Guru A's official status as a guru comes from his being the head of a major meditation center near Kandy. But he also leads various meditation groups around Kandy and Peradeniya and makes frequent trips abroad to teach meditation. He is highly respected by his followers although be does not insist on his guru status and would prefer to be regarded as a spiritual friend or Kalyana Mitta. His low key style of teaching is consistent with this image of a spiritual friend. Nevertheless, his followers clearly regard him as their guru and defer to him as an authority on the spiritual path.

　　 His authority comes from both his knowledge of the texts and his own experience in meditation. He uses the texts himself and also encourages followers to study them. This dependence on the texts is a sign of his relative orthodoxy since many of the contemporary gurus, as we shall see, do not employ the texts. His dhamma sermons and meditation teachings are also relatively orthodox, however, the teachings of this guru also exhibit the influences of a number of foreign teachers, such as Ajahn Chah and some of the Zen meditation teachers. Being an avid reader, he absorbs ideas from various sources and also collects ideas during his travels abroad. So although he is fairly orthodox he is also somewhat syncretic, although I doubt that his followers always recognize these syncretic elements in his teaching.

　　 He explains that his approach is based on using meditation to help people overcome suffering. Although he gives it a somewhat contemporary twist, this is a very orthodox goal recalling the Four Noble Truths and the central teachings of Theravada Buddhism. To reach this goal he stresses the meditation techniques of

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Metta (loving kindness) and Anapanasati (mindfulness of breathing). In his meditation classes he employs a kind of guided meditation and discussion approach, trying to help his followers use these meditations to address their concrete problems. In this way, his meditation sessions often resemble a kind of group therapy session.

　　 Another form of mindfulness (sati) meditation that Guru A employs to eliminate suffering involves teaching his pupils to be mindful of thoughts and emotions and their arising. He asks the meditators to recall something that someone did that made them angry. When they remember this incident the anger may arise again. The goal is to try to observe this incident now without reacting to it, to observe the anger with an awareness of anicca, impermanence. The meditator should observe it as not "my" anger, but should see it objectively, as a case of anger arising from a certain cause. If people can deal with remembered anger, then they can also deal with anger in the present, the key being to see what caused the anger. When you see that the cause of your anger is an expectation that you have had, then you see that the cause of suffering is with you and not with the other person. The point, he says, is not whether we react emotionally, but how quickly we recover. We are bound to have emotions, but we should not allow them to control us. To explain how this should work, he cites a teaching from the Buddha which says that anger -- or other emotions -- in the mind can be of three kinds: like letters written on the surface of water -- the anger is only momentary; like letters written on sand; or like letters written in stone. The goal, of course, is that our reactions to things should be like "letters written on water".

　　 He also teaches his pupils to observe current thoughts, feelings and emotions to see how they develop and create our suffering. This he sees as part of the 4 truths. He explains that we cause our own suffering because we have desires and expectations for the way things should be, and that when they do not work out in the way we want, we suffer. But if we could just accept the present and not impose desires, then we could avoid much of the present suffering. He says that this approach does not amount to just accepting suffering, but it removes suffering because suffering is a construct that we put on top of the real events that are happening.

　　 His followers report that these teachings are very helpful. He does not emphasize the higher attainments (ariya puggala), but has a very practical approach that teaches people to use meditation to relieve their problems and suffering. In all of this, he is, as we said, relatively orthodox. He is not extremely anti-Sangha, although he clearly respects the meditating monks more than the others and has little use for the rituals of contemporary orthodox Buddhism.

　　 Despite his relative orthodoxy, Guru A does have some unique elements to his work. He incorporates yoga in his teaching of meditation, something not done by many teachers in Sri Lanka today. He probably was influenced in this by Guru Ratnakara who has included yoga in his practice for many years. Guru A also employs meditation as a means of healing illness, which he sees as a more explicit form of suffering. He has worked with doctors and medical students to help them understand the intention of meditation. He has also gone directly to the cancer wards of the hospitals to teach the patients. He instructs these patients to radiate thoughts of Metta, loving kindness, onto their body at the place of illness. Another technique is to help the patients deal with feelings about themselves because they usually do not like