Reflections on Sogyal Rinpoche and circumstances that allow for abuse to arise in Buddhist teachers in general

  Introduction

A few months ago I participated in a documentary by Jaap Verhoeven that investigates the situation around Sogyal Rinpoche, my Buddhist teacher, who has been accused of physical, psychological and sexual abuse--which was later corroborated by an independent investigation--and who passed away about 1.5 years ago. Now mentioning "abuse" and "my teacher" in the same sentence may seem confusing, but in this blog I hope to show you how it is not that simple.

Participating in the documentary intense interview which lasted about 3.5 hours, but of course only a few minutes made it to the documentary. The documentary came out in the Netherlands a month ago, and very recently also internationally. Although the documentary I think does a good job at looking at the situation from several different angles, I feel like it lacks a bit of analysis of the complex circumstances that ked to this situation. Of course you can only do so much in the space of 1.5 hours. Nevertheless, in this blog I would like to share more of my reflections on this topic, because I feel like we are not done with it yet--it is a very challenging problem for Buddhism and for society at large. I do not claim I have the wisdom, but hopefully after having wrestled with these questions for a few years I would like to share my thoughts in a bit more detail than what was shown in the documentary.

The documentary starts with the interviewees discussing what brought them to Sogyal Rinpoche. In my case, I read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche, and it completely swept me off my feet: this was such a clear and accessible introduction into Buddhism that gave me practical tools for handling my emotions. And it still does, even to this day. Over the years of receiving his teachings, I have also developed a strong connection several of his teachers, including Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. This moves me even now to tears. Studying and practising in his organization Rigpa has given me tremendous meaning in my life, and a fundamental trust in the goodness of the buddha nature that underlies all of life and death. This trust has been fundamental to me developing some degree of self-confidence and fearlessness, and a sense of just being OK in myself. It should also be mentioned that over the years, Sogyal Rinpoche was able to inspire thousands of students to put in tremendous efforts in building outer and inner temples. And even though the latest scandals have been painful, they have also been a tremendous teacher for myself and many others I know. In the spirit of gratitude for all I have received I think it is important to write this piece: to investigate what I think is going on, and to also think about how we can move on so more people can benefit from the tremendous good things that Sogyal Rinpoche has brought, while preventing the bad things that have clearly happened from occurring.

I think one of the most inspiring things that Sogyal Rinpoche did is connecting his students to great teachers. Here is a wonderful example.

Analysis

The first thing that I think is very important to point out is that abuse by teachers takes place in many high-pressure situations. The intense student-teacher relationship that is crucial for Tibetan Buddhism is one such example, but similar situations have been reported in academia, ballet, as well as gymnastics, to name a few. All of these situations are characterized by a strong power imbalance and a tremendous dedication on the part of typically both student and teacher to what is being studied. A very interesting video on this topic in the domain of ballet is a talk by Theresa Ruth Howard who compares ballet to a cult. So it is too simple to blame it all on a single teacher individual--a large part of it is the culture around it that allows abuse to happen.

Another factor is that in an effort to push the student beyond their limitations, teachers sometimes resort to harsh means. I haven't quite figured out whether this is good or not. I know that in my experience a mild version of this has worked: I remember one day my ballet teacher was yelling at me for not remembering the combination properly, which occurred because I was completely exhausted. But these remarks still made me able to remember the combinations and really pay attention to an extent that I did not think possible. In an interesting film about this topic, Whiplash, the teacher says that he uses methods of physical and psychological abuse because he does not want to deprive the world of the artistic talents of the student, which needs to be cultivated through an amount of blood, sweat and tears that is almost not humanly possible. On the other hand, we never hear about the students in such systems that drop out and may be damaged for life, and never love their art/spirituality/science anymore because of these abusive experiences. Would a good teacher know what students can be pushed without serious damage? Would the student know what they get into before they enter such a relationship, as Dzongsar Khyentse suggests for Vajrayana?

Another relation consideration is that the position of a spiritual teacher in general is very challenging. A book that lays this out very eloquently is Sex and the spiritual teacher. The spiritual teacher is in a very lonely position, and has tremendous power that is not kept much in check. They often do not have equals to check in with and they are subject to many students that adore them and project all kinds of things on them. In addition, they have a tremendous opportunity to make use of their students, exactly because their students adore them. Finally, they have sexual drives, like every human, and all the people around them are typically their students. This makes it difficult to have equal sexual relationships. Of course these are not justifications for sexual misconduct and abuse, but at the same time, they make it a bit more understandable.

A further contributor to the arising of this situation is that given the same situation, different individuals can have wildly different perceptions of it. This is a fundamental principle of cognition that is also known as predictive perception. We never perceive anything as neutral, but constantly make predictions about what we will see, hear, and so on, and these color these perceptions. I think we can all see that happen in the current pandemic, where people who do not believe in COVID seem to almost be living in an alternate reality. A good article that goes into these cognitive biases is this.  Similarly, I feel that the experiences people have about Sogyal Rinpoche and Rigpa of the very same situation are wildly different, likely due to the cognitive biases with which they perceived the situation.

In the context of Rigpa, when I believed that Sogyal Rinpoche was a fantastic teacher, I was blind to his faults. Moreover, whenever I had any doubts, I felt I should not focus on those and instead give the situation a chance, because maybe these were special methods from Tibetan culture. How can I know what is the best way of teaching? And this was further reinforced by people who were humiliated publically, and then confessed that it helped them work with their minds and through their traumas. From the stories we have heard now in the investigation report and beyond, it seems like this was often a bit too optimistic. But I think we all wanted to believe it. This was further reinforced by reactions of Sogyal Rinpoche and the people around him on the scandals: they were attributed to people not understanding what a profound thing he was doing. According to this explanation, their mind was not spiritual enough and they were too much into their worldly concerns. With the knowledge I have today I think this was a very harmful tactic.

While I do not exclude the possibility that a teacher can use seemingly abusive techniques to help the student go beyond their blockages, I think that in that case it is the teacher's job to know whether it is helping or harming the student. A famous example that is often cited here is that of Marpa and Milarepa: Marpa made his student go through tremendous hardships but eventually Milarepa became one of the most amazing saints. But Milarepa was just one out of many students, and here is seems like dozens if not hundreds of students have been suffering from abuse. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has also mentioned in an assembly of Western teachers that such "crazy wisdom" only becomes relevant when the teacher him- or herself also shows tremendous obvious realization such as being able to fly or walk through walls.

A final thought that is relevant to the analysis of the situation is the idea that a genius in one domain cannot be at the same time completely dysfunctional in another domain, which was evident for example in the case of Harvey Weinstein or Michael Jackson. I think seeing that this is possible has been one of the most important lessons of the current situation for me. In my mind, Sogyal Rinpoche was able to impart some tremendous wisdom onto his students, but at the same time also had some very dysfunctional aspects to his personality, that were probably also amplified by the people surrounding him, rather than being reduced. For example, I can easily imagine that himself being brought up by a teacher who beats students, it was easy for him to think that this is a good way of teaching, even though in the context of the West at this time, it is not really (and there is a lot of scientific evidence that also supports that point). Then if those closely around him did not strongly counter that this did not work, probably made these practices going from bad to worse. This is often a mechanism at play: first a person does something somewhat questionable, such as making an inappropriate remark. The next time, they go a little further, maybe giving them a soft slap, and before you know it, it has become normal to abuse.

What can we do? (some initial ideas)

First of all, I think it is helpful to start with apologies--acknowledging things have gone wrong, so there is a space for making amends (as we also learn in the Vajrasattva teachings). I myself am sorry for believing in the system and not standing up when people were being publically humiliated, for not asking further when they said they were OK after this experience (I must emphasized here that I myself never had any bad experiences with Sogyal Rinpoche). While we can not change the past, we can learn from it to prevent such harm from occurring in the future. Maybe one idea would be to make amends by for example establishing a fund to help those who were harmed get therapy.

In terms of learning, I think various things can be changed. First of all, something that already has been happening in Rigpa and could be further strengthened is moving towards a more democratic leadership model. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been very much supporting this movement in Tibetan society (see for example his comments in this movie). Really giving space to many different voices and debate can help prevent abusive situations because those tend to arise when no-one dares to speak up or question behaviours. There is some movement towards that in Rigpa, where the different national organizations are now a federation, rather than being governed by a single teacher at the top. Moreover, there is no single teacher anymore who decides things, but rather a group who give advice to another group of Rigpa leaders. Of course this is still not perfect because those groups can be still engaging in group-think, but it is certainly better than the more dictatorial system there was before.

On top of that, maybe it can also be helpful that in every Buddhist sangha, there are a few members from another, closely-related sangha (e.g., in the context of Rigpa, this would be members of the sanghas of Tsoknyi Rinpoche or Mingyur Rinpoche or Khandro Rinpoche). They would not be students of the main teacher and instead they would be there to observe the student-teacher dynamics and ask questions when the group dynamics go from healthy devotion to group pressure and abusive situations. I think this kind of an inside-outside voice would have enough grounding in the tradition but also not be as bound to the teacher as to be blinded. More communication between sanghas can go a long way, I think.

On top of this I think we all need to be trained in tools for intervening in questionable situations, for example through active bystander training.

We should also stop with the reasoning that "if you cannot take this, you are not spiritually advanced enough"--a storyline that has been held--often implicitly--in Rigpa. This kind of a story is not taking people seriously and undermining them, a situation referred to as "gaslighting". This prevents people from feeling safe, and also from voicing their dissent, which then means that they then cannot indicate it when a particular teaching method does not work for them. In this way, even if the teacher has the best of intentions, they cannot get proper feedback about what works for the student.

 

Finally, I think that despite everything, the practice of guru devotion is a very powerful one. I hope that it will be possible to have a very honest and heartfelt discussion about how it can be practised in a Western context without engaging in spiritual bypassing and losing our own ground. I would love for such a conversation to be really taking place from a ground of practice, not just intellectual reasoning. I imagine a retreat where we practice meditation and guru yoga, and then have open dialogues about these topics: what does the practice mean? Where are the dangers? How can we hold the authentic lineage but also create an environment that is as safe as possible? I think there are no clear-cut answers here, but I am sure we will make progress if we put our heads and hearts in it.

May these thoughts  be a little help in maintaining this precious tradition while also preventing more suffering, and may it open the dialogue on how to continue. I apologize in advance for all the hurt this writing may cause. It is my sincere attempt at making sense of the situation and thinking about how we can move forward to address this problem--because it is not new, and not unique to Rigpa, as is also mentioned in the documentary and many things that have been written about it--so now is a chance to learn.

PS. Two resources that also informed my thinking were: How did it happen blog, the book Fallout by Thalia Newland. I don't necessarily agree with everything that was written in these resources but it did help shape my thinking.