It is often I read about scandal news of religious leaders
succumb to sexual temptation and unable to
abstain from sexual misconduct. If a highly religious leader
cannot resist sexual temptation, how about common people like us?
Is this the most difficult precept to undertake?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/asia/zen-buddhists-roiled-by-accusations-against-teacher.html?_r=0
Since arriving in Los Angeles from Japan in 1962, the Buddhist teacher Joshu Sasaki, who
is 105 years old, has taught thousands of Americans at his two Zen
centers in the area and one in New Mexico. He has influenced thousands
more enlightenment seekers through a chain of some 30 affiliated
Zen centers from the Puget Sound to Princeton to Berlin. And he is
known as a Buddhist teacher of Leonard Cohen, the poet and
songwriter.
Mr. Sasaki has also, according to an investigation by an
independent council of Buddhist leaders, released in January,
groped and sexually harassed female students for decades, taking
advantage of their loyalty to a famously charismatic roshi, or
master.
The allegations against Mr. Sasaki have upset and obsessed Zen
Buddhists across the country, who are part of a close-knit world
in which many participants seem to know, or at least know of, the
principal teachers.
Mr. Sasaki did not respond to requests for interviews made
through Paul Karsten, a member of the board of Rinzai-ji,
his main center in Los Angeles. Mr. Karsten said that Mr. Sasaki’s
senior priests are conducting their own inquiry. And he cautioned
that the independent council took the accounts it heard
from dozens of students at face value and did not investigate any
“for veracity.”
Because Mr. Sasaki has founded or sponsored so many Zen centers,
and because he has the prestige of having trained in Japan, the
charges that he behaved unethically — and that his supporters
looked the other way — have implications for an entire way of
life.
Such charges have become more frequent in Zen Buddhism. Several
other teachers have been accused of misconduct recently, notably
Eido Shimano, who in 2010 was asked to resign from the Zen Studies
Society in Manhattan over allegations that he had sex with
students. Critics and victims have pointed to a Zen culture of
secrecy, patriarchy and sexism, and to the quasi-religious worship
of the Zen master, who can easily abuse his status.
Disaffected students wrote letters to the board of one of Mr.
Sasaki’s Zen centers as early as 1991. Yet it was only last
November, when Eshu Martin, a Zen priest who studied under Mr.
Sasaki from 1997 to 2008, posted a
letter to SweepingZen.com, a popular Web site, that the wider
Zen world noticed.
Mr. Martin, now a Zen abbot in
Victoria, British Columbia, accused Mr. Sasaki of a “career of
misconduct,” from “frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of
female students” to “sexually coercive after-hours ‘tea’ meetings,
to affairs,” as well as interfering in his students’ marriages.
Soon thereafter, the independent “witnessing council” of noted Zen
teachers began interviewing 25 current or former students of Mr.
Sasaki.
Some former students are now speaking out, including seven
interviewed for this article, and their stories provide insight
into the culture of Rinzai-ji and the other places
where Mr. Sasaki taught. Women say they were encouraged to believe
that being touched by Mr. Sasaki was part of their Zen
training.
The Zen group, or sangha, can become one’s close family, and
that aspect of Zen may account for why women and men have been
reluctant to speak out for so long.
Many women whom Mr. Sasaki touched were resident monks at his
centers. One woman who confronted Mr. Sasaki in the 1980s found
herself an outcast afterward. The woman, who asked that her name
not be used to protect her privacy, said that afterward “hardly
anyone in the sangha, whom I had grown up with for 20 years, would
have anything to do with us.”
In the council’s report on Jan. 11, the three members wrote of
“Sasaki asking women to show him their breasts, as part of
‘answering’ a koan” — a Zen riddle — “or to demonstrate
‘non-attachment.’ ”
When the report was posted to SweepingZen, Mr. Sasaki’s senior
priests wrote in a post that their group “has struggled with our
teacher Joshu Sasaki Roshi’s sexual misconduct for a significant
portion of his career in the United States” — their first such
admission.
Among those who spoke to the council and for this article was
Nikki Stubbs, who now lives in Vancouver, and who studied and
worked at Mount
Baldy, Mr. Sasaki’s Zen center 50 miles east of Los Angeles,
from 2003 to 2006. During that time, she said, Mr. Sasaki would
fondle her breasts during sanzen, or private meeting; he also asked
her to massage his penis. She would wonder, she said, “Was this
teaching?”
One monk, whom Ms. Stubbs said she told about the touching, was
unsympathetic. “He believed in Roshi’s style, that sexualizing was
teaching for particular women,” Ms. Stubbs said. The monk’s theory,
common in Mr. Sasaki’s circle, was that such physicality could
check a woman’s overly strong ego.
A former student of Mr. Sasaki’s now living in the San Francisco
area, who asked that her name be withheld to protect her privacy,
said that at Mount Baldy in the late 1990s, “the monks confronted
Roshi and said, ‘This behavior is unacceptable and has to
stop.’ ” However, she said, “nothing changed.” After a time,
Mr. Sasaki used Zen teaching to justify touching her, too.
“He would say something like, ‘True love is giving yourself to
everything,’ ” she explained. At Mount Baldy, the isolation
could hamper one’s judgment. “It can sound trite, but you’re in
this extreme state of consciousness,” she said — living at a
monastery in the mountains, sitting in silence for many hours a day
— “where boundaries fall away.”
Joe Marinello is a Zen teacher in Seattle who served on the
board of the Zen Studies Society in New York. He has been openly
critical of Mr. Shimano, the former abbot who was asked to resign
from the society. Asked about teachers who say that sexual touch is
an appropriate teaching
technique, he was dismissive.
“In my opinion,” Mr. Marinello said in an e-mail, “it’s just
their cultural and personal distortion to justify their
predations.”
But in Zen Buddhism, students often overlook their teachers’
failings, participants say. Some Buddhists define their philosophy
in contrast to Western religion: Buddhism, they believe, does not
have Christian-style preoccupations about things like sex. And Zen
exalts the relationship between a student and a teacher, who can
come to seem irreplaceable.
“Outside the sexual things that happened,” the woman now in San
Francisco said, “my relationship with him was one of the most
important I have had with anyone.”
Several women said that Zen can foster an atmosphere of overt
sexism. Jessica Kramer, a doula in Los Angeles, was Mr. Sasaki’s
personal attendant in 2002. She said that he would reach into her
robe and that she always resisted his advances. Surrounded almost
entirely by men, she said she got very little sympathy. “I’d talk
about it with people who’d say, ‘Why not just let him touch your
breasts if he wants to touch your breasts?’ ”
Susanna Stewart began studying with Mr. Sasaki about 40 years
ago. Within six months, she said, Mr. Sasaki began to touch her
during sanzen. This sexualizing of their relationship “led to years
of confusion and pain,” Ms. Stewart said, “eventually resulting in
my becoming unable to practice Zen.” And when she married one of
his priests, Mr. Sasaki tried to break them up, she said, even
encouraging her husband to have an affair.
In 1992, Ms. Stewart’s husband disaffiliated himself and his
North Carolina
Zen Center from Mr. Sasaki. Years later, his wife said, he
received hate mail from members of his old Zen group.
The witnessing council, which wrote the report, has no official
authority. Its members belong to the American Zen Teachers
Association but collected stories on their own initiative, although
with a statement of support from 45 other teachers and priests. One
of its authors, Grace Schireson, said that Zen Buddhists in the
United States have misinterpreted a Japanese philosophy.
“Because of their long history with Zen practice, people in
Japan have some skepticism about priests,” Ms. Schireson said. But
in the United States many proponents have a “devotion to the guru
or the teacher in a way that could repress our common sense and
emotional intelligence.”
Last Thursday morning, at Rinzai-ji on Cimarron Street in Los
Angeles, Bob Mammoser, a resident monk, said that Mr. Sasaki’s
“health is quite frail” and that he has “basically withdrawn from
any active teaching.” Mr. Mammoser said there is talk of a meeting
at the center to discuss what, if any, action to take.
Mr. Mammoser said he first became aware of allegations against
Mr. Sasaki in the 1980s. “There have been efforts in the past to
address this with him,” Mr. Mammoser said. “Basically, they haven’t
been able to go anywhere.”
He added: “What’s important and is overlooked is that, besides
this aspect, Roshi was a commanding and inspiring figure using
Buddhist practice to help thousands find more peace, clarity and
happiness in their own lives. It seems to be the kind of thing
that, you get the person as a whole, good and bad, just like you
marry somebody and you get their strengths and wonderful qualities
as well as their weaknesses.”