The following article, which runs to about 6,000 words, was originally written about a dozen years ago for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. The editors commissioned, approved, and paid for the article, but decided not to run it because they felt the topic had already been covered. I disagreed, and subsequent, ongoing revelations indicate that it remains of perpetual relevance. It was originally available on the website sweepingzen.com, which no longer exists. I’m posting it here to make it available to a wider audience.
In the Shadow of the Dharma
Why Buddhist teachers have sex with their students—and what we can do about it
By Stephan Bodian
(Copyright 2010 by Stephan Bodian)
“The subtle source is clear and bright,
the tributary streams flow through the darkness”
--from “The Identity of Relative and Absolute” by Zen Master Shitou Xiqian
Among the earthly pleasures available to us, sex is arguably the one that most closely resembles the spiritual illumination to which we as Buddhists aspire. In moments of deep sexual union, we’re granted an opportunity to dissolve our physical and energetic boundaries and enter a selfless, timeless, boundariless realm where we feel deeply connected, even merged, with all of life. In the fleeting ecstasy of orgasm, we may catch a glimpse of the transcendent bliss that often accompanies the enlightenment experience. And in the feelings of tranquility and satisfaction that follow, we may find echoes of the peace and completeness that are essential characteristics of our innate Buddha nature. In fact, sex for some people can be a powerful doorway to spiritual transformation, whether inadvertently or through the practice of sexual tantra.
On a more instinctual level, of course, sex grips us with unparalleled urgency precisely because it rules our lower energy centers and is inextricably linked to the survival of the species. Without sex, quite simply, we would not be. Powerful hormones governed by the more primitive parts of the brain drive us to procreate whether or not our neocortex agrees. In traditional Buddhism, sex is regarded as the chief expression of the craving or thirst that gives rise to attachment and suffering and propels us forward relentlessly on the wheel of samsara. In the thrall of sexual desire, after all, we human beings have been known to behave in some remarkably impulsive, irrational, and irresponsible ways.
Probably the most controversial form of sexual expression in the Western Buddhist sangha has been the sexual relationship between teacher and student. In our unique cultural climate, in which monks associate with (or may even be indistinguishable from) lay practitioners, men practice with women, and teachers socialize or even practice therapy with their students, we have a situation that lends itself to role ambiguity and social and sexual boundary confusion. Given this intimate intermingling, it’s no surprise that we’ve witnessed a series of teacher-student affairs—some well publicized, many others relegated to the shadows of secrecy—that in many cases have disrupted practice centers, embittered and disillusioned practitioners, and shattered lives.
In her book Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism, published in 1988, Sandy Boucher includes a chapter entitled “Conspiracy of Silence” in which a number of longtime women practitioners express their outrage and dismay over teachers who sleep with their students and then conceal or rationalize their behavior. Buddhist teacher gatherings have addressed the issue for more than a decade; articles and books have been written about particular teachers; and a number of centers have established guidelines intended to prevent such transgressions from occurring. The attention given to high-profile cases over the years may lull us into concluding that the problem has been dealt with and largely resolved. Yet teachers continue to have sex with their students with surprising regularity. Indeed, one female teacher related with some consternation how a male teacher who introduced her to give a presentation on appropriate teacher-student boundaries at a Buddhist teachers conference several years ago turned out to be having an affair with a student himself.
“These relationships happen quite often, “says Alan Senauke, Zen priest and former executive director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. “But there’s a great reluctance in the wider Buddhist community to acknowledge the issue. Where there are no resources available to deal with it, communities don’t want to hear about it. As a result, the situation doesn’t get worked through, and people leave the sangha.” Yvonne Rand, a Buddhist teacher trained in both Zen and Vajrayana, believes this reluctance may lie in our idealization of Buddhism. “Unique to many Western Buddhist practitioners is the sense that this kind of thing won’t happen in our tradition. We tend to think we’re special and immune to the hazards and shortcomings we bring as human beings.”
In a tradition that emphasizes mindful attention and compassionate action, such seemingly unconscious and injurious behavior may be especially shocking. But, as Buddhism itself teaches, the forces that drive the human mind and heart are extremely complex and resistant to change, and even teachers who are genuinely devoted to the Dharma may find themselves swept away by the compelling power of sexual desire. The unique gender and power dynamics between men and women frequently fuel such behavior, and the vast majority of cases have occurred between male teachers and their female students. But women teachers are certainly susceptible to similar temptations, and other gender combinations, both heterosexual and homosexual, are possible—indeed, have no doubt already occurred.
As a priest and senior disciple of Taizan Maezumi Roshi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles in the early ‘80s, Jan Chozen Bays was deeply immersed in koan study with her teacher when the two began a clandestine sexual relationship that lasted for two years, even though both were married. When the secret was finally divulged, shortly after the affair ended, the center, one of the first and largest Zen communities in the U.S., entered a period of turmoil from which it never fully recovered. Maezumi Roshi admitted to being an alcoholic and attended a monthlong residential rehabilitation program. (Though he stopped drinking for a time, he began again and eventually died of alcohol-related causes.) Professional trainers came to the center to teach members about alcoholic patterns and dysfunctional family systems. Many members were outraged by the affair and the secrecy involved, as well as by other transgressions that subsequently came to light, and left feeling betrayed and disillusioned. Some stopped practicing entirely. Within a year the center had dwindled from a high of over 100 resident members to several dozen. . (Now headed by a teacher in Maezumi Roshi’s lineage, the center currently has (fill in # here!) residents and (fill in # here!) nonresident practicing members.)
But according to Bays the relationship began quite innocently, with an intimacy founded exclusively on a shared devotion to truth. “I fell in love with the Dharma as expressed through Roshi,” she says. “I wanted to dig down to what life and death are really about, and I trusted him to lead me in this work. Everything he said had this ability to penetrate in and crack me open. He was an extraordinary person.”
After completing her residency as a pediatrician in San Diego, Bays moved to the Zen Center with her husband and three children. She meditated with the sangha mornings and evenings, had dokusan (private interview) with her teacher several times a day, and worked her way rapidly through the koan system. She was a rising star in the center firmament, and Roshi was clearly grooming her to be one of his successors.
“Our physical intimacy began in dokusan,” she says. “If I had a big crisis or opening, I would often burst into tears, and he would comfort me. I might put my head in his lap, and he would pat my head or hug me. Then we began doing translation work together, seated side by side. After a couple of hours we would take a break and have some tea, and Roshi would reach over and pat or hug me. Gradually it moved into kissing. ‘If he thinks it’s appropriate,’ I thought, ‘then it’s appropriate.’ It seemed quite normal and mutual.
“When you love another person, you naturally want to give them comfort and happiness,” she muses, “and one of the ways that women instinctively know to comfort a man is to have sex with him.”
When their relationship became sexual, Bays says, they both began having “very serious reservations” and talked about how “this wasn’t right.” Yet the relationship continued for two years, during which time they lied repeatedly to their spouses. How did they rationalize their behavior, given that both adultery and lying are proscribed by the very precepts they were studying together in dokusan?
“We didn’t have to rationalize our behavior, because we were already deluded,” Bays admits. ”We created a bubble around us where nothing touched us, and we believed that nobody understood us except one another. Everything seemed so true and right, despite what the world or the precepts might say about it. When you’re in love with somebody, you create a world of delusion, but it seems like a world of enlightenment.”
Though the relationship was consensual and never coercive, Bays now feels that it was abusive. “He was the teacher, the person in the position of power, and he abused his power,” Bays says. “He had the responsibility to say no, at the beginning, the middle, and the end.”
When she finally left the Zen Center, Bays was “disillusioned and revolted, not only by Roshi’s behavior, but by my own as well, by how deluded I had been and how I had rationalized my actions and been blind to Roshi’s alcoholism. I thought, if this is an example of living the enlightened life, I’m not interested. I put away my robes and stopped sitting.” After exploring other practices and faiths for several years, Bays gradually made her way back to Buddhism and eventually began teaching herself. Now she and her second husband are the resident teachers at Great Vow Zen Monastery near Portland, Oregon.
The bubble of delusion and self-deception that Bays describes is central in most cases to the sexual relationship between teacher and student. Without this bubble, teachers who are genuinely devoted to Dharma would not cause suffering to the students they have been entrusted to lead on the path to end suffering. “Teachers slip out of attention and deceive themselves into believing that this is true love or I’m an exception to the rule,” says Yvonne Rand. “This blurs their capacity to consider the consequences for the student or the community.” (Rand played a key role in resolving a crisis over this issue at the San Francisco Zen Center in the early 80s and has since counseled dozens of students and a number of teachers involved in such relationships.) And without this bubble, students who have come to the teacher for spiritual guidance would not otherwise continue to engage in a sexual involvement that has diverted them from their original purpose. “I just knew that this energy that was supposed to have another more appropriate use had been detoured into a physical relationship,” says Bays.
As Bays’s story makes clear, the relationship between teacher and student can be an extraordinarily intense and intimate one, in which two people discuss the most profound spiritual issues in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. Sexual energy may infuse the interaction from time to time, and powerful archetypes are almost always at work. In the end, however, as Bays suggests, the playing field is never level. Teachers are inevitably more powerful—by virtue of their position, training, and wisdom—and they must take responsibility for the well-being of their students and the power they have entrusted to them by maintaining appropriate, role-related boundaries.
“The teacher of religious practice occupies an archetypal place in the psyches of the students,” writes Zen teacher Robert Aitken in his book Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics. “He or she continues to teach in their dreams. . . . It is important for the teacher to be responsible for this power, and to encourage the students to use its influence, and to speak out when they are being used. . . . When the teacher, in the role of teacher, confronts the student sexually, the archetype is violated, and the student is deeply confused and disturbed. This is a law, as irrevocable as the Law of Gravity, proved in the suffering of earnest . . . students and their sanghas today.”
What prompts the teacher to violate this archetype? In his book Sex in the Forbidden Zone, which focuses on the male-female dynamic, psychiatrist Peter Rutter offers one explanation: Teachers, clergy, and other men in positions of power, he says, often bypass or suppress their own vulnerability and woundedness in their attempts to appear powerful and authoritative, and then seek emotional nurturance and sexual healing through their female clients or students. Driven by their own unacknowledged need or pain, they may confuse receptivity and vulnerability with sexual openness and availability and “ignore whatever violation may be involved . . . in their attempts to get close to or inside the soul or body of a woman.”
Lest we imagine that such powerful forces do not affect Buddhist teachers, here is one woman’s description of her relationship with her Zen teacher, who also happened to be her psychotherapist: “As I came to know him better, I could see how enormously wounded he had been as a child, and I felt tremendous empathy for him. He was actually much more wounded than I was, and there was a way in which the roles began to reverse. I felt I had been entrusted with the sacred task of providing this enormously gifted man with a very simple love that he had missed out on in his early life.”
Jan Bays, using a metaphor that reveals a striking confusion between spiritual transmission and sexual intimacy, reports that “Roshi would say, ‘I feel like I can pour the dharma into you,’ because I was such an empty vessel. I would listen to him and just soak it up.”
In the arms of a woman, these male teachers may believe, they can put down the role and image they maintain in the sangha and reconnect with an innocence, completeness, and authenticity they may feel they’ve misplaced in their attempts to act a certain way for their students. “When I’m with you,” Maezumi Roshi would often say to Jan Bays, “I feel I can relax.”
Other forces can also drive teachers into the arms of their students, such as sexual addiction, intoxication with power, a misguided sense of entitlement, or simply loneliness and isolation coupled with genuine confusion about appropriate, role-related boundaries—forces that apply equally to women as well as to men. According to Rev. Marie Fortune, author of Is Nothing Sacred? When Sex Invades the Pastoral Relationship, and founder of the FaithTrust Institute, which offers workshops on clergy sexual abuse to religious groups nationwide, spiritual teachers who have sex with their students generally fall into one of two general categories: “wanderers” and “predators.” As their name suggests, wanderers stray from their chosen path every now and then, especially when they’re under pressure, and may have the capacity, with education and training, to change their ways. Generally these people have poor professional boundaries at every level—sexual, emotional, and financial—and are unaware of the archetypal power their role confers and the damage their actions may cause. “These teachers are usually isolated,” says Yvonne Rand, “and they may disappear for months into sexual obsessions with their students. After all, the human realm is the desire realm, and we’re so bombarded by sexuality that we become dulled to its effect on us.”
By contrast, predators are teachers who “intentionally seek out vulnerable people and groom them—that is, do whatever it takes to break down their ability to refuse consent—with a focused intent to cross boundaries and take advantage,” says Fortune. “Students who are experiencing a life crisis, relationship difficulties, or childhood abuse issues and need the help of a teacher are most vulnerable to being hurt. Predators will go out of their way to create a special bond with these people, which makes it harder for them to understand what’s going on or take action on their behalf.”
Predators are “often sociopathic, insensitive to the harm they’re causing, astute and manipulative,” explains Fortune. “If they’re accused, their job is to mislead and get out of the situation.” Despite the integrity and sincerity of the vast majority of teachers, reports from students in the U,S, and Europe suggest that Buddhism in the West has had its share of predators as well, .
For example, one American-born Zen teacher would cultivate a special relationship with a particular student and then seduce her. After a few months, he would drop her abruptly and move on to the next conquest, usually with devastating consequences. Over the years he had sexual relationships with dozens of students, and the resulting upheavals destroyed several sanghas. One of the women eventually committed suicide. When confronted about his behavior, he would invariably lie. In a similar pattern, a Tibetan teacher has had a series of well-documented, coercive sexual relationships with his students but refuses to acknowledge or take responsibility for his behavior.
Of course, some sexual relationships between teachers and their students are more benign and well intentioned and turn out to be mutually beneficial. Many teachers, after all, have only limited social contacts outside their spiritual community and may not know where else to look for a prospective partner. In the Vipassana tradition, for example, where teachers tend to function more as “spiritual friends” (kalyana mitra) than as gurus, a number of teachers have married or entered into long-term relationships with people who began as their students. At Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, the ethical guidelines for teachers acknowledge the possibility of such relationships as long as both people are single; the teacher doesn’t intimate any romantic interest while teaching; the student finds another teacher before the commencement of any romantic involvement; and the two people wait at least three months before mutually agreeing to “a conscious commitment to enter into a relationship that brings no harm to either party.”
Several Tibetan lamas have also established long-term relationships with their students with no apparent ill effects. “It can work out as long as the teacher is open and transparent about what’s going on, and the student recognizes early on that this person is no longer my teacher,” agrees Fortune. “Sometimes these relationships are problematic in the beginning, however, especially when infidelity is involved,” and a power differential may always exist and continue to influence the relationship in unacknowledged ways.
If the two people fail to relinquish their old roles, even the most careful and conscious relationship between teacher and student can have unexpected negative consequences. One Zen teacher, for example, openly dated one of his students with the permission of his sangha board and eventually developed a long-term monogamous relationship with her. But over the years the teacher went out of his way to avoid any show of favoritism and placed extra demands on his partner, which eventually contributed to the break-up of the relationship.
Much has been written about the characteristics and motivations of the male teacher who enters into a sexual relationship with his student. But what about the female student who participates? Unless she’s physically coerced, which rarely happens, she’s inevitably drawn by powerful psychological forces of her own to respond to the power and manipulation she encounters—or even to initiate sexual contact herself. Like anyone, she may seek love and approval and have an unacknowledged need to feel special—and what could be more special than acting as the consort for your teacher? Or, like Jan Bays, she may fall in love with the Dharma as embodied in her teacher and yearn to get as close to him as she possibly can. “When we have this desire to merge with our own Buddha nature,” Bays says, “we may experience it as a desire to merge with another human being. The most powerful way we know to experience oneness is through the interpenetration of bodies and through orgasm, where we have little moments of the oneness we seek.”
Indeed, this confusion between sexual and spiritual merging may make the bond with the teacher quite difficult to break, because the archetypal power of the union reinforces the belief that the relationship is sacred and karmically destined to be. One woman who had a sexual relationship with her teacher for nearly three years admits that the transgressive nature of the relationship actually convinced her of its absolute inevitability—until it ended after he began a relationship with another student. “I kept saying to myself, ‘He would never risk his marriage, his career, and his reputation in allowing himself to enter into connection with me if he didn't absolutely love me, for now and forever.’”
As Aitken Roshi suggests, the teacher embodies the archetype of the Buddha, and students may believe that sexual contact with the teacher will connect them directly with the power and numinosity of the Dharma. This false hope is inevitably betrayed because the teacher is not offering a bridge to enlightenment but taking care of his own needs. In the end, the student may end up feeling profoundly disillusioned because a relationship that had at first seemed so sacred now feels shameful and tawdry.
At an even deeper level, students often come to the teacher with the trust, openness, and vulnerability of children seeking relief from their suffering—and when the trust is violated, the effect may be especially traumatic. “One day when I was giving dokusan,” Bays recalls, “I suddenly saw the student in front of me as an innocent child who was baring her heart to me. By now I was working as a pediatrician with abused children, and I realized that if I made one wrong move or took advantage of the situation in any way, it would be child abuse.” Some women may even bring a history of sexual trauma that makes them both more in need of a healthy relationship with an authoritative male and more vulnerable to being exploited. “When they experience repeated violations that mimic the abuse of their childhood,” says Yvonne Rand, “the path to liberation becomes a path of continued suffering.”
By assuming an archetypal position, the Buddhist teacher invites his students to project onto him the wisdom, compassion, and spiritual authority that inherently belong to them as well. This projection is a sacred trust, and the teacher’s job is to help his students to reown it and realize their own innate Buddha nature. When, instead, he misuses the projection for his personal gratification, he may thwart or even destroy their deepest spiritual aspirations. “When the student offers you her heart and you trample on it,” says Bays, “you’re destroying her belief in her own spiritual potential, her own Buddha nature, which is the worst crime you can commit.”
Admittedly, Buddhist practitioners are not passive victims and must take responsibility for their own behavior. Unlike children, they have the capacity to educate themselves and take action on their own behalf. But when they’re approached by a teacher sexually, students may feel isolated and unaware of the resources available to them, and they may not realize the impact their actions will have on themselves and their community.
Also, teachers who knowingly assume the authoritative archetype of teacher frequently encourage their students to suspend judgment and receive the teachings—and the teacher—with beginner’s mind. “Teachers intentionally place themselves in positions of power,” says Lama Michael Conklin, a disciple of Kalu Rinpoche and resident teacher at Kagyu Changchub Chuling in Portland, Oregon, “and if they use this power for anything but the student’s benefit, they shouldn’t be teachers.” At the same time, he adds, “students can make the mistake of taking samaya vows [that is, making a long-term commitment] with a teacher too soon.” Perhaps, as the Dalai Lama recommends, we should spend several years getting to know a teacher before we commit to being his or her student. Ultimately, however, says Conklin, “teachers need to take full responsibility for their relationships with their students. If this person hurts, it’s my hurt, it’s my problem, by virtue of my commitment to the bodhisattva path.”
Often, as well, a teacher may use secrecy to “help sustain the isolation of the student by preventing her from seeking the feedback and support of friends,” explains Marie Fortune. “For example, he may say ‘We have a special karmic bond, and no one else would understand.’. . . If the potential issues are openly discussed in a context of common boundaries before the relationship happens, then the student can give her informed consent. Otherwise, her moral agency is compromised by the secrecy and the manipulation, and the teacher can use ethical and spiritual arguments to seduce her. Most women don’t have the necessary resources at hand.”
According to Yvonne Rand, “far more boundary violations occur in Zen and Vajrayana than in the Theravada tradition.” Vipassana teacher Gil Fronsdal, who is on the ethics council at Spirit Rock, agrees: “I may be naïve, but it’s remarkable how little scandal we’ve seen.” Theravada monks have detailed rules to protect them—for example, they can’t be in a room with a woman alone or with the door closed—and lay teachers at Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society are trained in ethical behavior and appropriate boundaries and meet regularly for peer support and discussion.
By contrast, observes Rand, “Zen and Vajrayana put a strong emphasis on the teacher as an authority figure and on the privacy and secrecy of teacher-student meetings, and this authority and secrecy become a hazard for both teacher and student. . . . Teachers who take an authoritarian role tend to be more isolated, and secrecy makes it easier for the teacher to transgress and more difficult for the student to come forward and confront the teacher or seek help from the community.”
Once the teacher has transgressed and the student steps forward to complain, her suffering may be perpetuated or even intensified if the teacher refuses to acknowledge the misstep, other sangha members ignore or ostracize her, or the organization, rather than openly investigating the allegations, endeavors to deny them or cover them up. “Even more significant in the bigger picture than the initial betrayal is the way students are treated when they come forward,” explains Fortune. “The individual can deal more easily with the unethical behavior of the teacher if the institution responds to the complaint with appropriate sanctions. . . . A cover-up exacerbates the individual’s woundedness and betrays the fact that the institution is there not for the benefit of students but to protect itself.” If students experience “an inadequate response, [they may] end up seeing the whole institution as corrupt and not come back, in which case they lose their faith community.”
One woman who came forward after a sexual relationship with her teacher reached out to another teacher, and together they put together a panel of teachers from several Buddhist traditions. The idea was to give sangha members a forum where they could unburden themselves of the pain and confusion they had experienced as a result of their teacher's affairs. "The teachers on the panel were very well-intentioned,” she recalls, “but somehow it just wasn't a strong enough container to bring the catharsis that students had hoped for, given the intensity and complexity of feeling and the level of psychic and spiritual disruption.” To make matters worse, she says, when the teacher met before the same panel, he lied about the situation. “That felt like the ultimate betrayal—that there would be lies in the midst of what had been intended as a process of healing. My rock-bottom faith in the Dharma was never shaken, but I do feel allergic now to group dynamics or anything even remotely approaching teacher-worship."
Although there seems to be a growing recognition in the wider Buddhist sangha of the problems involved in teacher-student sexual relationships, and some steps have already been taken (see sidebar), we clearly have a long way to go before we’ve established adequate safeguards to prevent further transgressions from occurring. Perhaps future gatherings of Western Buddhist teachers can make it a priority to develop clear ethical guidelines, grievance procedures, and role-appropriate boundaries and behaviors that apply to teachers universally across the various schools and traditions. “We need to understand that we’re all potentially corruptible,” says Buddhist teacher Yvonne Rand, “and we need safeguards to keep us from acting on our corruptibility.”
In the end, however, despite our best efforts as a sangha and our compassionate concern as individuals, teachers will undoubtedly continue to have sex with their students from time to time, and students will continue to suffer as a consequence. “Flowers fall even though we love them,” says Zen Master Dogen, “and weeds flourish even though we dislike them.” Although we can’t stop preferring flowers to weeds, we can gradually let go of our attachment to having people behave the way we think they should. While we continue to refine our guidelines, train our teachers, and educate ourselves, we’re invited to consider some deeper truths—that the mysterious dance of life as it is embraces the bad as well as the good, the painful as well as the pleasurable, the shadow as well as the light, and that the Dharma, perfect thought it may be, has always expressed itself through imperfect human beings.
SIDEBAR:
What We Can Do As a Sangha
Rev. Marie Fortune, founder of the FaithTrust Institute, which offers workshops on clergy sexual abuse to religious groups nationwide, recommends a series of steps that Buddhist and other religious institutions can take to avoid transgressions before they happen and to mitigate the damage when they do. These include the following:
Published guidelines available to members that outline clear ethical standards for teachers
Education and discussion in the community that prepares people for what to expect from their leadership and tells them who to go to for support
Grievance procedures and other mechanisms for hearing and adjudicating complaints and taking action. so people trust the system to handle complaints justly
Training, continuing education, discussion, problem solving, and opportunities for reflection and critical support among teachers so we have fewer wanderers
In the wake of past transgressions, a number of Buddhist organizations and centers have established detailed ethical guidelines and grievance procedures that are readily available to members. For example, the San Francisco Zen Center—whose former abbot, Richard Baker, left in 1982 after admitting to sexual and financial improprieties—has issued a booklet that offers interpretations of the 16 Zen precepts and their application to Zen Center practice. The manual also features “procedures for grievance and reconciliation,” including basic guidelines for resolving conflicts and disagreements and a step-by-step outline of a formal grievance procedure to be heard by an Ethics and Reconciliation Council made up of “seven members appointed by the Zen Center Board of Directors after soliciting nominations from the Zen Center members.”
Similarly, Shambhala International has adopted a set of policies and procedures known as Shambhala Care and Conduct. The organization’s founder, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, had numerous sexual relationships with his students, as did his appointed successor, Osel Tendzin, who died of AIDS after infecting one of his students. According to current Shambhala president Richard Reoch, this 12-page document “includes an overall statement of view along with recommendations for local Shambhala Centers on dealing with conflicts within the community and complaints against individual practitioners.” Reoch says that every center must post a notice that briefly outlines ethical guidelines and grievance procedures and offers students a copy of the Shambhala Care and Conduct guide.
Perhaps the most thorough compilation of ethical guidelines and related resources can be found in Safe Harbor, published by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and edited by Alan Senauke. The 60-page booklet includes the complete guidelines of the San Francisco and Berkeley Zen Centers, the Insight Meditation Teachers Code of Ethics, and a list of legal, psychological, and Dharma resources.
Although some centers have established ethical guidelines and procedures, very few offer workshops expressly designed to educate their members proactively about role-related boundaries and the risks of violating them. According to Alan Senauke, the Berkeley Zen Center now offers a series of workshops on sexual boundaries, transference and countertransference, mutual accountability and communication, and broader issues of power and authority based on gender, age, and race. These workshops provide “preventative medicine, rather than procedural help,” says Senauke, “because the problem is very difficult to deal with after the fact.” Also, Jan Chozen Bays and her husband, Larry Hogen Bays, offer educational workshops and consultations for Dharma groups on clergy misconduct and boundary issues.
As for training, continuing education, and peer support for teachers to prevent transgressions, Spirit Rock and Insight Meditation Society have multi-year teacher training programs and regular teacher council meetings, where, says Spirit Rock teacher Gil Fronsdal, “we’ve spent years working on our communication and can have frank discussions about our personal and professional lives. Sometimes we’ll even take the initiative to talk with a particular teacher [if a problem arises].” By contrast, teachers in the other Buddhist traditions meet sporadically, if at all, and may have only limited contact with their peers, though the Zen tradition now has two fledgling organizations, the American Zen Teachers’ Association and the Soto Zen Buddhist Association. Both groups meet periodically, and the SZBA has begun offering training to teachers.
Other Resources
Buddhist Peace Fellowship
PO Box 3470
Berkeley, CA 94703
510-655-6169
FaithTrust Institute
2400 N. 45th Street #10
Seattle, A 98103
206-634-1903
Jan Chozen and Larry Hogen Bays
Great Vow Zen Monastery
PO Box 368
Clatskanie, OR 97016
503-728-0654
SIDEBAR:
What You Can Do As a Student of Buddhism
Educate yourself about appropriate role-related behavior and sexual boundaries between teachers and students, drawing on the resources listed here
Ask frank questions about your teacher, and spend some months or even years getting to know him or her before committing to be his or her student
Inquire about ethical guidelines at your practice center—and if none exist, suggest establishing some
Feel free to talk openly within your sangha about sexual, gender, and boundary issues—indeed, about any issue that concerns you
SIDEBAR
Would the Buddha Ever Have Sex with His Students?
My first Zen teacher used to say that the Buddhist precepts (in this case, the 16 precepts of Zen) are simply descriptions of enlightened behavior. In other words, a fully enlightened being could not lie, steal, or have exploitative sex, not because some rulebook prevented him, but because his wisdom and compassion would naturally make it impossible. If he were awake to his own Buddha nature and saw it reflected back to him in every being and thing, he would treat everyone he met as his very own self. If the ridgepole had collapsed, as the Buddha describes, and the separate self had revealed itself to be a colossal illusion, she would have no motivation to take advantage of others for her own benefit, but would naturally act for the greatest benefit of all concerned. The true Buddha needs no precepts, because enlightenment ensures spontaneous right action—which is, after all, where the precepts originate.
Alas, this view has often been used to rationalize unconscious and exploitative behavior in the name of enlightenment. Since I’m enlightened, the argument goes, everything I do must be appropriate and good. Thinking he was immune to the consequences of his actions, for example, one American-born teacher of Tibetan Buddhism had sex with his students even though he knew he had AIDS. Numerous others have misused their power and authority because they mistakenly believed that their level of realization entitled them to act as they wished, regardless of the consequences.
Some teachers have invoked the notion of “crazy wisdom” to excuse their excesses, pointing to the famous Zen master who cut off a student’s finger or the great Tibetan yogi who heaped abuse on his closest disciple. But crazy wisdom behavior is intended to awaken the student, not gratify the teacher, and it’s generally reserved for the most advanced spiritual practitioners, not directed toward vulnerable neophytes. Besides, says Lama Michael Conklin, “I talked to a number of the great Tibetan lamas of the 20th century about this issue, and they told me that true crazy wisdom adepts take full responsibility for the consequences of their actions and don’t protest that they’re special” or above the law when they’re caught and chastised.
The truth is, fully enlightened beings and genuine crazy wisdom masters are rare in any tradition or age, and most of the teachers we encounter in the West, including most of the roshis and rinpoches, have achieved only partial realization of the nature of reality and their own minds. As a consequence, we would do well to assume that they have the usual array of human tendencies and weaknesses—and act accordingly.–S.B.