Sex, Lies And The Dharma

[camerata]

Sex, lies and the dharma

American Buddhism faces up to scandals of the spirit.

It’s a place of meditation and devotion, a source of solace and inner peace, a refuge where we seek a sense of continuity with life. Call it a church, temple or center, we go there to worship or practice in confidence and trust ... or do we?

Though Catholics have been the latest to question their shepherds — wondering why so many priests seem intent on bringing them down instead of helping them to a higher plane — scandal is no stranger to the American spiritual scene. Just last summer, a book was published that examined in uncomfortable detail the controversies that rocked one of the principal fountainheads of Zen Buddhism in this country: Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Counterpoint, $26, 385 pp.) focused on the trials and troubles at San Francisco Zen Center after the death in 1971 of its founder, Japanese Soto Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, and the subsequent direction it took under Richard Baker-roshi, Suzuki’s hand-picked successor.

Written by Michael Downing, a novelist with little or no Zen experience, the book was both hailed and damned by Buddhists of all persuasions for its thorough airing of the Zen Center’s dirty laundry. During three years of research and preparation, Downing interviewed more than 80 Zen Center veterans, then managed to couch his narrative in eminently readable, often poetic prose. Shoes is evidence of Downing’s having achieved a fairly clear notion of Zen’s ideals and means, while nevertheless taking an investigative approach to his subject.

During Baker-roshi’s tenure, San Francisco Zen Center, the most highly visible of all American Zen institutions, bought ever more real estate, transformed ever more Bay Area buildings into meditation halls, living quarters and administrative facilities, and launched into such complex business ventures as Greens Restaurant, the Tassajara Bread Bakery and the Greengrocer. But Baker’s dazzling entrepreneurial abilities and high-level schmoozing with the likes of then-Gov. Jerry Brown were matched by his outlandish spending sprees on imported statuary from Japan, exquisite building materials for his numerous apartments, cross-country corporate meetings and a sleek BMW. This while students were taking vows of humility and simplicity, living in cramped quarters and working for slave wages (under the idea of work-practice) in the Center’s businesses.

But the most damning accusations involved Baker’s numerous sexual adventures with women disciples, his continuing denials of same and (in a defense echoing the notion of papal infallibility) his resistance to being held accountable for any of his actions.

“In San Francisco, people had dealt with sex,” says one former student. “But to this day, [baker] says things didn’t happen that did happen. One example is the number of different times he has said he didn’t have sex with people with whom he did.”

Baker left Zen Center in 1983, but Downing reports that the problem was hardly limited to that particular situation:

“In 1985, Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Jack Kornfeld published the results of his interviews with Eastern (principally Buddhist and Hindu) spiritual leaders in Yoga Journal. Of the 54 teachers and gurus Kornfeld interviewed, 34 told him they had been sexually involved with students.”

Throughout its history, Buddhism has been handed down by means of a web of lineages — traditions of face-to-face transmission of the dharma (or the wisdom of Buddha’s teachings) from master to disciple. During 25 centuries the teaching spread to each of the countries of Asia, from India to China and Japan, to Vietnam, Tibet and Korea. Buddhist practice varied, often considerably, from one country or lineage to another, but an emphasis on compassion and mindfulness — above all, on doing no harm — continues to be shared by all adherents.

As the paperback edition of Shoes Outside the Door is readied for September release, and as both the Vatican and American Catholic bishops try to limit the damage to their church’s credibility, I wanted to know what Detroit-area Buddhist teachers thought about these sensitive issues. What happens when the old cliché about “make me one with everything” smacks up hard against the reality of a spiritual teacher’s transgressions in the realm of the flesh?

P’arang Geri Larkin, guiding teacher at Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple in Detroit, was trained in the Korean Zen tradition. The author of such books as Stumbling Toward Enlightenment, First You Shave Your Head and Tap Dancing in Zen, she takes an openly feminist, contemporary approach to her practice.

Continued at Metro Times.

[billzant]

What is the purpose of this post in a Thai Buddhist forum?

Hope you are keeping well,

All the Best

Bill Z

[bankei]

There have been plenty of sexual, and other, scandals in Thai Buddhism too.