REVISIONING SPIRITUALITY: Rethinking Spiritual Teachers, Spiritual Betrayal and Spiritual Knowledge

© 2010 Dr. Jim Manganiello

Imagine that someone you trusted completely persuaded you to have unprotected sex with them—without telling you that they had AIDS. Then imagine that your friends could have saved you from harm by warning you—but they chose not to.  Imagine further that you contracted AIDS and had to die a hard death—well before your time. And, finally, imagine that this deadly sex partner was your spiritual teacher, and that your friends were members of your spiritual community.

THE DARK TERRITORY OF SPIRITUAL BETRAYAL

Welcome to the dark territory of spiritual betrayal.

This story is about events that took place in the late 1980’s. About events that still beg us for real understanding, events that we continue to sweep under perfumed Buddhist rugs of denial.  They involved Osel Tendzin, AKA Thomas Rich, the AIDS afflicted Vajra Regent and successor to the pioneering Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa “Rinpoche”. Tendzin ultimately died of AIDS after finally acknowledging responsibility for his actions.

Chogyam Trungpa, was heir to the remarkable Tibetan Buddhist teaching lineages of Milarepa and Padmasambhava. He was first to transplant these teachings into Western soil. Although a capable teacher and a courageous pioneer, he was a troubled man. He died of alcoholism at 47.  Before his death Trungpa betrayed many of his students by abusing them both sexually and emotionally. More about him and other failed teachers and communities later.

My understanding of spiritual betrayal and about Buddhist teacher and community failures has been honed during long years of experience.  Both as a clinical psychologist working with deeply wounded spiritual practitioners recovering from teacher betrayals, and as a devoted member of a number of Buddhist communities, including Trungpa’s and Tendzin’s, where I took refuge vows. I’m also a longtime Heart student of His Holiness Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, the spiritual leader of this indigenous Tibetan tradition—Yungdrung Bon.

OUR TASK AND THE NEED FOR INTEGRITY AND HONESTY

Not only is it not a disservice to Chogyam Trungpa and other teachers to note their failings, but it’s actually a gesture of deep regard. It’s our obligation to do so. Only if we squarely face the truth will the Dharma be properly valued and honored in the West. From a Dharmic perspective, failures are opportunities to learn, but only if we face them with integrity. If we cloak or disclaim them, then they’ll carry an objectionable odor of deceit and hypocrisy. And Buddhism will continue to suffer as a result. Since any spiritual tradition that claims association with Ultimate Truth, but which won’t face the ordinary truths about itself, will be rightly seen as lacking credibility and character.

Our task is to understand and remedy our problems.  To do that we cannot leave them in the shadowy night, we need to face them in the light of clear day. Osel Tendzin’s failure is not an isolated incident.

RECURRING SPIRITUAL FAILURES

In fact for nearly 40 years Western Buddhist teachers and their sanghas have often made more sense from Freud’s point of view than from Buddha’s. Especially those organized according to Eastern views, views rooted in much earlier times and very different places. The failures of Buddhist spiritual teachers are so persistent that anyone who can’t see them is either blind or have their eyes closed.

They happen repeatedly, and in predictable, pervasive ways. And yet they go on and on without bold inquiry. Time and again we see the usual suspects: Sexual and emotional abuse, financial exploitation, and dysfunctional power and control games. Harsh games of struggle, strategy and rivalry that often put practitioners at considerable risk.

We’re obliged to recognize two things: 1) the pitfalls and dangers of organizing present time Western Buddhist communities according to past time eastern views, and 2) the need for new democratic models, healthier models more aligned with the way life is lived and experienced in the West.

THE TRANSPLANT PROBLEM AND DIVINE RIGHT MONARCHY

Western Buddhism has a transplant problem. The forms of feudal Eastern spiritual teachings do not transplant well in the West. They tend to do well for a time. But then, like many flowering plants uprooted from their native soil and transplanted into foreign conditions, they begin to suffer and degrade after an initial breathtaking bloom. Spiritual teacher betrayals, spiritual community failures and spiritual practitioner wounds are signs of that suffering and degradation.

Part of the problem is that the transplanted Eastern view of the Buddhist teacher into the West is as a Divine Right Monarch (DRM). The Master/Lama/Guru has been anointed by higher forces, not by the members of the community. This makes for trouble.

It makes it hard to hold the teacher accountable.  If the teacher owes his authority to divine forces, and not to members of the community, then any attempt to criticize him, limit his powers or remove him is in error, because it’s in opposition to divine forces. Power is lodged in the DRM teacher. Not in a well representative community or in individual practitioners. Unlimited, unrestrained power triggers forces of dark human frailty and breeds tyranny. What results can lead teachers into failure, sanghas into ruin and practitioners into serious harm’s way.

The DRM model of spiritual teacher may still work in the East, but it’s a dogma without basis or foundation in the West. Unlike the East, we have no history, traditions or institutions that can support and steward this model. Quite the contrary. Nor are we inoculated against or prepared for its excesses.

This is true not only for Western Buddhist organizations but for any Western spiritual teacher and community using the DRM model.

WESTERN STUDENTS AND DVR MONARCH TEACHERS

Many Western students find the “spiritual” part of their identity fused with the divinely anointed teacher. They project idealizations onto the teacher that then trigger experiences that seem to irrefutably validate that their teacher is indeed a divine being.

Consider the Tibetan view of the Lama as a Tulku, as a reincarnated Bodhisattva, or even as a Buddha. The Tibetan teacher is called “Rinpoche” or “Precious One.” Teachings must be transmitted through the “Precious One” or else they are seedless and dead. One doesn’t easily feel justified in not trusting or being angry with such a Being.

A disciple’s relationship with her Lama or Guru is a deeply devotional one. Students typically don’t imagine that a reincarnated Bodhisattva, Buddha or Precious One will want to get into their pants or bank account for personal pleasure or gain. Or that he will abuse, humiliate or endanger them because he’s sick or because he simply enjoys the prerogatives of power to harm, control and dominate.

When an idealized figure becomes a voice for spiritual teachings he can appear, to himself and others, to embody and source them. That’s dead wrong.

BE AWARE OF “THE ONE WHO KNOWS”

Sangha members can be overcome by these same unconscious energies and surrender control and sound judgment to the “One Who Knows”. Students often have the right experience when they’re awakened by the Dharma, but they account for it with the wrong storyline. They imagine the teacher as its source.

Committing to a spiritual teacher presents us with a ruthless dilemma. Since we imagine him as one who is divinely anointed and awake while we are not, our projections then convince us that our hesitation and resistance to him is a sign of ego that we must overcome.

Of course no capable teacher will or should comfort us always. It’s necessary for our ego to meet with frustration and adversity on the spiritual path. It’s a very different affair, however, to have our souls betrayed. Only if we can have faith that our teacher is genuine, then we have a basis for trusting that our resistance to him is resistance. A trust based on that conviction makes it possible for us to distrust ourselves, to reject our doubts and ambivalence and to look upon our worries and concerns about him, however intense, as distractions.

Taking DRM presumptions literally triggers powerful unconscious energies in both teachers and students. Many teachers suffer dangerous inflation and the narcissistic license that accompanies it. And many sangha members lose themselves in their desire to be led and loved by One Who Knows.

HEALING FROM SPIRITUAL BETRAYAL

Many western students have been deeply wounded and spiritually betrayed, because they believed their teacher was genuine. Spiritual betrayal is a nasty wound that doesn’t heal easily or well. Which is one reason why so many people deny its sting.

Spiritual betrayal occurs when a teacher breaks the faith while pretending to be loyal to it. This duplicity exploits a student’s faith and trust by persuading her or him to accept as true what is actually false. It occurs when a teacher misrepresents who he is, what he’s doing and why.

This is not necessarily to attribute malevolent intent to the teacher at square one. Once we disabuse ourselves of our DRM fantasies about the teacher, we see that the forces rooted in human frailty can sidetrack him—and us. These forces tend to descend upon him, and upon a spiritual community, like a virus that infects and spreads under the radar.

Healing from betrayal requires that we attend to its wounds properly. Unless our relationship with a spiritual teacher is deconstructed and unless our projections are reclaimed, a spiritual betrayal wound typically remains a dissociated one.

We must also struggle to avoid self-betrayal in the midst of this healing process, self-betrayal born out of the shock of facing how wrong we were. After we realize that we can’t trust the teacher, then we have to weather powerful doubt about our capacity to “know”. In truth this is an initiation into a deeper level of understanding about what it means to be conscious. But, if we stop here, the self-protective forces within our personality can collude to shut down our spiritual life with a huge billboard reading: “Never Again.”

THE NEED FOR “SPIRITUAL TEACHERS” TO BE AWARE AND HONEST

An aware, high integrity teacher will pick up the scent of his descent and seek help. Rather than doubling down on the bet that he is “The Transcendent One”, he faces a hard but liberating truth: He can indeed at times “inhabit” spiritual insight and transcendent wisdom, but he doesn’t “embody” them full time. He then comes to two essential realizations: 1) he needs to turn toward what he doesn’t want to know about himself and 2) he can’t wax a dirty floor with spiritual practices or whacko spiritual delusions. Not without risking harm to himself and others.

Let’s return to Osel Tendzin and others to illustrate. Before he died of AIDS in 1990, the bisexual Tendzin had unprotected sex with many community members—without telling them he had the deadly virus. He finally acknowledged his fall into magical thinking saying that “he thought the lineage would protect him”.

It gets worse. After swearing everyone to secrecy, Tendzin told community members that Trungpa instructed him not to reveal that he had AIDS. Tendzin explained that Trungpa told him to do Tantric purification practices so that his sex partners wouldn’t get AIDS. That didn’t work, numbers of Tendzin’s sex partners got infected and some died.

Trungpa’s personally chosen inner circle, those most magically identified with him as a fully enlightened being, simply could not believe that Osel Tendzin was in whacko territory. Because, if Tendzin was a whacko, then Trungpa was fallible. Their entire delusional view was rooted in believing that Trungpa was a fully awakened divine being who could do no wrong. This inner circle remained silent while Tenzdin spread the AIDS virus.

This same inner circle accepted and promoted Tendzin’s AIDS and Trungpa’s alcoholism as Crazy Wisdom teachings, not as a diseases. They magically believed Trungpa was a Vajra Master with an indestructible body, and so no harm could come to him.

THE INNER CIRCLE AND “CRAZY WISDOM” PROBLEM

A teacher’s personally chosen inner circle is most likely to become identified with and possessed by unconscious forces. Losing the capacity for reflection and echo, they can’t locate themselves properly. This brings danger to the teacher and to the community. Tendzin died young from AIDS and Trungpa died at only 47 from alcoholism. Perhaps if they had more capable reflection around them, it could have been otherwise.

No teacher failures and betrayals can be rationalized as Crazy Wisdom” by the idea that the realized teacher acts “rude” or “crazy” out of compassion to awaken others. Accounting for spiritual betrayal this way is an act of bad faith. Like heading for Canada from Boston, arriving in Miami and then changing the road signs to read: “Welcome to Montreal”.

Working to make sense of the damage caused by so-called Crazy Wisdom debacles, I asked the Dalai Lama many years ago about Crazy Wisdom teachers. His response says it all. He noted: “I never met one.”

Consider the case of  Sogyal “Rinpoche”, Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author of the highly regarded Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Sogyal reportedly told one of his students that she would be healed—if she had sex with him. And further, that it was a blessing to be hit by a Tibetan lama. Feeling the sting of spiritual betrayal, she saw through his seductive manipulations, and sued him for fraud, assault, battery, emotional abuse and for breach of duty and trust. Sogyal’s spokeswomen avoided the real issues by noting that Sogyal wasn’t married and didn’t claim to be celibate. The suit was finally settled out of court.

THE DALAI LAMA’S EXHORTATION

In 1993, twenty-one Western Buddhist teachers met with the Dalai Lama and once again complained vehemently about Tibetan Buddhist teachers. About their sexual transgressions, abuse of drugs and alcohol, financial high jinks, and abuse of power. According to Jack Kornfeld, well known western Buddhist teacher in attendance at the meeting, the Dalai Lama urged practitioners to confront teachers and publicly report any behavior that goes against Buddhist teachings. Interestingly, Kornfeld reported years earlier that 34 of the 54 Buddhist and Hindu teachers and gurus he interviewed, told him they had sexual relations with students.

The Dalai Lama’s exhortation to confront teachers is easier to say than do however. A betrayed student can remain dissociated from her wounds. And the dynamics within a community often serve to insulate and protect a violating teacher. Community members who confront teachers are often rejected, attacked or shunned. To confront the teacher is to create tremendous dissonance within the community and the pressure to revise beliefs and convictions. It’s easier for people to reject the message and condemn the messenger.

I’ve seen this repeatedly and I’ve experienced it myself. Shocked and deeply disappointed, I confronted Bonpo Geshe Tenzin Wangyal for misrepresenting himself to me and to others. Many community members painfully stretched themselves financially to fund the purchase of a property whose purpose he misrepresented.

Claiming to be deeply committed to avoiding the excesses and problems of Tibetan Buddhist sanghas in America, he pled for help in raising funds to finance a property. For a center devoted to sustaining a psychologically healthy sangha, one sensitive to the needs of Western practitioners. A major purpose of the property was supposed to be the collaborative study, translation, practice, and dissemination of the remarkable Bon Dzogchen teachings.

Once the property was acquired through donations, Wangyal abandoned his promoted plans and unmasked his DRM ambitions. He wanted to unilaterally determine who had access to the property and when. His inner circle is made up of DRM fundamentalists, some of whom learned their roles well—in the Trungpa scene. One of them is an unrecovered heroin addict who now perfumes his manipulative addict personality with Tibetan incense and prostrations. It’s not improbable that Wangyal was seduced by the campaign to elevate him to Divine Right status, as it keeps DRM fundamentalists in familiar administrative roles and him ego secure and less anxious about a second community failure.

Wangyal’s first Virginia community failed in the midst of sex, money and power and control problems. He is not a bad guy at heart but, like many Tibetan and Indian teachers who find themselves in the west, he refuses to deal with his emotional confusion and his dependency issues by hiding behind the role of “Rinpoche” and those most compelled to consider him a Divine Right Monarch.

The Divine Right Monarch stance is what prevents profound spiritual knowledge, such as that contained in the Bon Dzogchen teachings, from becoming accessible to those who could value it properly. Our species is at a crossroads. We need to awaken to a deeper level of awareness and concern about life and we need to take responsibility for stewarding human evolution into greater possibilities, or we will risk extinction.

Spirituality is essential for this. Science and commerce alone would never have the depth of vision to safeguard our species or to realize what truly makes life worth living.

Why should access to such breathtaking and invaluable spiritual knowledge be limited to small numbers of people who seek comfort and consolation in some obsolete Divine Right Monarch drama whose shadow is filled with egoic power and control preoccupations?

The Tibetan and other Eastern teachings are often in forms that were well suited to life in other times and places. I have great respect for that. But what is is—those forms not only don’t work today in the west but they also degrade the knowledge in the teachings.

THE DIVINE RIGHT MONARCH’S NARCISSISM

Like so many other DRM spiritual teachers, Mr. Wangyal felt no obligation to take responsibility for the complaints of people who feel let down, conned and bamboozled by him. Instead, he felt put upon and offended, as if he was being falsely accused. Tenzin Wangyal’s self-serving refusal to take responsibility for the problems inherent in the DRM posture is common among troubled teachers who find themselves pushed out of a high integrity stance to star in a DRM screenplay by forces they neither understand nor want to look at.

I say this with great respect for the tradition Mr. Wangyal represents as I have been unspeakably moved and enriched by its living knowledge. My own teacher, His Holiness Lungtok Tenpai Nyima, is the head of Bon spiritual tradition. He is a high integrity teacher who has realized what he teaches, and he well understands what I am saying and why.

Not long after he earned his Geshe degree at Menri Monastery, Mr. Wangyal began representing himself as a Dzogchen master and as a “Rinpoche”, an honorific title widely used when addressing a realized master or an incarnate lama. Mr. Wangyal apprenticed with Dzogchen master Namkhai Norbu for a short time, but he left to teach on his own, under criticism that his doing so was premature.

A Geshe degree is a significant accomplishment, the equivalent of a doctorate degree, but the degree does not equate with long and deep spiritual practice and certainly not with spiritual realization. This may be a significant factor in understanding Mr. Wangyal’s difficulties. For as the renowned Dzogchen master Ponlob Tenzin Namdak has noted, the Geshe degree, while very important and worthy of high regard, is mostly a matter of intellectual study with little time for practice. Doing a 40 day  ”Dark Retreat” does not make one a Dzogchen master.

The Tibetan Bon-Buddhist spiritual tradition is a treasure trove of invaluable spiritual knowledge, knowledge that could improve life for all. But we underestimate the pressures on young Tibetan teachers to represent their traditions to Westerners in DRM forms that simply cannot work here. The paradox is that those entertained and consoled by the DRM drama often stand in the way of  the true well-being of  the DRM teacher and in the effective dissemination of Eastern spiritual teachings to Westerners.

As another example of DRM narcissism, let’s consider the case of the capable Richard Baker-roshi, Zen teacher and Shunryu Suzuki-roshi’s handpicked successor. Baker led the San Francisco Zen Center. While his students lived humbly, working long hours for little money and living in cramped quarters, Baker spent a fortune on real estate, businesses, cars and building materials for his apartments.

And despite the fact that it was widely known that he was having sex with his students, he wouldn’t admit it. To the outrage of his students who knew better, he adamantly refused to take responsibility for his actions.

Spiritual failures and painful spiritual betrayals haven’t been limited to the Buddhist tradition. They’re common to most if not all Western spiritual communities organized according to a Divine Right Monarch model. The model causes intractable problems in the West.

SETTING SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE FREE—TOWARD SOLUTIONS

Here’s some possible solutions, solutions meant to honor the spiritual imperative, not forsake it. We need to have a meaningful conversation within and between ourselves.

A conversation meant to answer questions such as: How can we create healthy, high integrity spiritual organizations, organizations that can make life-changing knowledge and practices available to the large numbers of Westerners. Not merely to the limited number of people who for whatever reasons gravitate toward DRM “Eastern” scenes. The best minds in the West have yet to hear the Dharma.

Capable spiritual teachers remain necessary. We need to learn from and practice amidst those who have realized what they teach. They deserve to be loved, honored and respected. But they must be delinked from absolute Divine Right authority, and so remain accountable to the community of practitioners.

STRUCTURES THAT PROTECT THE TEACHINGS AND SUPPORT INTEGRITY

An independent Board of Directors is essential, as are enforceable Standard Policies. Among them: No sex with students. No physical, emotional or financial abuse of students. No unilateral decisions by the teacher. Communication among community members must be allowed to be open, and horizontal. Not directed vertically to and from the teacher through his inner circle.

A spiritual community can only be as healthy as its ability to communicate with itself, without fear, pressure or censorship.

Neither Eastern or Western teachings and practices can be inflexible sacred dogma. We need to test their efficacy. As Namkai Norbu noted, we go into a restaurant to eat, not to hold the utensils. And we practice to realize our True Nature as Pure Presence, not to sit cross-legged, light candles and burn incense. And certainly not to take loyalty oaths, make vassal pledges and sound courtier bleats to a Divine Right Monarch.

Dzogchen Master Garab Dorje’s three statements may provide one possible guide as an example for focusing many levels of practice based research. I paraphrase as follows: 1) experience the awakened state of Pure Presence; 2) be certain the state is genuine and 3) then train to make the state stable and continuous.

DEVELOPING RELIABLE AND VALID EXPERIENTIAL RESEARCH METHODS

How can we optimally test, advance, and disseminate practice-based spiritual knowledge in response to these and other questions?

By developing reliable experiential research methods and a fertile communication network. Then practitioners can experiment and communicate results with each other without censorship. And we can resort to one another more to develop a knowledge base relevant to 21st century life in the West.

Buddhism’s walk with Western science may be down a cold path. Because the view of science proceeds from the sense-bound analytic mind, a mind that fails to recognize different levels of Being. And different levels of Being determine not only who one is, but also what one can know. And at level of Pure Presence—who one is and what one knows are inseparable.

We need phenomenological methods of experientially testing, mapping and communicating this. Methods used by people actually doing practice intentioned toward contemplative outcomes.

We should venerate already established knowledge as well as those who discovered and teach it. Relieved of their DRM straight jackets, capable teachers can orchestrate, supervise and direct experiential research. But they can’t limit or censor it. They can train and mentor us, but they can’t control and dominate us.

We should keep in mind that if Quantum Physics needed Einstein’s approval and blessings, it may not exist.