Safety in Duality

In a dialogue where the Buddha listed the duties of teachers to their students (DN 31), the final and most prominent item on the list was this: that the teacher provide the student with protection in all directions. Of course, this didn’t mean that teachers were duty-bound to follow their students around with shields to ward off potential dangers. Instead, it meant that teachers should provide their students with knowledge that the students could use to protect themselves in every situation. And in a dialogue where the Buddha criticized some teachers of other sects for leaving their students unprotected (AN 3:62), he made clear that protective knowledge was expressed in terms of a duality: clearly seeing the difference between what should and shouldn’t be done.