Samaya

This is from Pema Chodron's book, "When Things Fall Apart."  I read it while sitting under the dryer at the hairdresser, of all places.

In the vajrayana, there is something called the samaya bond, whereby the student's total experience is bound to the path.  At a certain time, after a lot of intelligent questioning, the student may finally feel ready to enter into a samaya relationship with his or her teacher.  If the student accepts and trusts the teacher completely and the teacher accepts the student, they can enter into the unconditional relationship called samaya.  The teacher will never give up on the student no matter how mixed up he or she might be, and the student will also never leave the teacher, no matter what.

The student and teacher are bound together.  It's like a pact that they make to attain enlightenment together.  Another definition of samaya is "sacred oath," or "sacred commitment."  But it's nothing holy; it's a commitment to sanity---to indestructible sanity.  Samaya is like a marriage with reality, a marriage with the phenomenal world.  But it's a trick.  This marriage is a little bit like having amnesia.  We think that we have decided to marry this partner of our own free choice; however, unknown to us, we already are married.