Scholars Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg have a look at how Buddhist sanghas have responded and advanced in response to the moral breaches of the previous few a long time. From the Winter 2023 difficulty “The Teacher & The Student” of Buddhadharma.
Photo by Murielle Michetti Baumgartner.
In March 1993, a gaggle of twenty-two Western Buddhist academics representing completely different lineages met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, to debate the transmission and adaptation of Buddhism to the West. One of their central matters was moral instructor conduct. Participants mirrored on variations between seeing the instructor as a dwelling buddha and as a human non secular pal, hierarchical and democratic fashions of authority, and Tibetan monastic versus American lay instructor trainings.
This dialog was prompted by a number of high-profile instances of sexual abuse and moral misconduct by Asian and American academics over the years. In 1983, as an illustration, married Japanese Zen instructor Maezumi Roshi, founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center, apologized for having affairs with a number of feminine college students and entered therapy for alcoholism. In 1989, it was revealed that Osel Tendzin, the American dharma inheritor of Chögyam Trungpa, had engaged in unprotected intercourse with a quantity of his college students regardless of understanding he was HIV optimistic. One pupil later died of AIDS, as did Tendzin.*
As American Zen priest Bodhin Kjolhede defined about the 1993 occasion, “Several of our displays addressed the grave drawback of moral misconduct on the half of Buddhist academics. Many of us, together with the Dalai Lama, have grown more and more alarmed in latest years at the abuse of alcohol, intercourse, energy, and cash by roshis, senseis, lamas, rinpoches, and tulkus in addition to some academics in the Vipassana and different Theravadan traditions.”
At the finish of the convention, the academics fashioned the Network of Western Buddhist Teachers and issued an “open letter” which said that “No matter what degree of non secular attainment a instructor has, or claims to have reached, no particular person can stand above the norms of moral conduct.” It inspired college students to confront and, if mandatory, publicize academics’ unethical conduct, and to acknowledge the “helpful insights” that may very well be gained from non-Buddhist frameworks reminiscent of psychotherapy.
While the open letter instructed that Western academics had been at the forefront of tackling Buddhist sexual misconduct, signatories of that letter, and their college students, have in the thirty years since confronted sexual misconduct and abuse allegations themselves. Between 2008 and 2020, 5 girls accused American Tibetan Buddhist instructor Lama Surya Das, one of the convention’s organizers, of sexual misconduct. Junpo Denis Kelly’s Mondo Zen neighborhood went by way of a disaster after he had what he described as an “affair” with a married pupil. In 2019, second-generation Insight instructor Noah Levine, who was educated by convention co-organizer Jack Kornfield, was discovered to have damaged the precepts of sexual misconduct and nonharming. (Levine’s authorization to show was withdrawn quickly after.)
These sobering information present that sexual abuse and associated moral breaches have continued throughout racial, generational, and lineage traces in transnational Buddhism for over 4 a long time. How have Buddhists responded to those crises? In what methods have Western understandings of Buddhist traditions matured? Which non-Buddhist frameworks have they discovered useful in addressing instructor misconduct? What new instructor fashions, moral trainings, neighborhood practices, and organizational practices have they developed? What challenges stay?
The Distorting Lens of Orientalism and Idealization
The majority of American convert Buddhists first encountered Buddhism by way of the Sixties and ’70s counterculture, which was half of a cultural lineage that historian J. J. Clarke known as “affirmative Orientalism.” Championed by Western Romantics, affirmative Orientalism presents the “mystical and transcendent” East as offering a non secular antidote to the materially superior however soulless West. Working inside this wider Orientalist framework, each Asian and Western Buddhist modernist figures promoted an idealized mannequin of the instructor that mirrored decontextualized doctrines and non secular archetypes somewhat than social realities.
In the case of Rinzai Zen Buddhism, as an illustration, the instructor is offered as an iconoclastic monk who has transcended dualistic moral norms and could use unconventional strategies to get up his college students. This attracts on historic figures reminiscent of poet-monk Ikkyu Sojun (1394–1491), who discovered liberation by masturbating, visiting brothels, and falling madly in love with a ravishing blind singer known as Shin. However, as scholar of Japanese religions Lori Meeks factors out, in modern Japan, such examples are usually handled as rhetorical units for understanding vacancy, and not as fashions of conduct for extraordinary monks. It is tough to think about that many parishioners in modern Japan would tolerate an area temple monk who tried to justify unethical conduct by citing the instance of a determine like Ikkyu.
American converts had been usually not educated about the particular social and institutional contexts that Asian Buddhist academics had been embedded in. While these contexts are themselves marked by androcentrism and aren’t resistant to abuses, they do present native programs of moral requirements, restraint, and accountability. Unmoored from their regulatory programs and idealized by American college students, some Asian Buddhist academics struggled to keep up moral integrity in the new and radically completely different cultural context they discovered themselves in. Other predatory academics had been in a position to take benefit of their college students’ naivete and the lack of institutional oversight. Multiple accounts of Rigpa founder Sogyal Lakar (aka Sogyal Rinpoche), as an illustration, present that he deliberately manipulated Vajrayana Buddhist doctrine and Western college students’ idealizations to abuse repeatedly with out consequence.
Responses to Sexual Abuse: From Teacher Boundary Training to Board Training
The first wave of sexual misconduct and different abuses of energy by Buddhist academics in the Nineteen Eighties pierced by way of some American Buddhists’ idealizations and pressured them to come across the actuality somewhat than the ultimate of Buddhist academics. One early response got here from Jack Kornfield, cofounder of Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and Spirit Rock Meditation Center. The IMS neighborhood was thrown into disaster after an incident involving the Burmese Indian instructor Anagarika Munindra, who got here to the IMS to show a three-month retreat in 1984. Although he held anagarika vows, which embody celibacy, Munindra grew to become sexually concerned with a younger girl on the retreat. This was problematic not only for the integrity of Munindra’s personal vows, but in addition for the gathered retreatants, all of whom had been anticipated to take and maintain short-term vows of celibacy at the retreat middle for the period. Kornfield insisted that the board of IMS learn of what he considered a critical moral breach, one compounded by the indisputable fact that the younger girl in query had a historical past of sexual abuse.
In 1985, Kornfield printed an article known as “Sex Lives of the Gurus” in Yoga Journal. He surveyed fifty-four non secular academics (Buddhist, Hindu, Jain), of whom forty-eight had been males and six had been girls, and found that thirty-four had had sexual encounters with a number of of their college students. While describing some of these relationships as “aware, loving, and freely chosen,” Kornfield acknowledges that “some have concerned the exploitation of the instructor–pupil relationship.” He continues, “Nonetheless, of the college students with whom I’ve spoken, most of whom had been girls, roughly half report that such sexual relationships have undermined their follow, their relationship with their instructor, and their emotions of self-worth.”
Coming to comprehend that greater than the conventional, Buddhist, 5 precepts had been wanted to information academics, Kornfield wrote a Teacher Code of Ethics for IMS that was additionally adopted by Spirit Rock. The Code included an expanded interpretation of the third principle towards sexual misconduct that condemned academics utilizing “their educating position to take advantage of their authority and place in order to imagine a sexual relationship with a pupil.” It additionally proposed {that a} real and dedicated relationship may very well be attainable between a instructor and a former pupil, however any such relationship required a impartial interval of three months, throughout which the folks concerned would dissolve their instructor–pupil affiliation and chorus from getting into a relationship. IMS and Spirit Rock additionally developed a multiple-teacher mannequin as a strategy to mitigate the energy of a sole educating authority.
Kornfield had educated as a medical psychologist and drew on rising psychotherapeutic, feminist, and authorized understandings of energy relationships between therapists and purchasers. This framework acknowledges that consent isn’t attainable in relationships in which there’s an influence differential and that sexual relationships typically end result in hurt to the shopper.
One landmark e-book was psychiatrist Peter Rutter’s Sex in the Forbidden Zone: When Men in Power—Therapists, Doctors, Clergy, Teachers, and Others—Betray Women’s Trust, printed in 1989. Rutter labored with the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) after abbot Richard Baker was pressured to resign because of his sexual affairs with feminine college students and monetary improprieties in 1983. In Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, Michael Downing discusses how SFZC adopted psychotherapeutic and feminist fashions throughout an extended interval of moral reflection and institutional reshaping in the wake of Baker’s misconduct and the neighborhood’s complicity in his abuses. In her 1990 essay, “Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America,” Buddhist practitioner and journalist Katy Butler presents a psychological interpretation of why grownup college students failed to carry their abusive academics accountable, suggesting that many of these college students come from households marred by alcoholism and incest in which denial, secrecy, and enablement are rife and that they repeat these unconscious psychological dynamics in their non secular communities.
After Rinzai Zen instructor Eido Shimano was uncovered for perpetrating sexual harassment and abuse for many years, ninety American Zen academics launched an open letter in which they vowed to finish the “tradition of silence” and the “idealization of the instructor” that had enabled abuses. They described abuses primarily in therapeutic language: they had been dedicated by narcissists, enabled by college students’ idealizations, and occurring in Buddhist sanghas that resembled dysfunctional households. The open letter was co-authored by Myoan Grace Schireson, a Soto Zen Buddhist priest and former medical psychologist, who means that one of the most pressing duties dealing with the Western Zen neighborhood is to develop coaching applications that can educate Zen clergymen, lay academics, and practitioners in psychological dynamics and developmental wants. She codeveloped one such program—the Shogaku Priest Ongoing Training (SPOT)—which ran from 2006 to 2014 and is now included right into a grasp’s of divinity program provided by way of the Shogaku Institute.
SPOT’s underlying premise is that Zen meditative attainment doesn’t routinely translate into emotional and relational maturity, and its goal is to teach members on “points of energy, transference, projection, idealization, and battle.” As Schireson explains:
Imagine a psychotherapist who has no coaching in transference, countertransference, or projection. Such is the case for a lot of Buddhist academics. A Buddhist instructor serving to a pupil with troubling feelings could mistakenly expertise the pupil’s gratitude, affection, or loving transference as an expression of private love somewhat than an anticipated final result in an intimate serving to relationship. This is particularly true when instructor and pupil meet in one-to-one interviews. A Buddhist instructor’s countertransference can result in sexual boundary violations.
As with therapists and purchasers, clergy misconduct acknowledges that consensual relationships aren’t attainable between clergy and congregants and that clergy misconduct is an abuse of energy and a violation of belief. Rev. Marie Fortune has been at the forefront of addressing clergy misconduct, having began the ReligionTrust Institute, a corporation that developed “Healthy Boundaries” coaching for clergy and non secular leaders throughout non secular traditions. (It has just lately printed the complete handbook Responding to Spiritual Teacher Misconduct: A Handbook as a free useful resource.) Fortune’s work is included in Safe Harbor: Guidelines, Process, Resources for Ethics and Right Conduct in Buddhist Communities, printed by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in the Nineteen Nineties. In partnership with the ReligionTrust Institute, Zen priest Jan Chozen Bays developed a Buddhist Healthy Boundaries coaching. Now operating independently, it’s a web-based, extremely interactive course that “gives Buddhist leaders with the instruments and data to grasp the significance of healthy boundaries in non secular communities and to critically discern the complexities of boundaries, energy, and vulnerability in non secular instructor–pupil relationships.”
Another main space of response has targeted on organizational accountability. One difficulty is that particular person academics have typically had absolute authority with inadequate peer assist or neighborhood oversight to mitigate their energy. Another is blurred organizational boundaries in which senior college students are additionally governing board members and communities lack clear moral pointers and grievance insurance policies. Archives from the Zen Studies Society, as an illustration, present that the Board of Trustees ignored a number of repeated complaints about sexual harassment and misconduct by Eido Shimano over a thirty-year interval.
In recognition of these issues, many communities have developed extra clear and democratic governance constructions, moral pointers and grievance insurance policies, and instructor accountability fashions. One instance is the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, whose founder Dainin Katagiri engaged in sexual relationships and undesirable advances to feminine college students. On its web site, the Center acknowledges this historical past and states that in response, “We instituted a transparent code of ethics stating that any sexual relationship between a instructor and his or her pupil is inappropriate and unacceptable. We developed instructor coaching applications and a management construction designed to assist a secure and clear setting.”
Under the steerage of former abbot Wendy Egyoku Nakao Roshi, the Zen Center of Los Angeles undertook a deep tradition reform that included a long time of neighborhood work and therapeutic. This course of is documented in the “Sangha Sutra,” a fifty-one-page booklet that paperwork the historical past of abuse at ZCLA and incorporates psychotherapeutic insights and boundary trainings with Buddhist ethics. Formatted as a Buddhist sutra textual content, the “Sangha Sutra” frames the work of therapeutic from instructor misconduct and abuses of energy as an integral half of Buddhist awakening.
Professional organizations have additionally rewritten their grievance and moral insurance policies. Under the management of Tenku Ruff, the Soto Zen Buddhist Association (SZBA) undertook a prolonged course of that included member surveys, city hall-style member conferences, neighborhood suggestions, and a sequence of displays on ethics, ensuing in the adoption of a brand new SZBA Grievance Process and Code of Ethics. The latter states that “Soto Zen Priests mustn’t interact in sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct contains sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, sexual innuendo, or any sample of conduct that will be perceived as sexual misconduct.” It additionally stipulates that members ought to keep away from sexual relationships with these they’re more likely to be in a instructor–pupil relationship with, even when consensual. SZBA members discovered in violation of the SZBA Code of Ethics could also be topic to sanctions, together with suspension of membership. These insurance policies function useful, efficient, up-to-date fashions for stopping and responding to sexual misconduct in Buddhist organizations.
Indeed, former Greater Boston Zen Center (GBZC) instructor Josh Bartok was suspended from SZBA after he was discovered to have breached the SZBA’s former ethics coverage. In the wake of his sexual misconduct, GBZC fractured and stays in disaster. However, some members developed a survivor-centered on-line useful resource “knowledgeable by a research-backed understanding of clergy energy dynamics” and together with a first-person assertion from the survivor. Rather than prioritize the expertise of the instructor or the wider neighborhood, a survivor-centered method places the wants of the survivors—as the harmed, most weak get together—first. This useful resource has been adopted by the solely present Buddhist survivor assist group, Heartwood’s Connecting Survivors of Guru and Teacher Abuse.
Understanding clergy energy dynamics isn’t solely an moral difficulty, however a authorized one. By 2022, 13 states and the District of Columbia had enacted legal guidelines that make it a criminal offense for clergy to interact in sexual misconduct with grownup congregants. Carol Merchasin is a former office harassment lawyer who has finished professional bono authorized work for a quantity of Buddhist survivors and participated in grassroots neighborhood reform efforts. This features a position on the advisory committee of Heartwood’s Connecting Survivors of Guru and Teacher Abuse and working with Buddhist survivor advocates to create tradition shifts in Buddhist communities. Merchasin has provided a sequence of workshops to coach organizations, significantly board members, on what procedures they should implement and observe to meet their authorized duties. In some of these workshops, Merchasin endeavors to attach this obligation with Buddhist formulations reminiscent of the bodhisattva precepts. In her more moderen work, nonetheless, she is much less involved with interesting to Buddhist commitments and extra targeted on stating authorized duties. As she warily observes, it has solely been the menace of prison or civil legislation that has spurred in any other case reluctant Buddhist organizations to droop abusive academics.
Merchasin labored with survivor Andrea Winn, whose groundbreaking Buddhist Project Sunshine (BPS) reviews revealed intergenerational sexual abuse in the Shambhala Buddhist neighborhood. Its founder Chögyam Trungpa, who died of alcohol-related issues at age forty-eight, overtly slept with feminine college students, some of whom have alleged they had been topic to bodily and emotional violence from him. In 2018, Trungpa’s son and successor, Sakyong Mipham, was pressured to step down from his management place after the second BPS report detailed his sexual abuse and misconduct towards feminine college students. Buddhist Project Sunshine signaled the want for and influence of survivor-centered approaches to sexual violence in Buddhist communities.
Ongoing Challenges
While it is very important determine how college students’ Orientalist romanticization of Buddhism has performed a job in abuse instances, it’s also vital to acknowledge the overlap between the doctrinal positions of some Asian Buddhist academics and college students’ idealizations. For occasion, after senior college students reported excessive abuse by Sogyal Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama gave a chat in which he mentioned Sogyal had been “disgraced,” denounced moral misconduct, and suggested college students to not indiscriminately settle for no matter their instructor mentioned. Other main Tibetan lamas, reminiscent of Khenpo Namdrol, nonetheless, extolled Sogyal and accused survivors of not solely breaking samaya (vows of dedication to the instructor), but in addition of destroying the dharma. Another complicating issue is that Buddhist sexual ethics articulated in the early custom is primarily involved with monastic purity and male entitlements and isn’t survivor-centered.
The considerably completely different social, cultural, institutional, and authorized contexts of Buddhism in North America and Europe have necessitated the adoption of conventional Asian Buddhist sexual ethics and instructor–pupil fashions. Yet initiatives reminiscent of Healthy Boundaries and the Shogaku Zen Institute have been met with resistance and rejection. The incorporation of psychotherapeutic insights and social justice understandings of energy into Buddhism have been challenged by those that see it as a reductive intrusion of non-Buddhist discourses into the custom. In reality, in a mirrored image on Sogyal Rinpoche, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche went as far as to say that fashionable liberal revisionings “had the potential to destroy Buddhism much more certainly than any of its inside scandals.”
Another problem is the willingness of particular person academics to mutually agree upon and adhere to a set of regulating moral practices and procedures adopted by their communities, associations, or extra casual networks. Consider the broad American Zen neighborhood, for instance. There have been difficulties in establishing widespread moral insurance policies and procedures. This is because of a number of causes: the sense that dharma transmission locations academics above typical ethics; disagreements round what ought to be included in moral requirements; insistence that conventional precepts are adequate; complaints of organizational overreach; interpersonal dynamics between academics; and the tradition of American individualism.
In different instances, particular person academics have helped set up organizational ethics however have merely refused to observe these requirements themselves. An instance right here is Noah Levine, founder of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society (ATS). Respective investigations from ATS and Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the place Levine was educated as a instructor, discovered that he had damaged the precepts of no hurt and sexual misconduct. His educating authority was rescinded. Levine, nonetheless, refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of each investigations and has continued educating.
Centering Survivors
As the a number of responses and the resistances towards them present, there isn’t one easy reply to the difficulty of instructor misconduct and abuse. In our analysis, nonetheless, we have now discovered that elementary to all efficient initiatives is readability about, concern for, and centering of the devastation that it causes survivors.
In 2018, the Dalai Lama had one other assembly about moral misconduct in transnational Buddhism; this time, with 4 survivors of sexual abuse after Sogyal Lakar was lastly held accountable for excessive sexual, bodily, and psychological violence spanning a long time. Listening and being accountable to survivors should be central to the dialog on responding to instructor abuse.
As Zen priest Lew Richmond as soon as mentioned, reflecting on the Baker-era SFZC disaster, “If you sit down with the girls, or the males, you notice that critical hurt was finished to those folks…. And you need to work backwards from there. There is just one principle. Do no hurt.”
*The printed model of this text mistakenly asserts that the girlfriend of the pupil in query had additionally handed away, additionally because of AIDS. Buddhadharma regrets the errors.