#MeToo Meets Déjà Vu

Making Enlightened Society Possible (but not Probable)

“Why does a dog lick his balls?  Because he can.”  –old joke.

“Men are addicted to ejaculation.”  Statement of a man on NPR’s Fresh Air, explaining male sexual behavior.[1]

I will sound naïve to say so, but I was utterly shocked by the sex scandal that recently rocked Shambhala International, and caused the Sakyong Mipham to step down.  Everybody knew that the Sakyong’s father was a roaring drunk, and that he slept with his students; there was also a huge scandal when his dharma heir, Osel Tendzin,[2] not only carried on the same kind of behavior, but actually had sex with his students while he was infected with HIV, without mentioning that fact to them.  At least one became infected as well, and in those days that was a death sentence.  It was amazing that the group recovered.

I assumed they had done so by making themselves squeaky clean.  The person I think of as Trungpa’s true dharma heir, Pema Chodron,[3] has lived as a nun, and as far as I know has been beyond reproach.  I had the impression that the Sakyong Mipham was the same.  He wore robes, as opposed to the Western dress that his father favored; he was an athlete, talked about running and horseback riding, and had a young beautiful wife.  He spoke with great respect and love of his father, but I figured he had seen the man’s obvious flaws, and was distancing himself as far from them as possible.  He also made changes in the organization, bringing the Shambhala teachings and the Buddhist teachings together.  People began calling themselves Shambhala Buddhists.[4]

I have great affection for that whole tradition.  Thirty years ago, when I was just beginning to interest myself in Eastern thought, and talked about that to a woman whom I met in the back of a bus in Mexico, she said, “There are two books you need to read.  Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.”  I secretly rolled my eyes at the weirdness of that second title, and thought, Now there is one book I’ll never read.

But six years later, after I had studied and practiced meditation for two years in Cambridge, and was returning to North Carolina looking for a teacher and a group to practice with, I not only read both of those titles, I practiced at the Shambhala Center for about six months.  I loved the people there, and the whole tradition.  Eventually I left the group, partly because of an expose I read about the Osel Tendzin situation, partly because I couldn’t find a teacher in that group.

I moved on to practice Zen, but I’ve continued to read Trungpa’s writing, and have probably read Shambhala: The Sacred Path at least ten times, and taught it to a group at North Carolina’s Central Prison.  To me it doesn’t describe some new secular organization.  It’s all just Buddhism with a slightly different vocabulary, but presents a vision of a whole society living that way.  It actually describes the way I—and many friends in my Zen community—try to live.

I guess what discourages me the most is the way that the Shambhala group seems in some weird way to have regressed.  Trungpa led an outrageous life, but was completely open about it, admitted that he slept with his students and sat there giving lectures while drinking a tall boy of malt liquor[5].  Since his death, and the Osel Tendzin scandal, the group has become if anything more of an institution, and more organized, but they were concealing things that many people must have known were going on, if the accounts in the Sunshine Project[6] are accurate.  The Sakyong was staging late-night booze parties, and summoning women to his quarters, as if he were a rock star.  When a woman finally called him on it to his face, he seemed shocked, as if he couldn’t believe anyone wouldn’t be dying to jump into bed with him.  There are also reports of girls being sexually abused in the Shambhala community, though not by the Sakyong.  Trungpa’s set up sounded like a hippie commune.  This sounds more like Fox News.

I recently listened to a fascinating 2008 interview with Reggie Ray[7], a former Shambhala teacher who left to form his own organization.  He spoke tentatively about his decision to leave Shambhala International—the interview was for their website—but mentioned that one thing he objected to was the way the Sakyong seemed to be going back to the old Tibetan way of organizing things, wearing robes and putting himself in the position of being the one authentic teacher.  Trungpa had been trying to go against that, taking off the robes and wearing Western garb, also introducing the Shambhala teachings themselves, which were less hierarchical than the traditional Tibetan setup.[8]  In combining the religious and secular sides of the organization, the Sakyong seemed to be returning to the more traditional Tibetan structures.[9]

I don’t think all the blame lies with the Sokyang.  When you have a top down organization like that, and you treat a human being as something close to a living god, you’ve set up a situation that is hard for anyone to resist (though the Dalai Lama seems to have managed.  He had some of the same teachers as Trungpa).

I also don’t let the Sokyang off the hook.  The leader of the New York Shambhala group said he constantly prays for the Sakyong because he must have been in a lot of pain to hurt other people so much.  I don’t see why we should assume he was in some extraordinary pain.  He was a famous Buddhist teacher, a role which he seems largely to have inherited, but he was also apparently a man who liked to drink and get laid, just like his father, just like most men.  Pray for him, for sure, but don’t make him into a victim.  There are plenty of those to go around.

[1] This is the most cogent and accurate assessment of the situation I’ve ever heard.

[2] I must admit to feeling somewhat skeptical about the foreign names.  When a guy whose name was originally Thomas Rich studies with a teacher named Swami Satchadananda and gets the name Narayana, then studies with a Tibetan and takes the name Osel Tendzin, I find the whole thing completely hokey.  What’s wrong with the name Thomas Rich?  I feel the same way about the names in my own tradition.  I was given a Japanese name when I did lay ordination, and it means something to me privately, but I would never use it publicly.  I like my name.

[3] There’s another one of those names.  She was born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown.  That seems to be a perfectly good name for a spiritual teacher.

[4] The Shambha lineage was the secular teaching Trungpa left behind, in contrast to his more traditional Tibetan teachings.

[5] How he could drink that crap I do not know.

[6] The report that officially blew the whistle on the organization.  http://andreamwinn.com/project_sunshine/Buddhist_Project_Sunshine_Phase_2_Final_Report.pdf

[7] Please note that this teacher of Tibetan Buddhism has not given himself some goofball Tibetan name.

[8] Ray knows much more about all this than I do, but I must say that Trungpa’s organization, though perhaps not traditionally Tibetan, sounded rather authoritarian and top-down.

[9] Ray—a religious scholar as well as being a practitioner and teacher—also made the fascinating statement elsewhere in the interview that homo sapiens seem to have descended from a few thousand African ancestors, and religious scholars believe they all had the same spirituality.  Ray thinks that the Shambhala teachings are a return to that original human spirituality.  The entire interview is here. https://www.chronicleproject.com/reggie-ray/