Iron Feather HQ : NOCH : CRUEL WYNDZ

I have great respect for Buddhism but like all organizations, some bad apples exist who pervert, ruin and rape. I suggest that Chogyam Trungpa, Rin­poche was a full on psychopath and should be removed from all mentions at the naropa University in Boulder....



Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America
1990 May/June
By Katy Butler

One summer afternoon in 1982, a friend of mine stood on a street in Boulder, Colorado-tinder a bright blue Rocky Mountain sky-holding a bottle of sake. The wine, a gesture of gratitude, was a gilt for Vajra Regent Osel Tendon, “Radiant Holder of the Teachings,” second-in-command of Vajradhatu, the largest branch of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States.

Moments later, my friend entered an elegant, minimally furnished office nearby. Tendzin-the former Thomas Rich of Passaic. New jersey, round-eyed, mustachioed and wearing a well-cut business suit-rose from his chair and smiled My friend shook his hand. grateful for the rare private audience. He had recently emerged from an emotionally repressive religious community in Los Angeles, and a meditation retreat led by the Regent had introduced him to a more colorful, less guilt-inducing, spiritual path­.
As the afternoon wore on, the men talked about Buddhism. love and theology. Gradually, the sake level dropped in­side the bottle- Then my friend, a little drunk, grew bold and raised the subject lie Feared most: homosexuality- There was a moment of silence.

“Stand up,” Tendzin said. “Kiss me.” My friend complied.

When the Regent requested oral sex my friend, slightly dismayed, declined.” I think you can do it,” the Regent said cheerfully. The two then moved to a couch, where my friend’s taboo against homosexuality was broken.

When it was over. Tendzin mentioned in passing that lie had similar sexual encounters several times a day. He offered my friend a ride, opened the office door and led the way through clusters of waiting assistants to a sleek car purring in the twilight below, a driver waiting at the wheel­
My friend later felt confused and embarrassed about that afternoon, but not bitter. “He pushed me into a homosexual experience, and yet at the same time he was generous. I asked to see him, and he made time (or me, he told me “I felt a mixture of embarrassment and honor. I don’t feel Tendzin abused me, and I don’t want my sexual experience judged by anybody



AFTER MY FRINED TOLD ME HIS Story, I often replayed it in my wind, like a videotape, sears bong or hidden clues to later events. I noted my friend’s fascination with the trappings of spiritual power and his discomfort with moral judgments. I observed Tendzin s apparently routine transformation of a religious audience into an afternoon of drinking and sexual relations, and how casually he admitted In addictively frequent sex I had to acknowledge that my friend had not been harmed: yet I saw in the incident the seed, of the disaster that followed.

These misfortunes are more than a tragic dance between exploitation and naivete. Their roots lie not in individual villainy, but in cultural misunderstandings and hidden emotional wounds.
Crisis of Leadership

In April 1987, Vajra Regent Osel Tendzin assumed leadership of the Vajradhatu community, following the death of the well-known and widely respected Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Less than two years later, in Decem­ber 1988, the most harmful crisis ever to strike an American Buddhist community unfolded when Vajradhatu administra­tors told their members that the Regent had been infected with the AIDS virus for nearly three years. Members of the Vajradhatu board of directors conceded that, except for some months of celibacy, he had neither protected his sexual part­ners nor told them the truth. One of the Regent’s sexual partners, the son of longterm students, was infected, as was a young woman who had later made love to the young man.

Two members of the Vajradhatu board of directors had known of his infection for more than two years, and chose to do nothing. Trungpa Rinpoche had also known about it before his death Board members had reluctantly informed the sangha (community) only after trying for three months to persuade the Regent to act on his own.

“Thinking I had some extraordinary means of protection, I went ahead with my business as it something would take care of it for me,” Tendzin reportedly told a stunned community meeting organized in Berkeley in mid-December.

This crisis of leadership was hardly the only disaster to befall an American Buddhist sangha In 13 years of practic­ing Buddhist meditation, I have seen venerated, black-robed Japanese roshis and their American dharma heirs (including my own former teacher) exposed for having secret affairs. Other Buddhist teachers-Tibetan, Japanese and American-have misused money, become alcoholic or indulged in eccentric ­behavior. (See box, page 21. )

As an American Buddhist, I found the scandals heartbreaking and puzzling. I thought of Buddhism not as a cult but as a 2,500-year-old religion devoted to ending suffering, not causing it. I also knew that the teachers involved were not char­latans, but sincere, thoroughly trained spiritual mentors, dedicated to transmit­ting the Buddhist dharma to the West.

As a journalist, I noticed that media coverage of the scandals seemed to rein­force secular America’s deeply held suspicion of all religious impulses The teachers came across as cynical explotters; their followers as gullible fools.

But having watched and participated in Buddhist communities for more than a decade, I know that these misfortunes are more than a tragic dance between ex­ploitation and naivete. Their roots be not in Individual villainy, but in cultural misunderstandings and hidden emo­tional wounds. And all community members, however unconsciously, play a part in them.

When Buddhism moved West, an ancient and profound Eastern tradition encountered a younger, more fragmented American society. The new American Buddhists enthusiastically built Japanese meditation halls lined with sweet ­smelling tatami mats, and Tibetan-style shrine rooms with altars laden with ceremonial bowls of water and rice. Try­ing, to build new communities, they cobbled together structures that combined elements of Eastern hierarchy and devotion and Western individualism. The blending of widely divergent cultural values was complicated by the fact that orally students hoped to find a sanctuary from the wounds of painful childhoods and from the loneliness of their own culture When the scandals erupted however, many found themselves like Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz “back in their own back yards,” having unconsciously replicated patterns the hoped to leave behind.

Now, as the shadow side has coin to light, certain common elements within the commmunities are apparent.

Patterns of denial, shame secrecy and invasiveness remminscent of alcoholics

and incestuous

Soft peddling of basic Buddhist precepts against the harmful use of alcoholics

and sex.

An unhealthy marriage of Asian hierarchy and American license the

distorts the teacher-disciple relationship and

A tendency. once scandals are uncovered, to either scapegoat the disgraced teachers or blindly deny that anything has changed.



A Lineage of Denial

From here to the end of the page is missing the last few letters. I did not finishing proofing that page.

As a member of San Francisco Zen Center in the early I980s. I was mystilie by my own failure-and the failure of Ill friends-to challenge the behavior of a teacher, Richard Baker-roshi, when seemed to defy common sense. Sine then, friends from alcoholic families have told me that our community reproduce patterns of denial and enablement simile to those in their families, When of teacher kept us waiting, failed to meditate and was extravagant with money, we ignored it or explained it away as a teaching. A cadre of well-organized subordinates picked up the pieces behind hill just as the wife of an alcoholic might cover her husband’s bounced check ??c bail him out of jail. This “enabling,” z?? alcoholism counselors call it, allowe damaging behavior to continue and grow. It insulated our teacher from the consequences of his actions and depraved hi?? of the chance to learn from his mistake.

The process damaged us as well: We habitually denied what was in front of our faces, felt powerless and lost touch with our inner experience.

Similar patterns were acknowledged at Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1983, when their teacher, the respected Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi-roshi, entered a treat­ment program and acknowledged his alcoholism. “We were all co-alcoholics,” one of Maezumi’s students told Buddhist historian Sandy Boucher. “We in subtle ways encouraged his alcoholism because when he was drunk] he would become piercingly honest.”

A similar process may have taken place at Vajradhatu in the 1970s, as stu­dents attempted to come to terms with their teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, Rin­poche, a maverick, Oxford-educated Tibetan exile who was brilliant, compas­sionate and alcoholic.

Trungpa Rinpoche, the 11th incarnation of the Trungpa Tulku. was the teenage head of several large Tibetan monasteries when the 1959 Chinese in­vasion tore him from his native culture. Eager to meet the West on its own terms, he gave up his robes for a business suit, fell in love with Shakespeare and Mozart, and married an English woman. He sometimes lectured with a glass of sake in his hand.

Trungpa Rinpoche taught that every aspect of human existence -neurosis, passion, desire, alcohol, the dark and the light-was to he embraced and trans­muted. lie called his wild approach “crazy wisdom,” referring to a small but genuine tradition of revered, eccentric Tibetan yogis-most of whom worked intimately with one or two students.

Buddhist teachers-even those uneasy with his behavior-admired Trungpa Rinpoche for his brilliant translation of Buddhism into Western terms, Wary of importing Tibetan cultural forms, he first taught his American students a simple, Zen-based sitting meditation. He then gradually introduced the elaborate Tantric disciplines that distinguish Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism from almost all other Buddhist schools. Students completed foundational prac­tices, including 100,000 prostrations, and attended a three-month seminary in the mountains. Advanced students were ceremonially initiated into confidential Tibetan practices of meditative visualiza­tion. Teacher and student entered into a relationship, traditionally more devo­tional than anything in other Buddhist schools.

Trungpa attracted thousands of well­ educated people who soon created the largest, most creative and least conven­tional of America’s non-Asian Buddhist communities. He counted among his students poets Alan Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, playwright Jean-Claude van Italic. Shambhala Publications publisher Sam Bercholz, and Rick Fields, author of a respected history of American Bud­dhism. Based primarily in Boulder, students ran businesses, founded Naropa Institute, an accredited Buddhist univer­sity; edited a journal on contemplative psychotherapy; and published a widely­ read bimonthly Buddhist newspaper, the Vajradhatu Sun.

Yet woven into the discipline and creativity was a strand of hedonism. Vajradhatu students had a reputation for the wildest parties in Buddhist America. Although most Tibetan Tantric schools clearly discourage “acting out” passions and impulses, Trungpa Rinpoche did not. In fact, drunk and speeding, he once crashed a sports car into the side of a joke shop and was left partly paralyzed. He openly slept with students in Boulder, he lectured brilliantly, yet sometimes so drunk that he had to be carried off-stage or held upright in his chair.

To student Jules Levinson, a Tibetan scholar and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia, the stones “were very upsetting-that he drank a lot, that he slept around “ Yet at the same time, Levinson was grateful to Trungpa. “1 found him gentle, delicate, provocative and nurturing-the most compassionate person I have ever known. I just couldn’t put it together.” he said.

Some students, replaying dynamics from their alcoholic families, responded to Trungpa Rinpoche by denying and enabling his addictive drinking and sex­ual activity. “I served Rinpoche big glasses of gin first thing in the morning, if you want to talk about enabling,” said one woman, who had watched her own father die of alcoholism.

Others resolved their cognitive dissonance by believing that their teacher had transcended the limitations of a human body. “Trungpa Rinpoche said that because he had Vajra nature [a yogically transformed and stabilized psychophysiology], he was immune to the normal physiological effects of alcohol,” said one student. “We bought the story that it was a way of putting ‘earth’ into his system, so that he could ... relate to us, It never occurred to anyone I knew that he was possibly an alcoholic, since that was a disease that could only happen to an ordinary mor­tal. And many of us were ignorant-we thought of an alcoholic only as the classic hum in the street “

An atmosphere of denial permeated the community in the 1970s and early 1980s, and other Vajradhatu students became heavy drinkers. “I found myself a nice little nest where I could keep on drinking,” said one long-time Vajradhatu Buddhist. who was among a handful of Vajradhatu members who joined Alco­holics Anonymous (AA) in the early 1980s. Their recovery seemed to threaten others. The first woman to get sober was asked to quit the hoard of a home care organization found by Vajradhatu mem­bers. “ I felt such contempt for someone who had to quit drinking, and I treated her like a mental case.” said the woman who got rid of her-a woman who has since joined AA herself.

When Trungpa Rinpoche lay dying in 1986 at the age of 47, only an inner cir­clc knew the symptoms of this final ill­ness. Few could bear to acknowledge that their beloved and brilliant teacher was dying of terminal alcoholism. even when he lay incontinent in his bedroom, belly distended and skin discolored, hallucinating and suffering from varicose veins. gastritis and esophageal varices, a swell­ing of veins in the esophagus caused almost exclusively by cirrhosis of the liver.

“Rinpoche was certainly not an ordi­nary Joe. but he sure died like every alcoholic I’ve ever seen who drank unin­terruptedly.” said Victoria Fitch, a mem­ber of his household staff with years of experience as a nursing attendant. “The denial was bone-deep.” she continued “I watched his alcoholic dementia ex­plained as his being in the realm of the daikinis (guardians of the teachings, visualized in female form). When he re­quested alcohol, no one could bring themselves not to bring it to him.

When our teacher kept us waiting, failed to meditate and was extravagant with money, we ignored it away as a teaching, although they tried to water his beer or bring him a little less. In that final time of his life... he could no longer walk independently. At the same time then was a power about hint and an equanimity to his presence that was phenomenal, that I don’t know how to explain.”

Sortie students now feel that the Regent Osel Tendzin suffered from a similar denial of human limitation, as well as ignorance of addictive behavior­.

“Many students who are outraged by the Regent’s behavior seem to think he arose out of nowhere,” one student said­ “They’re not using their Buddhist train­ing about cause and effect- I think the Regent has emulated in a more extreme and deadly fashion a pattern of denial and ignorance exemplified by Trungpa Rinpoche’s own attitude to alcohol.”
Family Secrets

By the time the crisis broke, a small but significant minority of Vajrtdhatu students had begun to deal with wounds fell by family alcoholism and incest. By the mid-1980s, about 250 Vajradhatu members around the country-mostly wives of alcoholic husbands-had joined Al-Anon, an organization modeled after AA for the Families of alcoholics, and more than a score of sangha members had joined AA. Soft drinks were also served at Vajradhatu ceremonies, and the atmosphere of excessive drinking diminished.

Those in the 12-Step movement were a minority. however, and certain stub­born pane ms persisted. For example, the Regent himself sought to suppress any public discussion oh the crisis, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of an alcoholic family’s defensive secrecy.

When editor Rick Fields prepared a short article for the Vojradhatu Sun describing the hare bones of the crisis, he was forbidden to print it. “There have been ongoing discussions, both within community meetings and among many individuals, about the underlying issues that permitted the current situation to occur,” read the banned article. Those issues include the abuse of power and the betrayal of trust, the proper relationship between teachers with spiritual author­ity and students, particularly in the West, and the relationship between devotion and critical intelligence on the spiritual path.”

In the article’s place, Fields printed a mute drawing of the Vajradhatu logo-a knot of eternity-stretched to the break­ing point over a broken heart. In March. Fields again attempted to non his article and was fired by the Regent. When the board of directors refused to support him, he formally resigned, saying that Bud­dhist teaching in the West “would behest served in the long run by openness and honesty, painful as that may be.”

The suppression of public discussion echoed both the Asian tradition of face ­saving as well as the dynamics of alcoholic families. “There’s a sense of fancily secrets, things you don’t talk about, especially with outsiders;” said Levinson “Shortly after the news came out I wrote to the Regent and said, if the rumors are true, then [those actions] don’t seeds to be in accord with the dharma, but it doesn’t snake you a devil. The most im­portant thing is what we do now I would really like you to come talk to us openly, in small groups, at least in Boulder and Halifax, as your health permits. If you can do that we. may be able to re-establish some trust. My biggest heartbreak is that he hasn’t done that.
Cross-Cultural Clashes

For more than a year, the stalemate stretched Vajradhatu to the breaking point. Tendzin publicly but obliquely acknowledged violating Buddhist vows, but he declined to accept responsibility for infecting others. He remained on retreat in California with a small group of devoted students, defying; a request by the board of directors that he withdraw from teaching. In Boulder, some anti­-Regent students virulently and unrealis­tically blamed him [or the entire disaster, while pro-Regent students practiced what might be called “devotional or transcen­dental denial.” They urged the preserva­tion of the Buddhist teaching lineage at the expense of facing what had hap­pened Many others fell into what one senior student called “the heartbroken middle.” In a letter widely distributed in Boulder. one student wrote, “If the Board and the Regent cannot work out their dif­ferences with compassion and intelli­gence, the sangha will he shattered.”

The community consulted Tibetan lamas to resolve the impasse, but their responses reflected an Asian emphasis on lace-saving, hierarchy and avoidance of open conflict. Although it is unclear how much he understood the situation, one venerated lama, the late Kale Rinpoche, forbade his American students to comment on the Vajradhatu disaster An­other, the Venerable Dilgo Khyentse, Rinpoche, first asked the Regent to go into retreat but urged Vajrildhatu students to respect the Regent s authority.

It was too much for many students to stomach “This is a living nightmare for us,” said Robin Kornman a long-time Vajradhatu meditation teacher and a gradate student at Princeton University. “We are being told to follow a person we are certain is deeply confused.

Buddhist students at other centers have experienced similar cross-cultural problems. Itit he late 1970s, Zen student Andrew Cooper became disturbed when he realized that his Japanese Rosh “dis­couraged the expression of personal disagreement, doubt or problems within the community, even whoa those problems were undeniably real and potentally disruptive.”

Cooper, now a graduate student in psychology, thought his teacher was hypocritical until a frend who had lived in Japan told him that the Japanese have no notion of hypocrisy, at lead not In the sense we in the West do. “For the Japanese, withholding one’s personal feelings in order to maintain the appearance of harmony within the group is seen as virtuous and noble,” Cooper wrote in an unpublished paper. “This attitude is part of the structuring of Japanese social relations-it has a place there. But when it is imported under the banner of enlightenment and overlaid on an American community. The results are cultish and bizarre.”
Asian Deference and Western License

The results are particularly trouble­some when communities import Asian devotional traditions without importing corresponding Asian social controls, Chogyatn Trungpa. for instance, came from a society where the sense of “self” and the social controls on that sell were very different from those in the West. Raised from infancy in Eastern Tibet as an incarnate lama, he headed a huge institutional monastery at 19. He was granted tremendous devotion and power, but his freedom was rigidly circum­scribed by monastic vows of chastity and abstinence, and by obligations to his monastery and the surrounding Community.

Community standards were based on an intricate system of reciprocal obligation. They were clear and often unspoken. Almost everyone’s behavior-serf, lama or landowner-was closely but subtly controlled by a strong and often unspoken desire to save face.

But these social controls did not exist in the society to which Trungpa Rin­poche came in the freewheeling 1970s. His American students’ behavior was loosely governed by contractual relation­ships; by frank, open discussions, and by individual choices rather than by shared social ethics and mutual obligation- His ancestors had lived in the same valley for generations; when he first arrived in America. he flew from city to city like a rock star. While America removed all social limits from Trungpa Rinpoche’s behavior, his students became his house­hold servants, chauffeured his car and showed him a deference appropriate to a Tibetan lama or feudal lord­.

The same deference was shown to his dharma heir. Osel Tendzin. “His meals were occasions for frenzies of linen-pressing, silver-polishing, hair­breadth calibrations in table settings, and exact choreographies of servers,” said television producer Deborah Mendelsohn, who helped host Tendzin when he gave two meditation retreats in Los Angeles. but has since left the commu­nity. “When he traveled, a handbook went with him to guide his hosts through the particulars of caring for him, includ­ing instructions on how and in what order to offer his towel, underpants and robe after he stepped from the shower.”

This parody of Asian deference, com­bined with American license, ultimately proved disastrous, and not only at Vajradhatu. At Zen centers as well, stu­dents took on Asian gestures of subser­vience while their teachers sometimes acted “Freely” drinking, spending money, making sexual advances to women or men, all with precious little negative feedback. The deference often went far beyond what would have been granted a teacher in Japan or Tibet.
“Pressure from the community isvery important in controlling behavior in Tibetan communities,” said Dr Barbara Aziz, an internationally known social anthropologist at the City university of New York who has spent 20 years doing fieldwork among Tibetans in Nepal and Tibet. “In Tibetan society, they expect more of the guy they put on the pedes­tal .. if such a scandal had happened in Tibet, the whole community might have felt polluted. Osel Tendzin might have been driven from the valley. Depending on the degree of community outrage. his family might have made substantial offerings to the monastery for purification rites and prayers to infuse society with compassion.”

Furthermore, Aziz pointed out, Tibetans may “demonstrate all kinds of reverence to a reverence, but they won’t necessarily do what he says.” “I see far more discernment among my Tibetan and Nepali friends,” she concluded. “than among Westerners.”
The Need for Discernment

I n this confusing cross-cultural con­text. the teacher-student bond can he eas­ily misunderstood. In the early days of my Zen training, I would make a formal prostration before my teacher when visiting him For practice instruction. I tried to see him as “enlightened,” and I hoped that over time I would internalize the qualities of awareness, sell­containment and energy that I admired in him.

Idealizing one’s teacher is part of a long and healthy tradition in Tibet, Japan and India, according to Alan Roland, a psychoanalyst and author of In Search of Self in India and Japan. “The need to have a figure to respect, idealize and imitate is a crucial part of every persons self­development. But “Eastern cultures are far more articulate about that need and culturally support it,” he explained.

Roland believes that Asian students approach the teacher-student relation­ships more subtly than Americans-who often commit rapidly and completely. or not at all. Asian students may display deference. but withhold veneration, until they have studied with a teacher for years. They scent to have a “private self’ unknown to many Americans, which is capable of reserving judgement even while scrupulously following the forms. When a teacher fails, Asians may con­tinue to defer to his superior rank but silently withdraw affection and respect.

In America, it’s often the reverse. Some Vajradhatu students could forgive easel Osel Tendzin as a human being, but could not treat him as a leader few Americans can show deference to some­one they don’t venerate without feeling hypocritical. Faced with this cognitive dissonance, they either abandon deference and leave, or they deny inner feelings.

If they deny their perceptions, reality becomes distorted and a mutual dance of delusion begins. “Part of the blame lies with the student, because too much obedience, devotion and blind acceptance spoils a teacher,” explained His Holiness the Dalai Lama last year at a conference.

In Newport Beach. California. Part also lies with the spiritual master because he lacks the integrity to be immune to that kind of vunerability. I recommend never adopting the attitude toward one’s Spiritual teacher of seeing his or her every action a divine or noble. This may seem a little bit bold, but if one has a teacher who is not qualified, who is engaging in unsuitable or wrong behavior, then it is appropriate for the student to criticize that behavior.”
Turning Point

Last autumn, it looked as though the Vajradhatu sangha would be torn in two. After the long retreat advised by Dilgo



BOX
Sex in the Forbidden Zone

In the late 1960s, a bright-eyed, patrician woman I know entered San Francisco Zen Center intending to give her heart to the practice She was in her Early twenties, shaken by a fail­ing marriage, with a fierce, lion­hearted energy that kept her back straight for long hours in the medita­tion hall. Several years after the death of her first teacher, her second teacher-who was married-pres­sured her to abandon her plans to attend the rigorous winter training period at the Tassajata monastery and to become his personal assistant. She resisted for months, knowing that this would mean living in his house and traveling with him. After she finally agreed, he asked her to enter what lie called a “practice relationship” with him that was to he kept a secret from the rest of the community.

“I’d never really felt intimate, never really felt known before,” she told me recently. “Until lie began to relate sexually to me, he had been the most important man I’d ever met, a wonderful teacher. He touched my deepest primal self, and I felt the promise of a spiritual intimacy that I longed for with my whole being. I very much hoped that by breaking through to that forbidden area I would some­ how, magically, break through to all that was held frozen and paralyzed within me.”

For six years, my friend remained enmeshed in this secret sexual rela­tionship. It healed none of her old wounds, it created new ones. She became a priest. but at the same time, she was guilt-ridden, isolated by secrecy from the rest of the commu­nity, and yet unable to pull away. Even after ending the relationship, she guarded its secret for years, She ultimately gave up her priest’s robes, left the community and entered therapy to repair the damage.

“As soon as we became sexually involved, any possibility of real spiri­tual intimacy with him ended,” she told me recently. “And so did my trust of my own inner center. It felt like incest to rime-it was very physically unrewarding, and after every time, I would feel just destroyed.”

My friend’s experience was not unique. Presumed taboos against sex­ual relationships between students and spiritual teachers from Asian traditions are Frequently broken When they end badly, these relation­ships cause the same damage seen in women sexually abused by therapists: guilt, emptiness, suppressed rage and an inability to trust. In the worst cases, women have tried to kill themselves, have been confined to mental hospi­tals, or have seen their manages, their self-confidence or their religious voca­tions destroyed.

Jack Kornfield, a psychologist and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society, informally surveyed 54 Bud­dhist, Hindu and lain teachers in the United States as well as their students. In a 1985 Yoga Journal article, “Sex Lives of the Gurus,” he reported that 15 of 54 were celibate. Thirty-four of the remaining 39-including Tibetan lamas, Zen roshis, vipassana medita­tion teachers and Indian swamis-had had sexual relationships with their students, ranging from one-night stands to committed relationships ending in marriage. Hall of the students told Kornfield that the rela­tionships “undermined their practice, their relationship with their teacher, and their feelings of sell-worth,” he wrote.

Kornfield, a former Theravadan monk said the teachers’ motivation was not always a misuse of power, but a lack of training in the psychological dynamics of transference anti-counter-transference and “a longing for contact and intimacy, a longing to step out of the isolating role of teacher.” Not all the relationships were disastrous, Cornfield added.

Many teachers, from all traditions, in­cluding Kornfield, have married students or staff members they met during retreats

The late Marine Stuart-rashi, a Zen teacher based in Cambridge, Mas­sachusetts, distinguished between sexuality and sexual abuse when she broke off contact with Eido Shimao­roshi of New York. “I wasn’t judgmen-tal about sex, or about a teacher hav­ing sex with a student, but in this situation it was an unloving act,” she told author Helen Tworkov, who pro­filed Stuart in Zen in America. “It was the misuse of sex—and of women­and the manipulations that were so devastating.”

While the distinction between sexuality and sexual abuse is a valu­able one, others argue that such rela- tionships almost always turn out badly because of enormous differ­ences in power, experience and hope between the people involved Peter Rutter, M D., a San Francisco Jungian analyst, believes women are drawn into Such relationships by psychologi­cal wounds: a background of incest, the desire to be deeply seen or the hope of spiritual and psychological healing.

But the promise of healing almost always goes unfulfilled, explained Rut­ter, author of Sex in the Forbidden Zone: When Therapists, Doctors, Clergy, Teachers and Other Men in Power Betray Women’s Trust. “The number of healthy relation-ships that emerge are minuscule,” he said in a recent interview “The damage is almost universal, and it is absolutely identical, whether the rela­tionships take place within imported Eastern disciplines or Western psy­chotherapy.” Rutter says the relation­ships bear the hallmarks, and cause the damage, of incest relationships. “There’s the same difference in power, the built-in admiration for the sym­bolic father, and the inability to displease him or see that he is damag­ing her.”

“These relationships are mostly temporary, and the women are usu­ally discarded,” Rutter said. “They break the student’s connection to his or her own spiritual source, and that connection can be forever lost.”

K. B.



End box



Khyentse, Rinpoche, Tendzin boldly re­asserted authorty. Those who refused to accept his spiritual leadership were fired from key committees, denied permission to teach meditation and barred from tak­ing part in advanced practices with the rest of their community. The conflict became so intense that the two opposing factions sent delegations to Nepal and India to implore senior lamas to support their positions­.

In response, Khyentse Rinpoche advised Tendzin to enter into a “strict retreat” for a year. Tendzin complied, retaining nominal authority but effec­tively abdicating his teaching and leader­ship role. Senior Tibetan lamas were in­vited to Boulder to teach, and Vajradhatu began to connect again to a wider Tibetan religious tradition.­

“This is a real turning point,” said a relieved David Rome, a member of the board of directors. “This is a way to come together and feel basic unity, and to look at the issues that this crisis brought to the surface. This is not the end; really, it’s the beginning,” he said­.

After the Fall

As Vajradhatu struggles to pick up the pieces, other Buddhist sanghas. which have undergone similar crises, are likewise dealing with ways to heal their communities. In one of the most promis­ing side effects, American teachers of In­sight (vipassana) meditation have recently created a clear set of ethical standards for teachers and a community hoard to oversee them­.

In other Buddhist communities, however, where teachers have stone­walled accusations of misconduct, suc­cessive waves of dissenting students have departed. At San Francisco Zen Center, my own practice home, our teacher re­signed under pressure. We brought in psychological consultants and learned to talk more honestly to each other, and adopted more democratic forms of decision-making. Even so, many stu­dents left. The meditation hall emptied. Friendships were broken, and some peo­ple lost the energy for spiritual practice. Our former teacher moved to Santa Fe and continued teaching; my husband and I moved to the suburbs­.

My black meditation robe still hangs in the back of my closet. I never lost faith in Buddhist teachings, but for some years I didn’t know how to reconnect with them. instead. I did what a friend called “remedial work,” examining my personal history and the anger and self-righteous­-

New box

Scandals and Improprities

Abuses of power and silent collu­sion in sexual exploitation occur not only in Buddhist communities, but in Western psychiatric settings and other religious communities as well. Here is a sampling:

The Zen Studies Society of New York: In 1975, 1979 and 1982, the married Japanese abbot, Eido Tai Shimano-roshi, was accused of seducing emotionally vulnerable women students—accusations he has repeat­edly denied.

San Francisco Zen Center: In 1983, American abbot Richard Baker, suc­cessor to Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, re­signed under pressure after affairs with women students- including his best friend’s wife were acknowledged. In 1987, Baker-roshi’s successor Reb Anderson was arrested waving all un­loaded pistol in a public housing proj­ect shortly after being robbed at knife­point. Investigators discovered that Anderson had taken the pistol four years earlier from the body of a suicide he discovered in a patio. He had not in­formed the police. Anderson took a six ­month leave of absence from admin­istrative responsibilities and now shares the abbacy with another teacher.

Zen Center of Los Angeles: In 1983 Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi-roshi, a married Japanese abbot, entered an alcoholism treatment program and openly apologized to his students for affairs with several women students. including a teen-age girl.

Kwan Um Zen School (Rhode Island): In April 1987, it was re­vealed that the widely respected and supposedly celibate Korean ten teacher. Soen Sa Nim, had had secret, long-tern sexual relationships with two women students.

Insight Meditation Society (Barre, Massachusetts): In the early 1980s. American meditation community has confronted sexual bounary violations before they became unmanageable.

Richard Ingrasci, M.D. (Water­town, Massachusetts): In 1989, The Boston Globe reported that three women patients accused lngrasci of fondling them during therapy ses­sions. Two of the women said they were molested while under the influ­ence. of pychotropic drugs, including MDMA, which the former medical editor of New Age Journal and holistic physician had lobbied Congress to legalize. Ingrasci surrendered his med­ical license, ending state disciplinary proceedings.

The Catholic Church in America: By the end of 1988, the Church had reportedly paid $19 million to fami­lies who had accused priests of sex­ually molesting alter boys and other children. At issue was not the small number of pedophile priests, but the church’s failure to protect children once problems were known. In several archdiocese, priests accused of molesting were quietly transferred to other parishes, where more children reported sexual abuse.

SYDA Foundation, Oakland, California: Shortly before his death in 1982, Swami Muktananda was accused by close disciples of repeat­edly molesting young female devotees some of them in their early teens.

End box



ness I expressed when the scandal broke, I was among those who hoped to find a sanctuary within Buddhism for my per­sonal wounds. But my culture and fam­ily history trailed me into my Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield flew to India and confronted an elderly, celibate Indian teacher who had sexually approached a young woman student during a retreat in Massachusetts. Kornfield, representing the Insight Meditation sangha, told the Teacher he would have to openly discuss the inci­dent in a community forum before he would be invited hack to teach in the United States. It is one of the few cases where an American Buddhist community like a can tied to the tail of a dog.

I study with another Buddhist teacher now, and I constantly remind myself to allow him-and me-to have impetections. Once a month or so, I gather with others in a friend’s living room to recite the lay Buddhist precepts.

Yet something of the past remains unfinished. My old teacher simply left when he could not hear his students’ anger any more I remember a senior priest saying at the time, “Students arc expecting him to transform himself without safety. You can’t learn a whole new way when you are under attack.”

The bitterness from that unresolved schism still hurts, like a splinter working its way deeper into one’s palm. A friend of mine, Yvonne Rand-an ordained Buddhist teacher who still participates closely in the community-said to me recently, “We’re still struggling with the fallout of his departure I don’t think the shoe will fully drop until we find a way to be in the same room together As long as there’s a fear of having him around, there’s a way people don’t understand their part in the situation.”

We lack rituals that would allow communities to acknowledge these crises and to heal them. I remember reading about the Full Moon Ceremony used by monks in the first few centuries alter Bud­dha’s death. On the eve of every lull and new moon during the rainy season monks would gather in the forest for a ritual called “confession before the com­munity.” There, they publicly recited the precepts, admitted their shortcomings, their violations and any damage they had done to their community

If we reinstated such a quiet ritual, perhaps a brave, disgraced teacher might safely acknowledge his misconduct and the wounds that brought him to it- Per­haps the sangha could confess its deep disappointment and feelings of betrayal, and its participation in what had gone wrong Perhaps the whole sangha could publicly apologize to the men or women who had been misused sexually or in other ways, and compensate them in some way.

After full acknowledgement and restitution, forgiveness might be possible and healing begin.

© 1990 Katy Butler. All Rights Reserved. Not to be reprinted without permission.

“Many believe Chögyam Trungpa has unquestionably done more harm to Buddhism in the United States than any man living.”

http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsam ... rungpa.asp

This article/chapter is excerpted from Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey D. Falk.

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CHAPTER XVII
A WILD AND CRAZY
WISDOM GUY

(CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA)


CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA, BORN IN 1939, is the first of the “crazy wisdom” masters whose effect on North American spirituality we will be considering.

The night of my conception my mother had a very significant dream that a being had entered her body with a flash of light; that year flowers bloomed in the neighborhood although it was still winter, to the surprise of the inhabitants....

I was born in the cattle byre [shed]; the birth came easily. On that day a rainbow was seen in the village, a pail supposed to contain water was unaccountably found full of milk, while several of my mother’s relations dreamt that a lama was visiting their tents (Trungpa, 1977).

As the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa Tulku, the milk-fed sage was raised from his childhood to be the supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries in eastern Tibet.

In Trungpa’s tradition, a tulku is “someone who reincarnates with the memories and values of previous lives intact” (Butterfield, 1994). Of an earlier, fourth incarnation of that same Trungpa Tulku (Trungpa Künga-gyaltzen) in the late fourteenth century, it has been asserted:

[H]e was looked upon as an incarnation of Maitreya Bodhisattva, destined to be the Buddha of the next World Cycle, also of Dombhipa a great Buddhist siddha (adept) and of Milarepa (Trungpa, 1977).

Having been enthroned in Tibet as heir to the lineages of Milarepa and Padmasambhava, Trungpa left the country for India in 1959, fleeing the Chinese Communist takeover. There, by appointment of the Dalai Lama, he served as the spiritual advisor for the Young Lamas Home School in Dalhousie, until 1963 (Shambhala, 2003).

From India Chögyam went to England, studying comparative religion and psychology at Oxford University. (A later student of Trungpa’s, Al Santoli, “suggests that the CIA may have had a hand in getting the eleventh Trungpa into Oxford” [Clark, 1980].) He further caused quite a stir in clashing with another tulku adversary (Akong) of his who, like Trungpa himself, had designs on leading their lineage in the West.

To the amazement of a small circle of local helpers and to the gross embarrassment of the powers that sent them to England, the two honorable tulkus entered into heated arguments and publicly exchanged hateful invectives. In an early edition of his book, Born in Tibet, Trungpa called Akong paranoid and scheming (Lehnert, 1998).

In any case, Trungpa and Akong went on to found the first Western-hemisphere Tibetan Buddhist meditation center, in Scotland, which community was visited by the American poet Robert Bly in 1971.

It was, Trungpa remembers, “a forward step. Nevertheless, it was not entirely satisfying, for the scale of activity was small, and the people who did come to participate seemed to be slightly missing the point” (Fields, 1992).

That same center later became of interest to the police as they investigated allegations of drug abuse there. Trungpa, not himself prone to “missing the point,” avoided that bust by hiding in a stable.

The Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo (in Mackenzie, 1999) related her own experiences with the young Chögyam in England, upon their first meeting in 1962. There, in finding his attentive hands working their way up her skirt in the middle of afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches, Trungpa received a stiletto heel to his sandaled holy feet. His later “smooth line” to her, in repeated attempts at seduction beyond that initial meeting/groping, included the claim that Palmo had “swept him off his monastic feet.” That, in spite of the fact that he “had women since [he] was thirteen,” and already had a son.

In 1969 Chögyam experienced a tragic automobile accident which left him paralyzed on the left side of his body. The car had careened into a joke shop (seriously); Trungpa had been driving drunk at the time (Das, 1997), to the point of blacking out at the wheel (Trungpa, 1977).

Note, now, that Trungpa did not depart from Tibet for India until age twenty, and did not leave India for his schooling in England until four years later. Thus, eleven years of his having “had women” were enacted within surrounding traditional Tibetan and northern Indian attitudes toward acceptable behavior (on the part of monks, etc.). Indeed, according to the son referenced above, both his mother and Trungpa were under vows of celibacy, in Tibet, at the time of their union (Dykema, 2003). Of the three hundred monks entrusted to him when he was enthroned as supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries, Trungpa himself (1977) remarked that

one hundred and seventy were bhikshus (fully ordained monks), the remainder being shramaneras (novices) and young upsaka students who had already taken the vow of celibacy.

Obviously, then, Trungpa’s (Sarvastivadin) tradition was not a “monastic” one without celibacy vows, as is the case with Zen.

Further, Trungpa himself did not formally give up his monastic vows to work as a “lay teacher” until sometime after his car accident in England. This, then, is another clear instance of demonstration that traditional agrarian society places no more iron-clad constraints on the behavior of any “divine sage” than does its postmodern, Western counterpart.

Trungpa may have “partied harder” in Europe and the States, but he was already breaking plenty of rules, without censure, back in Tibet and India. Indeed, one could probably reasonably argue that, proportionately, he broke as many social and cultural rules, with as little censure, in Tibet and India as he later did in America. (For blatant examples of what insignificant discipline is visited upon even violent rule-breakers in Tibetan Buddhist society even today, consult Lehnert’s [1998] Rogues in Robes.) Further, Trungpa (1977) did not begin to act as anyone’s guru until age fourteen, but had women since he was thirteen. He was thus obviously breaking that vow of celibacy with impunity both before and after assuming “God-like” guru status, again in agrarian 1950s Tibet.

In 1970, the recently married Trungpa and his sixteen-year-old, dressage-fancying English wife, Diana, established their permanent residence in the United States. He was soon teaching at the University of Colorado, and in time accumulated around 1500 disciples. Included among those was folksinger Joni Mitchell, who visited the tulku three times, and whose song “Refuge of the Roads” (from the 1976 album Hejira) contains an opening verse about the guru. Contemporary transpersonal psychologist and author John Welwood, member of the Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, is also a long-time follower of Trungpa.

In 1974, Chögyam founded the accredited Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado—the first tantric university in America. Instructors and guests at Naropa have included psychiatrist R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Ram Dass and Allen Ginsberg—after whom the university library was later named. (Ginsberg had earlier spent time with Swami Muktananda [Miles, 1989].) Also, Marianne Faithfull, avant-garde composer John Cage, and William “Naked Lunch” Burroughs, who had earlier become enchanted (1974, 1995) and then disenchanted with L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. Plus, the infinitely tedious Tibetan scholar and translator Herbert V. Guenther, whose writings, even by dry academic standards, could function well as a natural sedative.

Bhagavan Das (1997) related his own, more lively experiences, while teaching Indian music for three months at Naropa in the ’70s:

The party energy around [Trungpa] was compelling. In fact, that’s basically what Naropa was: a huge blowout party, twenty-four hours a day....

I was in a very crazed space and very lost. One day, after having sex with three different women, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was traumatized. It was all too much.

Jack Kornfield offered a less “traumatic” recounting of his own days lecturing there, being invited to teach after he and Trungpa had met at a (where else) cocktail party in 1973:

We all had this romantic, idealistic feeling that we were at the beginning of a consciousness movement that was really going to transform the world (in Schwartz, 1996).

Befitting the leader of such a world-changing effort, in 1974 Trungpa was confirmed as a Vajracarya, or a “spiritual master of the highest level,” by His Holiness the Karmapa Lama, during the latter’s first visit to the West (Trungpa, 1977).
* * *

The practice of “crazy wisdom” itself rests upon the following theory:

f a bodhisattva is completely selfless, a completely open person, then he will act according to openness, will not have to follow rules; he will simply fall into patterns. It is impossible for the bodhisattva to destroy or harm other people, because he embodies transcendental generosity. He has opened himself completely and so does not discriminate between this and that. He just acts in accordance with what is.... [H]is mind is so precise, so accurate that he never makes mistakes [italics added]. He never runs into unexpected problems, never creates chaos in a destructive way (Trungpa, 1973).

[O]nce you receive transmission and form the [guru-disciple] bond of samaya, you have committed yourself to the teacher as guru, and from then on, the guru can do no wrong, no matter what. It follows that if you obey the guru in all things, you can do no wrong either. This is the basis of Osel Tendzin’s [Trungpa’s eventual successor] teaching that “if you keep your samaya, you cannot make a mistake.” He was not deviating into his own megalomania when he said this, but repeating the most essential idea of mainstream Vajrayana [i.e., Tantric Buddhism] (Butterfield, 1994).

Q [student]: What if you feel the necessity for a violent act in order ultimately to do good for a person?

A [Trungpa]: You just do it (Trungpa, 1973).

A perfect example of going with energy, of the positive wild yogi quality, was the actual transmission of enlightenment from Tilopa to [his disciple] Naropa. Tilopa removed his sandal and slapped Naropa in the face (Trungpa, 1973).

We could, of course, have learned as much from the Three Stooges.

Q [student]: Must we have a spiritual friend [e.g., a guru] before we can expose ourselves, or can we just open ourselves to the situations of life?

A [Trungpa]: I think you need someone to watch you do it, because then it will seem more real to you. It is easy to undress in a room with no one else around, but we find it difficult to undress ourselves in a room full of people (Trungpa, 1973).

Yes, there was plenty of undressing. At the Halloween costume party during an annual seminar in the autumn of 1975, for example:

A woman is stripped naked, apparently at Trungpa’s joking command, and hoisted into the air by [his] guards, and passed around—presumably in fun, although the woman does not think so (Marin, 1995).

The pacifist poet William Merwin and his wife, Dana, were attending the same three-month retreat, but made the mistake of keeping to themselves within a crowd mentality where that was viewed as offensive “egotism” on their part. Consequently, their perceived aloofness had been resented all summer by the other community members ... and later categorized as “resistance” by Trungpa himself.

Thus, Merwin and his companion showed up briefly for the aforementioned Halloween party, danced only with each other, and then went back to their room.

Trungpa, however, insisted through a messenger that they return and rejoin the party. In response, William and his wife locked themselves in their room, turned off the lights ... and soon found themselves on the receiving end of a group of angry, drunken spiritual seekers, who proceeded to cut their telephone line, kick in the door (at Trungpa’s command) and break a window (Miles, 1989).

Panicked, but discerning that broken glass is mightier than the pen, the poet defended himself by smashing bottles over several of the attacking disciples, injuring a friend of his. Then, mortified and giving up the struggle, he and his wife were dragged from the room.

[Dana] implored that someone call the police, but to no avail. She was insulted by one of the women in the hallway and a man threw wine in her face (Schumacher, 1992).

And then, at the feet of the wise guru, after Trungpa had “told Merwin that he had heard the poet was making a lot of trouble”:

[Merwin:] I reminded him that we never promised to obey him. He said, “Ah, but you asked to come” (Miles, 1989).

An argument ensued, during which Trungpa insulted Merwin’s Oriental wife with racist remarks [in return for which she called him a “Nazi”] and threw a glass of saké in the poet’s face (Feuerstein, 1992).

Following that noble display of high realization, Trungpa had the couple forcibly stripped by his henchmen—against the protests of both Dana and one of the few courageous onlookers, who was punched in the face and called a “son of a bitch” by Trungpa himself for his efforts.

“Guards dragged me off and pinned me to the floor,” [Dana] wrote in her account of the incident.... “I fought and called to friends, men and women whose faces I saw in the crowd, to call the police. No one did.... [One devotee] was stripping me while others held me down. Trungpa was punching [him] in the head, urging him to do it faster. The rest of my clothes were torn off.”

“See?” said Trungpa. “It’s not so bad, is it?” Merwin and Dana stood naked, holding each other, Dana sobbing (Miles, 1989).

Finally, others stripped voluntarily and Trungpa, apparently satisfied, said “Let’s dance” (Marin, 1995). “And so they did.”

And that, kiddies, is what they call “authentic Tibetan Buddhism.”

Don’t let your parents find out: Soon they won’t even let you say your prayers before bedtime, for fear that it might be a “gateway” to the hard-core stuff.

The scandal ensuing from the above humiliation became known as, in all seriousness, “the great Naropa poetry wars.” It was, indeed, commemorated in the identical title of a must-read (though sadly out of print) book by Tom Clark (1980). If you need to be cured of the idea that Trungpa was anything but a “power-hungry ex-monarch” alcoholic fool, that is the book to read. (Interestingly, a poll taken by the Naropa student newspaper in the late ’70s disclosed that nine of twenty-six students at their poetry school regarded Trungpa as being either a “total fraud” or very near to the same.)

For his journalistic efforts, Clark was rewarded with “lots of hang-up phone calls,” presumably as an intimidation tactic on the part of Trungpa’s loyal followers.

And incredibly, even after enduring the above reported abuse, Merwin and Dana chose to remain at the seminary for Trungpa’s subsequent Vajrayana lectures.

At any rate, Chögyam’s own (1977) presentation of the goings-on at his “seminars,” even well after the Merwin incident, predictably paled in comparison to their realities:

I initiated the annual Vajradhatu Seminary, a three-month intensive practice and study retreat for mature students. The first of these seminaries, involving eighty students, took place ... in the autumn of 1973. Periods of all-day sitting meditation alternated with a study programme methodically progressing through the three yanas of Buddhist teaching, Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana.

“Mature, methodical progression,” however, does not quite capture the mood earlier expressed by the traumatized Das or the involuntarily stripped Merwin and his wife.

How then is one to understand Chögyam’s “extra-curricular” activities within the context of such Vajrayana teachings?

The notorious case involving Trungpa ... was given all sorts of high explanations by his followers, none of whom got the correct one: Trungpa made an outrageous, inexcusable, and completely stupid mistake, period (Wilber, 1983).

Trungpa’s own insistence, however, was again always that he and his enlightened ilk “never make mistakes.” (The explicit quote to that effect, above, is from 1973—a full decade prior to Wilber’s attempted, and wholly failed, explanation.) Rather, the day following the Merwin “incident,” Trungpa simply posted an open letter to everyone at the retreat, effectively explaining his previous night’s behavior as part of his “teaching.” No apology was offered by him, and he certainly did not regard himself as having made any “mistake” whatsoever (Marin, 1995).

Even in the late ’70s, when Allen Ginsberg asked Trungpa, “was it a mistake? He said, ‘Nope’” (in Clark, 1980). Ginsberg himself, too, “said Trungpa may have been guilty of indiscretion, but he had not been wrong in the way he had behaved” (Schumacher, 1992). And indeed, any disciple who might ever question the stated infallibility of such a guru would again only be demonstrating his own disloyalty. The only “option” for any obedient follower is then, quite obviously, to find a “high explanation” for the activities.

“I was wrong,” Trungpa might have said. Or, “he was wrong,” his disciples might have said. But they cannot say such things. It would interfere too much with the myth [of Trungpa’s supernatural enlightenment] they have chosen to believe....

I think back to a conversation I recently had with the director of Naropa’s summer academic program.... [W]hen, in the course of the conversation, I asked him whether Trungpa can make a mistake, he answered: “You know, a student has to believe his master can make no mistake. Sometimes Trungpa may do something I don’t understand. But I must believe what he does is always for the best” (Marin, 1995).

In 1978, the emotionally involved Allen Ginsberg was confronted with the suggestion that the obedience of Trungpa’s followers in the “Merwin incident” might be compared to that of participants in the Jonestown mass suicides. He then gave his own heated, and utterly irrational, analysis:

In the middle of that scene, [for Dana] to yell “call the police”—do you realize how vulgar that was? The wisdom of the East being unveiled, and she’s going “call the police!” I mean, shit! Fuck that shit! Strip ‘em naked, break down the door! Anything—symbolically (in Clark, 1980).

Yes. “Symbolically.”

Further, regarding Wilber’s intimation that the guru’s actions were an isolated “mistake”: When a former resident of Trungpa’s community was asked, in 1979, whether the “Merwin incident” was a characteristic happening, or a singular occurrence, she responded (in Clark, 1980):

It is a typical incident, it is not an isolated example. At every seminary, as far as I know, there was a confrontation involving violence.

In any case, the regarding of such actions as Chögyam’s versus Merwin, as being simple “mistakes,” certainly could not explain away the reported premeditated means by which disciples were kept in line within Trungpa’s community:

We were admonished ... not to talk about our practice. “May I shrivel up instantly and rot,” we vowed, “if I ever discuss these teachings with anyone who has not been initiated into them by a qualified master.” As if this were not enough, Trungpa told us that if we ever tried to leave the Vajrayana, we would suffer unbearable, subtle, continuous anguish, and disasters would pursue us like furies....

To be part of Trungpa’s inner circle, you had to take a vow never to reveal or even discuss some of the things he did. This personal secrecy is common with gurus, especially in Vajrayana Buddhism. It is also common in the dysfunctional family systems of alcoholics and sexual abusers. This inner circle secrecy puts up an almost insurmountable barrier to a healthy skeptical mind....

[T]he vow of silence means that you cannot get near him until you have already given up your own perception of enlightenment and committed yourself to his (Butterfield, 1994).

The traditional Vajrayana teachings on the importance of loyalty to the guru are no less categorical:

Breaking tantric samaya [i.e., leaving one’s guru] is more harmful than breaking other vows. It is like falling from an airplane compared to falling from a horse (Tulku Thondup, in [Panchen and Wangyi, 1996]).

In many texts, the consequences of breaking with one’s guru are told in graphic terms, for it is believed that, once having left a guru, a disciple’s spiritual progress “comes to an absolute end” because “he never again meets with a spiritual master,” and he is subject to “endless wandering in the lower realms.” In the case of disrespect for the guru, it is said in the texts that if the disciple “comes to despise his Guru, he encounters many problems in the same life and then experiences a violent death” (Campbell, 1996, quoting from [Dhargyey, 1974]).

Such constraints on the disciple place great power into the hands of the guru-figure—power which Trungpa, like countless others before and after him, was not shy about exercising and preserving.

[Trungpa] was protected by bodyguards known as the Vajra Guard, who wore blue blazers and received specialized training that included haiku composition and flower arranging. On one occasion, to test a student guard’s alertness, Trungpa hurled himself from a staircase, expecting to be caught. The guard was inattentive, and Trungpa landed on his head, requiring a brief visit to the hospital (Miles, 1989).

We could, of course, have learned as much from Inspector Clouseau.

Or, expressed in haiku (if not in flower arranging):

Hopped up on saké
I throw myself down the stairs
No one to catch me

I was scolded by one of his disciples for laughing at Trungpa. He was a nut. But they were very offended....

He had women bodyguards in black dresses and high heels packing automatics standing in a circle around him while they served saké and invited me over for a chat. It was bizarre (Gary Snyder, in [Downing, 2001]).

Interestingly, Trungpa considered the SFZC’s Shunryu Suzuki to be his “spiritual father,” while Suzuki considered the former to be “like my son” (in Chadwick, 1999).
* * *

There is a actually a very easy way to tell whether or not any “sage’s” “crazy wisdom” treatment of others is really a “skillful means,” employed to enlighten the people toward whom it is directed.

Consider that we would not attempt to evaluate whether a person is a hypochondriac, for example, when he is in the hospital, diagnosed with pneumonia or worse, and complaining about that. Rather, hypochondria shows when a person is certified to be perfectly healthy, but still worries neurotically that every little pain may be an indication of a serious illness.

We would likewise not attempt to evaluate any author’s polemics in situations where the “righteous anger” may have been provoked, and may be justifiable as an attempt to “awaken” the people at whom it is directed, or even just to give them a “taste of their own medicine.” If we can find the same polemic being thrown around in contexts where it was clearly unprovoked, however, we may be certain that there is more to the author’s motivations than such claimed high-minded ideals. That is, we may be confident that he is doing it for his own benefit, in blowing off steam, or simply enjoying dissing others whose ideas he finds threatening. In short, such unprovoked polemics would give us strong reason to believe that the author is not being honest with himself regarding the supposedly noble basis of his own anger.

We would not attempt to evaluate the “skillful means” by which any claimed “sage” puts his followers into psychological binds, etc., in their native guru-disciple contexts, where such actions may be justified. Rather, we would instead look at how the guru-figure interacts with others in situations where his hypocritical or allegedly abusive actions cannot be excused as attempts to awaken them. If we find the same reported abusive behaviors in his interactions with non-disciples as we find in his interactions with his close followers, the most generous position is to “subtract” the “baseline” of the non-disciple interactions from the guru-disciple ones. If the alleged “skillful means” (of anger and reported “Rude Boy” abuse) are present equally in both sets, they cancel out, and were thus never “skillful” to begin with. Rather, they were simply the transplanting of pre-existing despicable behaviors into a context in which they may appear to be acceptable.

In the present context, then, since Akong was never one of Trungpa’s disciples, Chögyam’s poor behavior toward the former cannot be excused as any attempted “skillful means” of awakening him. Merwin and his wife were likewise not disciples of Trungpa. Thus, his disciplining of them for not joining the Halloween party arguably provides another example of the guru humiliating others only for his own twisted enjoyment, not for their spiritual good.

We will find good use for this “contextual comparison” method when evaluating the reported behaviors of many other “crazy wisdom” or “Rude Boy” gurus and their supporters, in the coming chapters.
* * *

Allen [Ginsberg] asked Trungpa why he drank so much. Trungpa explained he hoped to determine the illumination of American drunkenness. In the United States, he said, alcohol was the main drug, and he wanted to use his acquired knowledge of drunkenness as a source of wisdom (Schumacher, 1992).

[Trungpa’s] health had begun to fail. He spent nearly a year and a half in a semicoma, nearly dying on a couple of occasions, before finally succumbing to a heart attack (Schumacher, 1992).

Before he died of acute alcoholism in 1987, Trungpa appointed an American acolyte named Thomas Rich, also known as Osel Tendzin, as his successor. Rich, a married father of four, died of AIDS in 1990 amid published reports that he had had unprotected sex with [over a hundred] male and female students without telling them of his illness (Horgan, 2003a).

Tendzin offered to explain his behavior at a meeting which I attended. Like all of his talks, this was considered a teaching of dharma, and donations were solicited and expected (Butterfield, 1994).

Having forked over the requisite $35 “offering,” Butterfield was treated to Tendzin’s dubious explanation:

In response to close questioning by students, he first swore us to secrecy (family secrets again), and then said that Trungpa had requested him to be tested for HIV in the early 1980s and told him to keep quiet about the positive result. Tendzin had asked Trungpa what he should do if students wanted to have sex with him, and Trungpa’s reply was that as long as he did his Vajrayana purification practices, it did not matter, because they would not get the disease. Tendzin’s answer, in short, was that he had obeyed the instructions of his guru. He said we must not get trapped in the dualism of good and evil, there has never been any stain, our anger is the compassion of the guru, and we must purify all obstacles that prevent us from seeing the world as a sacred mandala of buddhas and bodhisattvas.

Yet, in spite of that, and well after all of those serious problems in behavior had become widely known, we still have this untenable belief being voiced, by none other than Ken Wilber (1996):

“Crazy wisdom” occurs in a very strict ethical atmosphere.

If all of the above was occurring within a “very strict ethical atmosphere,” however, one shudders to think of what horrors an unethical atmosphere might unleash. Indeed, speaking of one of the unduly admired individuals whom we shall meet later, an anonymous poster with much more sense rightly made the following self-evident point:

One problem with the whole idea of the “crazy-wise” teacher is that [Adi] Da can claim to embody anyone or anything, engage in any sort of ethical gyration at all, and, regardless of disciples’ reactions, Da can simply claim his action was motivated as “another teaching.” He thus places himself in a position where he is utterly immune from any ethical judgment (in Bob, 2000; italics added).

More plainly, there can obviously be no such thing as a “strict ethical atmosphere” in any “crazy wisdom” environment.

But perhaps Trungpa and Tendzin—a former close disciple of Satchidananda, who was actually in charge of the latter’s Integral Yoga Institute in the early ’70s (Fields, 1992)—had simply corrupted that traditional “atmosphere” for their own uses? Sadly, no:

Certain journalists, quoting teachers from other Buddhist sects, have implied that Trungpa did not teach real Buddhism but a watered-down version for American consumption, or that his teaching was corrupted by his libertine outlook. After doing Vajrayana practices, reading texts on them by Tibetan authorities, and visiting Buddhist centers in the United States and Europe, I was satisfied that this allegation is untrue. The practices taught in Vajradhatu are as genuinely Buddhist as anything in the Buddhist world....

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, after the Tendzin scandal, insisted to Vajradhatu students that Trungpa had given them authentic dharma, and they should continue in it exactly as he had prescribed (Butterfield, 1994; italics added).

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche—“Rinpoche” being a title meaning “Precious One”—was head of the oldest Nyingma or “Ancient Ones” School of Tibetan Buddhism from 1987 until his death in 1991.

Even with all that, Peter Marin (1995)—a non-Buddhist writer who taught for several months at Naropa in 1977—still validly observed that the activities at Naropa were relatively tame, compared to the oppression which could be found in other sects.

In the end, though, Andrew Harvey (2000) put it well:

In general, I think that nearly all of what passes for “crazy wisdom” and is justified as “crazy wisdom” by both master and enraptured disciple is really cruelty and exploitation, not enlightened wisdom at all. In the name of “crazy wisdom” appalling crimes have been rationalized by master and disciple alike, and many lives have been partly or completely devastated.

One is of course still free, even after all that, to respect Trungpa for being up-front about his “drinking and wenching” (in Downing, 2001), rather than hypocritically hiding those indulgences, as many other guru-figures have allegedly done. That meager remainder, however, obviously pales drastically in comparison with what one might have reasonably expected the legacy of any self-proclaimed “incarnation of Maitreya Bodhisattva” to be. Indeed, by that very criterion of non-hypocrisy, one could admire the average pornographer just as much. Sadly, by the end of this book, that point will only have been reinforced, not in the least diminished, by the many individuals whose questionable influence on other people’s lives has merited their inclusion herein. That is so, whatever their individual psychological motivations for the alleged mistreatment of themselves and of others may have been.

To this day, Trungpa is still widely regarded as being “one of the four foremost popularizers of Eastern spirituality” in the West in the twentieth century—the other three being Ram Dass, D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts (Oldmeadow, 2004). Others such as the Buddhist scholar Kenneth Rexroth (in Miles, 1989), though, have offered a less complimentary perspective:

“Many believe Chögyam Trungpa has unquestionably done more harm to Buddhism in the United States than any man living.”
* * *

Sometimes the entire Institute seems like a great joke played by Trungpa on the world: the attempt of an overgrown child to reconstruct for himself a kingdom according to whim (Marin, 1995).

Through all of that celebrated nonsense “for king/guru and country,” the Naropa Institute/University continues to exist to the present day, replete with its “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.” Previous offerings there have included courses in “Investigative Poetry”—though, sadly, no corresponding instruction in “Beat Journalism.” Also, at their annual springtime homecoming/reunion, participation in “contemplative ballroom dancing.” (One assumes that this would involve something like practicing vipassana “mindfulness” meditation while dancing. Or perhaps not. Whatever.)

Indeed, a glance at the Naropa website (www.naropa.edu) and alumni reveals that the ’60s are alive and well, and living in Boulder—albeit with psych/environmental majors, for college credit.