Examining the Guru's Teachings

The first criterion, according to the Vedic scriptures, is the quality of the words the teacher speaks. (Even a fool may be highly esteemed-until he speaks.) In the Bhagavad-gita Lord Sri Krsna, the original spiritual master, tells his disciple Arjuna, "The self-realized soul can impart knowledge unto you because he has seen the truth." In other words, a genuine guru must have realized the Absolute Truth, the Personality of Godhead, and he must be able to impart this truth to his disciple, thus freeing him (or her) from repeated birth and death.

We should therefore immediately reject as outright charlatans those so-called gurus who pretend to have some spiritual knowledge, but who teach their disciples only how to gain some material advantage-a slimmer body, better sex life, success in business, and so on. Real spiritual life means getting free from the agony of birth and death. How can a common man, unable to distinguish spirit from matter-and thus himself caught in the cycle of birth and death-claim to be a spiritual master? Such cheaters generally take up the "guru business" just to earn a living. But the Srimad-Bhagavatam, the essence of all Vedic scriptures, sternly warns, "No one should become a guru unless he can free his disciple from birth and death."

A true spiritual master must not only be able to distinguish spirit from matter; he must also be able to distinguish the minute, individual spirit (the soul) from the supreme spirit (the Supersoul, or God). Failure to make this important distinction disqualifies many of today's so-called spiritual masters. In fact, blurring the difference between God and the living entity is the most common philosophical flaw among modern gurus. Their reasoning goes something like this: "The eternal spirit soul within the body is Brahman, and the supreme spirit beyond the body is also Brahman. Therefore, we are all equal to the Supreme Brahman-or in other words, everyone is God."

But Lord Krsna Himself denies this idea in the Bhagavad-gita (15.7): "The living entities in this material world are eternally My fragmental parts." It is certainly true that the Vedic scriptures, especially the Upanisads, teach meditation on Brahman, the eternal spirit. And they also teach the realization that each one of us, as a spirit soul, is also Brahman, separate from our material body. But beyond this all the Vedic scriptures explain that although each of us is spirit, we are only minute sparks of the supreme spirit, God. In other words, God is supreme and infinite, and we are all His infinitesimal expansions; therefore, our duty is to serve Him. This simple axiom is the essence of theism, and all the world's religions loudly declare it. For a guru to omit or distort this teaching is a serious philosophical lapse. Behind his negligence we will usually find a cheating mentality-a strong aversion for surrendering to the mastership of God. So, when the teachings of a spiritual master are inimical to bhakti, or loving devotion to God-when he teaches that there is no personal God, or that God is only an energy, or that we can become God-then we should reject him.

Just as it is a fraud for a so-called guru to offer only gross material benefits, or to collect money from his disciples for selfish aims, or to teach the disciples that they are God or can become God-so it is an even greater fraud for the so-called guru to proclaim that he himself is an incarnation of God. The Vedic scriptures predict the incarnations of God and describe their extraordinary qualities and activities. So any ordinary person who poses as a guru and says he is an incarnation of God exposes himself as the greatest fool in human society. The truth is that everyone, including the spiritual master, is an eternal servant of God.

Since we are all servants of the Supreme Lord, a bona fide guru must be a devotee of the Supreme Lord and teach others how to become His devotees. In fact, unless the guru is a devotee of Lord Krsna, he cannot understand transcendental knowledge-what to speak of imparting it to others. An ideal example of a qualified recipient of transcendental knowledge is Arjuna, whom Lord Krsna empowered to understand the Bhagavad-gita because of his devotional attitude. Krsna explains in the fourth chapter, "O Arjuna, this very ancient science of the relationship with the Supreme is today told by Me to you because you are My devotee as well as My friend; therefore you can understand the transcendental mystery of this science" (Bg. 4.3). Though Krsna spoke the Bhagavad-gita five thousand years ago, His words still hold true today: only the Lord's devotees can understand transcendental knowledge.

Another important criterion for a guru is that he himself must be a disciple of a bona fide spiritual master-one who is part of a succession of spiritual masters coming from Lord Krsna Himself. A guru's teachings cannot be genuine unless he has received his knowledge by this process of disciplic succession, because one who is not part of a genuine disciplic chain can have no access to the Vedic knowledge. So we cannot overemphasize the importance of the disciplic succession in determining the credibility of a spiritual teacher. No matter how learned a scholar one may be, he cannot understand the import of Vedic knowledge by the speculative approach. In other words, no one can know the Transcendence by his imperfect sense perception. As the Svetasvatara Upanisad (6.23) explains, "Only unto those great souls who simultaneously have implicit faith in both the Lord and the spiritual master are all the imports of Vedic knowledge automatically revealed."