Zoltán Cser

Teacher at Dharma Gate Buddhist College, Director of Dharma Gate Buddhist Church
(Meditation, Tibetan Buddhism, Yoga, Buddhist Practice)

A traditional teacher is someone who understands what they teach, clarifies their theses, breaks them down into parts, demonstrates logical connections, and then expects students to understand what they have understood during the exam. The most important question is: Do you understand? And if they do, the teacher is satisfied.

I don’t understand

For me, “I don’t understand” is the starting point—I clarify what I don’t understand, break it down, and highlight inconsistencies within a logical system. Since my youth, “I don’t understand” has guided my research and thinking. I tried to understand through mathematics, then through various fields of life—why things happen the way they do. Whenever I understood something at university, I left the institution, which my surroundings never understood, and in 1991, I applied to the newly established Buddhist College, thinking: If I don’t understand the external world, maybe I’ll understand the internal one.

Questions filled my mind, such as:

• Astrology has 12 signs, but why 12? Why is this the basis of our timekeeping—2×12 hours, 12 months?
• Meditation involves a cross-legged posture, but why?
• The law of karma is famous and widely accepted, but what exactly is the causal relationship between things? Am I in a state of cause or a state of effect?
• Until now, the world was just the world, but now everything is karma—why?

How?

Buddhist practice then raised another question: How?

• How can one sit motionless?
• How can one stop thoughts?
• How can one attain enlightenment?
• And back to the old question: Why should thoughts be stopped? Why should one practice?

In my experience, dissecting “I don’t understand” brings me closer to something internal, something more essential, something connected to our core. The “hows” are increasingly important to me—the correct posture, movement and breathing exercises, the precise application of meditation techniques, and the quality, even enjoyable, practice that allows us to see questions more clearly while making the answers seem less important.

Why?

Teaching, then, is nothing more than the development of intelligence—the cultivation of intelligence that arises from listening, thinking, and ultimately deep contemplation.
For me, this is the essence of teaching.
But WHY?