderful slippage that really close teachers and students have when they choose each other, that there’s a slippage between the teacher and the student. And it’s something I shared with Max Ritvo. It’s something I share with my teacher, Paula Vogel. And it’s something I see so much in my mother who I wrote about in the book in a couple essays. She’s such a present person. She was a teacher of English her whole life and an actor, and she’s 82 and she’s still completely in the position of an excited learner and teacher and still taking classes. Every time I call my mom, she’s just read the most interesting book and that she has to share that information with you, and there’s a giddiness, I think, for her about the receiving and giving of knowledge, the exchange of knowledge, and I guess going back to the original thing we’re talking about in the conversation, that media, digital media gets rid of relation and teaching, it also gets rid of exchange. There’s no reciprocity in a MasterClass or a lecture on YouTube. And I think there’s something about the exchange and the reciprocity that is just part of the gold when you think about teachers who’ve had a huge impact on you.

James Shaheen: So you also note that finding a teacher is a process of letting oneself be taught, which you suggest as a kind of bravery. How so?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, I remember talking to my sister when I was close to done with the book and asking about what mentors she had. She’s a doctor, and she was saying she didn’t feel she had had any good or really close intimate mentors when she became a doctor, and she said she views her husband as a teacher and my mother and people in her life, but she said, “I don’t think I was willing to make myself vulnerable enough to become really close to a teacher.” And so that fascinated me. And I do think about students I’ve had who’ve sort of stepped forward or sort of raised their hand in a way, not visibly, but invisibly, and said, “I want to be taught. I want more teaching.” There are the students who pass through the classroom, and that’s fine. But then there are the ones who just invisibly in some way raise their hand and say, “I want to be taught by you outside of the classroom as well,” and then it kind of crosses over from teaching to mentorship. And it’s hard, I think, to raise your hand in case you might be rejected, maybe, in some way.

James Shaheen: Yeah. So let’s say you go from that classroom relationship to mentorship, and also at a certain point it jumps over into a kind of friendship without that teacher-student relationship being lost. Can you say something about that?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, that’s one of the thrills is when friendship, true friendship, arises out of a teacher-student relationship. There’s this quote by Martin Buber in the book, let’s see if I can find it. Well, I just have, “The relation in education is one of true dialogue,” by Buber, but he has this text that’s much more esoteric where he talks in detail about the transformation of the teacher-student relationship to friendship and, in a way, how fraught with peril it can be too. You know, I think this is why universities have had to go to great lengths to make sure there are boundaries in education so that it doesn’t become too much for the student. But I think, what do I think, I think some of my dearest friends have been my students and have been my teachers.

James Shaheen: Mmm. One last question for you, Sarah. You say that in writing this book, you sent your essays to the teachers you wrote about. I was wondering that until you finally say that’s what you did. What was this process like, and what did it teach you?

Sarah Ruhl: Well, it taught me a really important lesson, which is the brevity of all things, which we learn all the time, but there were four teachers who were older who I lost by the time the book was done, and I was so grateful that I had sent them the essays before they died. One was David Constant, this classics professor who I really adored, and I’d sent him the essay I wrote about him and learned later that he had cancer. I had no idea he was sick. Another thing I learned was how rare it is for people to thank their teachers, because I remember thanking my music teacher, my piano teacher, and her saying, “God, I I never am really sure if I’ve had an effect.” I think of her as such a consequential person and that she’s taught generations of kids how to play the piano, and the fact that she didn’t know or she didn’t hear that often from former students was shocking to me. So I was really grateful to be in touch with all those people and to have had them know what a huge impact they had on me.

James Shaheen: Yeah, reading that in particular made me think I better start thanking some of these people, you know?

Sarah Ruhl: I mean, simple thank yous, I guess they’ve done studies on this. Thank yous are more meaningful to people than we think. I don’t know how you possibly can measure this, but I feel like I’ve read sociologists trying to measure this, and simple thank yous go a long way.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, we know what it’s like to be thanked. So Sarah, anything else before we close?

Sarah Ruhl: I am just grateful to you for reading the book so, so deeply and for all of your insights, and speaking of the joy of listening, you have a beautiful way of listening, and I’m just grateful to you for the conversation.

James Shaheen: Oh, thank you. I loved that book. So, Sarah Ruhl, it’s been a great pleasure. Thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Lessons from My Teachers, available now.

James Shaheen:  ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Sarah Ruhl. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!