The focus of this thesis is the Buddhist teacher-student relationship; embedded in this topic is the sub-focus of Buddhist teaching methods.
As a twenty-five-century-old tradition which has existed in nearly every region of Asia, Buddhism is necessarily a diverse religion which has undergone a great number of reinterpretations and transformations. The contemporary spread of Buddhism into the West promises the emergence of even more variations.
The teacher-student relationship reveals one of the more pronounced of these variations, and provides a means by which to more fully comprehend both the unity and diversity of classical and contemporary Buddhist theory and practice.
