The recent report of Dalai Lama apologizes for asking a young boy to suck his tongue reflect a long time under spin of public uneasiness about abuse of spiritual power by the teachers who are in the position of doing so. This is valid concerns. There is really a delicate dance in searching for spirituality and avoiding falling into trap of abbassy. For that very reason, the Buddha had taught us for the sake of protection the precepts as they are Protection for Buddhist Practitioners. I personally came from an area in China where Chan Buddhism (禅宗）is the dominant force, so I am not familiar with the Vajira Buddhism tradition.
Chan Buddhism is Chinese version of Buddhism popularized by the the 6th Patriarch of Chan Buddhism Master Huineng. He spent all his life in the south part of China, mainly taught from Nan Hua Temple (南華寺) in GuangDong Province of China. Master XuYun , (simplified Chinese: 虚云; traditional Chinese: 虛雲; pinyin: Xūyún; 5 September 1840? – 13 October 1959), a renowned Chinese Chan Buddhist master and an influential Buddhist teacher of the 19th and 20th centuries, was also came from south east part of China.
What I learned is, the function of Buddhist precepts is not to prohibit us from saying or doing certain things, but, rather, to remind us not to do things that may cause harm, both to ourselves and to others. In other words, the Buddhist precepts function to protect ourselves and others. Therefore, the Five Precepts and the Bodhisattva Precepts are protective shields that allow one to a) feel peaceful in the practice, b) cultivate an appropriate sense of shame, c) repent frequently, and d) regulate behavior at any given time, in order to continually uplift one’s character. These five precepts are:
- 1) I undertake the rule to abstain from killing.
- 2) I undertake the rule to abstain from taking what is not given.
- 3) I undertake the rule to abstain from sexual misconduct.
- 4) I undertake the rule to abstain from false speech.
- 5) I undertake the rule to abstain from taking intoxicants that cloud the mind.
There are no lacking of abuse of power in every religions. Catholic church had notorious coverup for the abuses of public trust. In 2019, the death of Sogyal Rimpoche, author of the best-selling Tibetan Book of Living and Dyin, unleashed a new torrent of victim revelations, accounting questions and legal rulings that further illuminate the trail of injury and insult he left behind. The imposter guru ended his days as a refugee in Thailand, beyond the reach of police and civil investigations in several countries. In 2018, at Longquan monastery in Beijing China, High-profile Chinese monk accused of sexually harassing nuns in China . An article of 1989 about Ösel Tendzin, the first American accepted lineage holder of Kagyu tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism. America’s largest Tibetan Buddhist group, has been thrown into turmoil by allegations that its leader knew he had AIDS and transmitted it to his sexual partners in a report: Buddhists in U.S. Agonize on AIDS Issue. Another report 2012 by Mary Finnagan about Young Kalu Rinpoche’s traumatic revelations highlight the dissonance between Tibetan tradition and 21st-century life. These confessional sending shockwaves through the Buddhist world.
Chris Chandler’s Expose of Shambhala as a Mind Control Cult Is Required Reading The Shambhala organization is in crisis, and Chris Chandler is perhaps the most fearless and best-informed of its critics. Shambhala’s spiritual leader, the “Sakyong Mipham,” has been outed as a sexual assaulter and heavy drinker with a bad habit of assaulting his female followers. Ms. Chandler shares her journey and reveals her understanding of the Tibetan Tantric belief system. As an insider, she was privy to much that is unavailable to newcomers and those who have not progressed sufficiently along the Tantric path. She reveals a hidden agenda, an upending of Western values and democratic governance by stealth. The Dalai Lama and the Sex-Slaver Cult of NXIVM.
These horrable instances show us the dark side of spirituality when fall into the trap, and demands us to seriously consider the implications, to raise important questions practitioners need to ask: such as, if gurus are not all perfect, what measures are you going to apply to determine if you should follow one or not? If other Tibetan Buddhist leaders are not willing to unequivocally and specifically denounce such a clear case of abuse, what does this say about the value of Buddhist practice?
The detail accounts in Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism: The Rise and Fall of Sogyal Rinpoche by Mary Finnigan and Rob Hogendoorn is well worth a read by anyone involved in or interested in any spiritual movement to be aware of such issues. This is a work that everyone connected with Vajrayana should read. It serves as a grave warning to exactly how far people can delude themselves. It shows exactly why people should not trust what is popular or fashionable. When eight students wrote a letter accusing Sogyal Rinpoche of decades of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, Tahlia Newland set up an online support group for abuse victims and students of his Tibetan Buddhist community, Rigpa. Appalled by the lack of ethics, the group undertook a journey of discovery during which they uncovered the depth of the trauma suffered by victims, and the fundamentalism and cult behaviour at the heart of Rigpa. They learned about destructive cults, trauma and recovery, narcissistic abuse, co-dependency, institutional betrayal, and the methods of mind control used by Rigpa, who had covered up and enabled the abuse for decades.
Readers feedbak on this book was: The most serious omission in this book is the lack of depth in discussing the Dalai Lama’s motivations providing Sogyal validation and the Dalai Lama’s motivations for not specifically condemning Sogyal until after after the scandal blew wide open. The same could be asked of many other gurus. It is an important discussion, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter: Is it acceptable in Tibetan Buddhism for lamas to behave like Sogyal? If not, what are the barriers to critically discussing and identifying specific instances of abuse by gurus in TB?
The book includes an almost forensic – yet very readable – dissection of how a sexually voracious and ultimately abusive, untrained and unqualified opportunist, Sogyal Lakar, seized the opportunity offered by a constellation of factors: Westerners’ spiritual hunger and the gullibility that thrives in the needy; an unwillingness to probe; a simple inability to ask the right questions, because of our ignorance; a willingness to indulge the sexual and culinary gluttony of someone believed to be extraordinary; the patriarchal, even misogynistic culture of old Tibet, along with its class-ridden unwillingness to be seen to criticise; the only-too-understandable urge of the Tibetan community – a community that has been slaughtered and tortured out of its own land – to pull together and look after its own, trying to sweep the appalling behaviour of one of its best-known representatives under the sofa. These are some of the ingredients of this ghastly cocktail.
After having heard about and researched into the abuse of Sogyal Rinpoche, one question was left open. How could anyone who was part of this group and witnessed the abuse, just have let this happen? Why was this allowed to grow to these extents and all involved seemingly just swooning about the abuser? The book Fallout: Recovering from Abuse in Tibetan Buddhism Paperback – July 20, 2019 gives exactly the answer to this question. It’s an honest and personal account about the process involved for people to wake up from the delusion that supporting hellish behavior would bring them to enlightenment or would set them apart and above others as exceptional beings with special insight, wisdom or realization.
Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism Paperback – June 17, 2017 The author Chandler spent nearly three decades in the center of the hierarchy of Tibetan Lamas’ inner circles by taking care of the son of notorious Lama, Chogyam Trungpa, whose Crazy Wisdom has destroyed a significant mass of three generations’ reasoning minds.
Trungpa paved the way for the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Lamas to ‘colonize’ the United States and the West to spread out their Guru Occult Tantra to slowly undermine foundations of a liberal education and its Judea-Christian Western Civilization roots. Tantra is about chaos; i.e. creating chaos to turn social mores upside down. It changed a critical mass of three generation’s views about ‘right and wrong’; good and bad; and an ability to tell lies from the truth. Chandler has both and intimate and a bird’s eye view of how these Lamas work their western groups, together, and in collusion with the Progressive Left, the Green New Deal, and China. Once Chandler realized she had been made a pawn on a geopolitical chessboard to perpetuate a deeply misogynistic, totalitarian worldview for the future, she broke free, determined to warn others about what lies beneath the smile of the Dalai Lama and a guru-worshipping cult that goes by the name of Buddhism.