American Buddhism
The Controversy Of Sexual Abuse
Controversy has a certain magnetic negative polarity to attract people to the bad news of what’s become the latest controversy. Typically, controversy is never considered bad because bad news sells the controversy that keeps the conversation going. This is especially true for sex abuse scandals in spiritual communities.
A recent example is the latest episode in a scandal spanning 40 years manifested from the Tibetan teacher Soygal Lakar, who died last year (August 30, 2019) of complications from cancer. To those who were members of the Rigpa Fellowship, the scandal had seemed one long continuous nightmare that wasn’t going to change when he was alive and now that he has passed away, is requiring enormous amounts of healing energy to rectify the intractable nature of physical, emotional, sexual and financial abuse. The actions taken by Rigpa International since Sogyal Lakar’s death do not seem to be helping the problems caused by his past malfeasance. The people who considered themselves students, customers, victims or any combination thereof, have either remained in the Rigpa organization to guide future change or have remained to regurgitate past teaching habits at the unsuspecting expense of future potential students. Some of these past students and administration are wanting the whole culture to change and seem to be at a loss as to how to do that. This is partly because a change for the better doesn’t involve ignoring past harms Sogyal Lakar and Rigpa International caused to its members. What is ordinarily identified as ‘change for the better’ in Vajrayana teaching and path is all brought into question through the example of Sogyal Lakar.
Here is a list of subjects that have created the controversy: sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional intimidation, guru having sex with students and their spouses, disrespecting marriage by shaming partners, manipulating student emotions by stipulating that the death of a friend was due to the friend not following the guru’s command, hitting students including nuns and monks, shaming them when the tea being served is not hot enough or some other trivial reason, not succumbing to humiliation in order to empower the lama under the pretext of serving the lama, etc..
This scandal of abuse created by the spiritual teacher Sogyal Lakar and former head of Rigpa International, was enshrined publicly by eight senior students through a signed public letter. The letter stipulates all the abuse that Sogyal Lakar has committed upon his students over a 40 year teaching career and requests from him an explanation of how this violent abuse represents authentic buddhadharma teaching. A fellow teacher from the same Nyingma lineage, Dzongsar Khyentse, volunteered a critique of the letter from the eight senior students and tries to deflect the focus of the student’s critique by giving his explanation of what vajrayana buddhism is as distinct from Sogyal Lakar’s behavior as an abuser. Dzongsar Khyentse’s letter is an apology for Sogyal Lakar that Lakar couldn’t make towards his students because of the reverse understanding that is part of the samaya violations that the students are accused of — not the teacher/abuser who has committed the abuse. Samaya is considered a reciprocal commitment to enlightenment by the disciple and teacher. Samaya means that each has a share in enlightenment’s creative possibilities. As such, a realization of spiritual freedom is experienced by the student and the teacher through the bond of samaya, if the bond is not broken in some way. (see glossary)
Here is a description of abuse in the letter by the eight senior students addressed to Sogyal Lakar: “You use your role as a teacher to gain access to young women, and to coerce, intimidate and manipulate them into giving you sexual favors…Some of us have been subjected to sexual harassment in the form of being told to strip, to show you our genitals (both men and women), to give you oral sex, being groped, asked to give you photos of our genitals, to have sex in your bed with our partners, and to describe to you our sexual relations with our partners. You’ve ordered your students to photograph your attendants and girlfriends naked, and then forced other students to make photographic collages for you, which you have shown to others. You have offered one of your female attendants to another lama (who is well known in Rigpa) for sex. You have had for decades, and continue to have, sexual relationships with a number of your student attendants, some who are married. You have told us to lie on your behalf, to hide your sexual relationships from your other girlfriends. Publicly, you claim that your relationships are ordinary, consensual, and proper because you are not a monk. You deny any wrongdoing and have even claimed on occasion that you were seduced. We do not believe this to be so and see such claims as attempts to explain away egregious behaviors.”
It’s taken 40 years for the students of Rigpa Fellowship to break the story publicly having raised their level of courage to overcome their guru’s embarrassing resistance and the heavy stigma that is maintained by a poisonous misunderstanding of emptiness as a concept distinct from the primordial experience and the emotional abuse behind the use of the concept of samaya. The crux of the challenge of this situation mandates a spiritual difference between sexual, emotional and physical abuse as a ‘teaching mechanism’ and the experience of trauma caused by such abuse from this particular teacher toward his students. That is the main challenge and a challenge that ultimately won’t be solved in a court of law, inasmuch as a wealthy abuser can pay off victims of abuse before the situation is dragged through the court system as Sogyal Lakar did in 1994 with a woman identified in a 10M dollar lawsuit as Janice Doe. The other key element that really contributes to the student experiencing the abuse as abuse and not experienced as an ‘emptiness palliative’ is the function of taking or receiving vows. (My next essay will focus on broken vows.)
What western and eastern students haven’t really assimilated in their understanding of vajrayana buddhism comes through the explanation that Dzongsar Khyentse gave in trying to explain vajrayana. Vajrayana is nondual groundlessness which means among other explanations that it doesn’t adhere to traditional buddhist teachings. It actually highlights a complete break from traditional Shravakayana and Mahayana buddhist teachings that rely on the development of prajna, ethics and vows which form the ground of the buddhist teaching. In that particular context, DJK has said as much, that vajrayana isn’t connected to buddhist teachings per se, because the source of vajrayana resides in the spiritual examples of the 84 mahasiddhas of first millennia India and the Hindu and Buddhist tantras that were written down during the time period between 400ad and 1200ad.
To get a sense of the broader context of sexual abuse in the Rigpa sangha, an explanation about so-called ‘crazy wisdom’ is necessary to understand how abuse has been justified as a bona fides of vajrayana teaching. To seemingly undergird his academic legitimacy, Sogyal Lakar had copied Chogyam Trungpa’s recondite fabrication of ‘crazy wisdom’ to justify physically, emotionally and sexually abusing students. As I will explain in this and forthcoming essays, ’crazy wisdom’ action is actually meant to be a deliberate obstacle to your buddhist path that doesn’t rely on some linear way of connecting to reality, while at the same time violates all of the five precepts or vows of traditional buddhist teaching.
The eight senior students continue on in the letter to explain to Sogyal Lakar that his abuse never achieved the intended instruction for the students:
“Your behavior did not cultivate our mindfulness or awareness, but rather it made us terrified of making a mistake. You tell your students that you spend most of your time engaging in Buddhist study and practice, but those of us who have attended you in private for years know this is not the reality.” The eight students who wrote this letter are not only calling out his abuse (when he was alive) but have reflected back to him his own style of spiritual laziness masquerading as a master of Tibetan Buddhism. Instead, Sogyal Lakar with the help of other Tibetan lamas, maintained his own personal way of being a charlatan.
One of the more egregious violations of Sogyal Lakar’s unethical behavior is detailed in his fear mongering style that the eight senior students recount in the letter: “You have threatened us and others saying, if we do not follow you absolutely, we will die “spitting up blood like Ian Maxwell.” You have told us that our loved ones are at risk of ill-health, or have died, because we displeased you in some way.”
The fear of breaking samaya with the guru was exploited in a rather pernicious way to get students to cower to his demands and to ignore or cover-up his abusive ways. It is altogether questionable as to whether there was ever any good intention behind exploiting abuse to get all the material comforts Sogyal Lakar enjoyed as a teacher from thousands of dues paying students and their sizable donations. The rationalizations used by him and other teachers like Orgyen Tobgyal and Dzongsar Khyentse for abuse were often focused on some obscure philosophical presumptions like samaya, non-dual groundlessness, the two truths; absolute and relative truth, and the emptiness of everything including the reality of being physically, emotionally, financially and sexually abused.
The non dual groundless mindset is one that dispenses with linear thinking altogether. A linear mindset is usually required to perform a job involving a daily work schedule with other people who are dependent upon you being reliable and trustworthy and contributing to the beneficial work conditions. If you do vajrayana correctly suggests Dzongsar Khyentse, you have to make a complete break from your familiar conventional reality, whether that means disconnecting from buddhist, christian, zen, islamic, or jewish teachings or political views of fascism, communism, socialism, capitalism and democracy. This is the passively violent view that Dzongsar Khyentse says that you are suppose to know, presumably having been taught such view from a qualified vajrayana teacher, which also includes being given all the warnings about how dangerous it is because of its deceptively violent nature. The suggestion presented by Dzongsar Khyentse is to actually make a complete break from your familiar reality and still maintain some degree of sanity — or not! It is well-known in the buddhist tradition that some past practitioners of vajrayana were not able to maintain their sanity while assiduously following what became for some, an insane form of buddhist teaching.
The project of becoming enlightened can never be that important if you have to undergo unnecessary suffering like that so a guru can be spoiled with
sexual favors on a daily basis, make whining remarks about his tea service and driving detail and create general chaos that is intended to create paralyzing and traumatizing dysfunction in the lives of the students. The purpose of making disparaging remarks about students is presumably made so that their ego is bruised, abused and worn down. The wearing down of ego like water wearing down a stone should be as gentle as the activity of water wearing down a stone. It is not the constant shaming of students concurrent with sexual, emotional and physical abuse and the following trauma that wears the ego down. Wearing down the ego like running water wears down a stone happens gradually over a whole lifetime and the resulting progress is all the success one needs.
This ‘hurry-up-and-get-enlightened’ approach is a fallacious one, inasmuch as it doesn’t achieve its intended purpose, nor ever has — for the most part. This kind of demonstration is suppose to announce the fact that the student is still holding onto the ego and therefore should suffer the consequences of the teacher’s abuse meant to assert the teacher’s dominance in the relationship. Such dominance seems to be the most important objective because it is always a play on gaining more and more power from each student the teacher succeeds in subjugating in that particular way. It doesn’t have anything to do with the student becoming more enlightened as a result of being shamed and mistreated.
The examples of the 84 mahasiddhas between the 4th and 12th century India are meant to be true examples of what a vajrayana master is and how one manifests as a vajrayana master. Mind you, none of these 84 mahasiddhas cared about becoming big time gurus who relied on millions of dollars to fund their abuse towards the few students they may have had, though most were not teachers. Fundraising year round to finance an extravagant lifestyle that has to be defended without any guilt or recompense and therefore prove the teacher’s non-dual attitude about it all is a relationship based on fraud. Proving that you hold to a non-dual view is not worth the cost of the student’s trauma from sexual, physical, emotional and financial abuse. The non-dual view is surreptitiously conflated with maintaining a neutral attitude in all controversial acts by the guru. This neutral view is suppose to be the (indoctrinated) enlightened view of the bodhisattva. But actually, the bodhisattva way is not neutral at all. The bodhisattva way is to act when its appropriate to act and to not act when its appropriate to not act based on the discernment of the heart and mind to benefit beings, including those beings who’ve been physically, emotionally and sexually assaulted. For a teacher who has sexually abused students; to hold to this bias of neutrality is a poor excuse for creating havoc in people’s emotional lives, not to mention the indulgences in spiritual materialism.
Another teaching ruse that is often invoked as a rationalization for abuse in general, centers around a misunderstanding of courage. It is sometimes argued by apologists that sexual abuse is an experience presented by the teacher to give the student an opportunity to manifest their courage. The responsibility placed on the student is to raise their level of courage in the face of a deliberate sexual assault and in so doing rise above the harm that it actually causes by maintaining some non-dual attitude about it. The non-dual attitude as I just mentioned is a ruse for being neutral when abuse calls for a response. The teaching is actually meant for those abused to try to use one’s courage to resist the temptation of seeing the abuse as harmful. As a countervailing force one is asked to see the abuse from the teacher as a blessing in disguise. The ruse is that a student should be able to accomplish this by suppressing one’s natural reaction of anger from these assaults and utilize one’s courage to overcome the inevitable rage that results from unknowingly being subject to a violent intrusion on one’s autonomous body. Never does the guru or teacher actually subject himself to such demeaning behavior and show to the student how to raise one’s courage in instances of sexual assault. Sogyal Lakar didn’t demonstrate his teaching by subjecting himself to abuse because he doesn’t believe in abuse as a skillful means for himself, since he knows it didn’t accomplish the intended result, if in fact he was abused when he was young. The Tibetan lamas also don’t ask the student for permission to violate one’s body, speech and mind as an experiment in enlightenment teaching. Because the virtue of courage has been misunderstood or misused by the teacher, the suggestion of raising one’s courage is misappropriated in efforts to mitigate the negative effects of sexual, physical or emotional assaults. The response by students whether male or female is always the same; revulsion towards the guru and some of the senior students who conspired to spiritual betrayal resulting in spiritual trauma.
The proper use of courage in both the pretext to sexual abuse and its aftermath as well, is finding the courage to say ‘no’ when the teacher should be saying ‘no’ to himself before the assault ever takes place. And when the victim’s voice falls silent due to the trauma induced at the moment of abuse, the opportunity to be courageous pivots toward the difficulty of sharing the assault publicly with medical personnel and other people in positions of responsibility of whom are capable of offering help to the victim. The teacher or senior student should be raising his or her courage to resist the temptation to rape or sexually assault a child or an adult who is in the vulnerable position of being trained to never question the teacher or guru’s actions or intentions when he or she wants to exploit the student for his or her own sexual pleasure. This is all to say that no teaching occurs in these instances of physical, emotional and sexual abuse — only the harm that comes from criminal exploitation.
It is so obvious that Sogyal Lakar had been manipulating students to get what he wants in a material way and not for the spiritual purpose of becoming enlightened or creating conditions for students to become enlightened. It is equally obvious that the continued abuse over the course of a 40 year teaching career was due to the culture of silence (omerta) from the Tibetan leadership which would include all the teachers that came to Lerab Ling in Southern France to teach Tibetan Buddhism over the many years of its existence. Just as sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is enabled by the silence of the Archdiocese as a sin of omission, buddhist teachers like Sogyal Lakar were shown to have practiced physical, emotional, sexual and financial abuse with impunity.
In this example, we have first hand information about Sogyal Lakar’s abuse because he states his view about abuse in a July 30th, 2004 recorded teaching spoken in the garden of Sogyal Lakar’s villa at Lerab Ling. Sogyal is responding to the distress a student feels after just being hit by him: “Each time I hit you, I want you to remember that you’re closer to me. And the harder I hit you, the deeper the connection.” One wonders what he thinks he means when he says you are ‘closer to him.’ Spiritual enlightenment isn’t about physical, emotional or psychological proximity to a teacher. It has nothing to do with that. And ‘deeper the connection’ — what in hell’s name does that mean? If your connection to this teacher is the deepest, does that mean that the ocean of dharma has swallowed you up by the Sogyal whale? Are you swimming around in his bloodstream then? (haha) That means absolutely nothing relevant to enlightenment. It’s as if to say; “My connection to Sogyal was so deep I drowned in his barrage of fists because he was so close to me.” Those are stupid words that mean nothing worth remembering let alone feel devotion for. But I can understand why many students would give Sogyal Lakar the benefit of the doubt about his violent behavior over the course of 10,15, 20 or 30 years of being a student. Because all the other Tibetan lamas teaching at Lerab Ling would back up Sogyal Lakar by suggesting to students this is what the vajrayana path is all about — taking abuse without objecting to its demeaning experience and seeing it as a blessing. All the Tibetan lamas have said its a blessing so it must be true as the stated command.
This observation of exploiting students for the attempted practice of transforming the poison of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, doesn’t seem to have achieved the objective of producing enlightenment in the student or the teacher. If Sogyal Lakar’s abuse was successful at making students become enlightened, then the outcome of such abuse would have been praised by everyone who was abused by Sogyal Lakar. Nobody would be complaining about their abuse and nobody would be seeking healing to overcome its devastating effects. If the abuse was a successful enlightenment technique, then every person who went through boot camp in the military would have become enlightened. Every person who persevered to become a professional athlete would have become enlightened. Every person who has suffered at the hands of an abusive spouse or parent would become enlightened. Every minority who has suffered the abuse of racism from the dominant culture would be enlightened. Obviously, that is not the case.
Another suspect rationale for making students feel shame and degradation in order to achieve enlightenment is made through invoking the example of one of the Tibetan mahasiddhas such as Milarepa or the Indian mahasiddha Naropa. Naropa or Milarepa are often cited as students who suffered immensely at the hands of their guru but then became enlightened as a result. I have no reason to doubt their experience of enlightenment as recorded in history. However, it is unlikely that it was the abuse that made them enlightened or that the abuse became a preparation for the enlightenment experience. The traditional answer is that the abuse purified their negative karma that they have accumulated throughout many lifetimes. There are different theories about these examples of enlightenment. Breaking Milarepa’s spirit was an objective that his guru Marpa felt would dispel the negative karma that Mila had accumulated from the practice of black magic upon Milarepa’s uncle who was stealing from his mother the inheritance that came to the family when Milarepa’s father died. Plain and simple, this story is as old as humanity.
Black magic was practiced a lot in feudal societies all over the world because of the lawlessness that existed in some feudal societies including Old Tibet. Black magic is what some people often resorted to in order to correct an injustice when there was no court of justice to defend the innocent. In addition, the innocent in buddhist societies like Old Tibet were never considered innocent due to a manipulated misunderstanding of karma that always favored the elite of the feudal society as in the case of Old Tibet.
The enlightenment objective for the student and the teacher is to achieve non-dual groundlessness which is presumed to be achieved through this type of abuse. The description makes it sound like your spirit has to float in space above ground and disconnect from earthly reality after all your bones have been broken lying on the ground near death. When you have achieved that
you might get your picture up there in the lineage tree thangka. But if you’re a woman you won’t; only the man gets his picture in the painted thangka.
It’s such a romantic notion — to become enlightened. But then to accomplish it you have to undergo enormous suffering according to the Tibetan lamas. But if you were to follow the life story of any of the modern day lamas; they almost all without exception have lived a luxurious life in the 20th and 21st centuries in Europe, Australia, North and South America. There is one lama — Mingyur Rinpoche — who had volunteered to become homeless for a few years as a wandering lifestyle of homelessness inspired by the example of the 10th century Tibetan Milarepa and the 5th century bc Indian mendicant, Siddhartha Gautama. And now, even Mingyur Rinpoche is discovering he can’t hide from allegations of sexual abuse.
If what has happened to Rigpa students at the hands of Sogyal Lakar is a manifestation of enlightened society, then nobody would want to live in an enlightened society. Dzongsar Khyentse has described the spiritual degradation as a lack of understanding of what it means to be a vajrayana student, implying this type of abuse that has become habitual is necessary to the vajrayana enlightenment. Perhaps, Dzongsar Khyentse is defending the torture and whippings that his predecessor Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro inflicted on his monks at Ketok Monastery because they had the audacity to be monks within the guru’s purview as described by Dilgo Khyentse in his biography of; The Life And Times of Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro.
It’s also important to understand the justification that all high lamas agree to when precepts are broken by a vajrayana lama like Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lordro. This justification by lamas of being perfectly liberated from samaya and vows is succinctly stated in the biography: “As we have already seen, Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro transformed all his precepts into all-accomplishing wisdom so he had no need to keep his vows in the same way ordinary beings did. To ordinary beings he always appeared as the great Sovereign Lord of experience and realization; therefore it was appropriate for him to rely on the mudra of immediate cause, without forsaking the vows of shramanera and bhikshu.” Later in the biography, he goes on to say that he kept the robes of the monk of individual liberation to honor Buddha Shakyamuni almost with the implied understanding that Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro’s realization is beyond Buddha Shakyamuni’s realization as representative of a great mahasiddha.
All of this flowery language is typical of a namtar or spiritual biography of a renowned Tibetan lama and is meant to impress upon the reader the great accomplishments of the teacher. In this biography, those spiritual accomplishments of Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro that were mentioned included giving 400 lashes to the monks of Katok Monastery who were tough minded mountain people. According to the great master they needed these lashings because it was a difficult task to subjugate them. This is the lama’s antinomian logic for imposing pain and sufferings upon the monks. With this kind of public torture it became necessary to explain to the questioning practitioners that the great master has only pure intentions and only wants the best for the monks, if not to make them toe the line of monastic life in 20th century Tibet before the Chinese occupation began in March 1959.
And last but not least, there is the attitude and teaching that states obstacles on the path are the path. Without obstacles there is no path. This is a common buddhist theme. This attitude is also used to justify abuse. If an obstacle on the path is the path and abuse is an obstacle, then abuse is the path so goes the syllogistic logic. Of course, there is a major problem with abusing this teaching about abuse which actually might be considered by the teacher as part of the teacher’s path. Never does a student think that sexual assault from their teacher will become a reality much less an obstacle on their spiritual path, any more than one would expect it to be an obstacle on a path on a hike through the mountains. But it almost always is experienced by the student more than just a mere obstacle, and instead becomes an ethical violation resulting in spiritual trauma from the moral injury that prevents the proliferation of the buddha’s dharma in the student. It is the very thing that turns people against — not the dharma — but the teacher’s abuse of the dharma!
Nobody has any right or license to abuse you regardless of whether it’s a teaching or not. This should be common sense understanding in the minds of teachers and students. Learning happens when there is a flow to the synapses that occur in the brain with physical, emotional and mental concentration of one’s spirit. Having that concentration disrupted through abuse is an obvious moral injury and ethical obstruction — an obstruction that prevents the advancement of true learning. Exploiting students by trying to get them to donate money after being subject to physical, emotional or sexual abuse results in the development of a narcissistic personality disorder if not actual sociopathic pathological states of mind in the teacher.
To be literal in explaining an obstacle on a path that you walk upon is to say; ‘This tree that was felled by lightening is blocking my path.’ What we normally do is climb over the tree or walk around it. What we don’t do is blame the hiker for confronting an obstacle or blame the lightening for felling the tree. It would be in the nature of healing obstacles on one’s spiritual path to say that the obstacle of sexual abuse is a harm that can be healed with an apology from the guru or teacher that caused the abuse. If the abuse broke the law as in the case of rape or sexual assault; an additional form of justice on top of the acknowledgement would be financial restitution or a civil lawsuit to assist in paying for the requisite therapy needed to heal the trauma from such abuse. In addition, a prison sentence is appropriate for those lamas who would violate laws against sexual assault and rape. Some gurus, priests and ministers believe they are privileged buddhist, hindu or christian teachers or gurus for whom abuse against their students or supplicants is their right to enact with impunity. This needs to change.
One of the main problems to confront in all of this spiritual wrangling is to come to an understanding of the meaning of the most important vajrayana terms, like the Tibetan and Sanskrit terms for samaya, prajna, compassion and insight. One also has to consider that there is no real attempt by lamas at providing an understanding that would make themselves be responsible for violations of any of the five precepts or the vajrayana samaya that is meant to be a reciprocal commitment to enlightenment between the disciple and teacher. The reciprocal commitment of samaya would indicate that at least some of the lama’s senior students would have attained the same enlightenment that the teacher is assumed to have attained.
To rectify this buddhist accounting, the letter the eight senior students crafted for Sogyal Lakar was needed for their own healing with the hope that an acknowledgement of the harm Sogyal Lakar caused to his students would be forthwith, but in fact never arrived before his death: “With regards to your abusive behavior, your sexual misconduct, and your lavish lifestyle, we see no clear or identifiable ethical standards or guidelines to which you are held. There is a vacuum of accountability. We hope that sending you this letter, sharing it with your peers, and the Rigpa Dzogchen mandala students, will serve to fill that vacuum.”
The Tibetan buddhist lineages are not about wanting you to be enlightened necessarily, though ostensibly that is their public intention. Mainly, their objective is about getting and maintaining power for themselves and their own personal monasteries; quite ordinary power that resides in the physical assets of money, monasteries and manipulation — a kind of 3M version of Tibetan corporate power. Tibetan lamas are not interested in bestowing spiritual power to white caucasian students if some of them have that power to give. After all, why would they?
The purpose of healing one’s psychological and emotional wounds to pursue enlightenment through spiritual practices is accomplished through understanding how to access one’s unique spiritual energy. How many western students have become enlightened in the last 50 years among over twenty million practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism world-wide? I would say none in the Tibetan traditions. There is one female Zen practitioner, Maura O’Halloran, who her Zen abbott has publicly acknowledged as having attained enlightenment and she then died shortly after that pronouncement in 1982. The credit for her enlightenment would be attributed to her extraordinary efforts and to that Zen Master and Zen lineage.
The Vietnamese monk, buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hahn, has emphasized that our modern and post-modern enlightenment shall be achieved by the whole sangha as a group and not in the ancient context of one person achieving enlightenment. That makes perfect sense since we as a variety of individual cultures throughout the world have enjoyed the benefits of studying and living with the buddhadharma and evolving through such experiences for 2,500 years. So, naturally all of us have a better chance of achieving that enlightenment together as a group. This will only remain true if our human species doesn’t destroy itself while being distracted with the socio-economic oppression of fascism, racism, world wars, and the pestilence of ‘world-wide pandemics’ and environmental degradation just to ‘prove’ some oblique apocalyptic biblical narrative or some futuristic Shambhala narrative written down 1,000 or 2,000 years ago — or maybe written just last week.
david edward suppan
Glossary
emptiness: All things are empty of intrinsic existence; emptiness also refers to empty awareness or the emptiness of primordial awareness.
five precepts: 1) Refrain from taking a life. 2) Refrain from taking what is not freely given. 3) Refrain from sexual misconduct 4) Refrain from wrong speech; lying or gossip. 5) Refrain from intoxicants that cloud the mind.
mahayana: translated as ‘the great vehicle’ because it mandates an understanding regarding the bodhisattva who endeavors to enlighten others before attaining enlightenment oneself by utilizing one of three separate approaches: as a king, a boatman or a shepherd on the buddhist path to enlightenment.
Old Tibet: Tibet as it was before the Chinese occupation began in March 1959.
samaya: A reciprocal bond between disciple and guru formed by vows or precepts that the disciple and guru establish in a vajrayana abisheka or empowerment; samaya is union with the three vajras of the Buddha.
shravakayana: the ‘vehicle of individual liberation’ along with Theravadan school that reflects the meaning and practices of pre-sectarian buddhism before it was later sliced and diced into 18 different schools. (Most modern scholars agree the pejorative term ‘hinayana’ doesn’t accurately reflect a group of teachings usually translated as the ‘small vehicle.’)
spiritual trauma: Spiritual trauma is caused by believing in an authoritarian’s version of truth that causes moral injury to the victim; (which in turn requires a process of disillusionment to heal the spiritual harm caused by such manipulations.)
three vajras: Vajra body, vajra speech and vajra mind of the Buddha.
vajra: A vajra is a weapon used as a ritual object to symbolize properties of indestructibility and irresistible force.
vajrayana: The indestructible vehicle of tantric buddhism.
References
1. https://www.lionsroar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Letter-to-Sogyal-Lakar-14-06-2017-.pdf
2. https://www.buddhistdoor.net/news/dzongsar-khyentse-rinpoche-issues-public-statement-on-recent-criticism-of-sogyal-rinpoche
3. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jul/01/lama-sex- abuse-sogyal-rinpoche-buddhist
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LcMeNBWj6Q
5. https://behindthethangkas.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/13-dakini-janine/ is just one example
6. https://behindthethangkas.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/16-the-three-year- retreat/
7. The Life And Times of Jamyang Khyentse Chokyi Lodro by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Shambhala Publications, Boulder 2017 (pg 527)
8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jul/01/lama-sex-abuse-sogyal-rinpoche-buddhist