Sogyal Rinpoche and the abuse accusations rocking the Buddhist
world
By David Leser
Punching. Emotional abuse.
Eye-popping sexual misdeeds. The accusations made against Sogyal Rinpoche – a key lama
in the uptake of Buddhist principles by the West – have rocked devotees,
including many in the top echelons of Australian business.
On a late September evening this year, a group of leading
Australian business figures gathered in a Sydney boardroom to discuss a series
of allegations that had scandalised the Buddhist world, and shaken their
own to the core. The meeting was called by David White, chairman of
business strategy advisers Port Jackson and Partners; Ian Buchanan, former
lead partner with management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton; Diane Grady,
non-executive director of Macquarie Bank and chair of Ascham School; and
Gordon Cairns, chairman of Origin Energy and Woolworths.
What these four had in common was a long-standing involvement in
Practical Wisdom, a series of business retreats held in Sydney over the
past 15 years with Sogyal Rinpoche,
the Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author of the 1992 international
bestseller The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
These retreats were now up for review, as Rinpoche
stood accused by eight of his former senior students of decades of
physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
"There is such a deep sadness over what has happened,"
Buchanan tells Good Weekend. "Whatever the facts turn out to
be post investigation, this will inevitably be a tragedy. That this should
come from an organisation that has done so much good, and from an
individual who has done so much good, is very sad."
The Practical Wisdom group had formed in 2002 as a way of making
available to leaders in Australian business, public health, government and
defence "authentic Buddhist teachings on meditation, compassion and
wisdom" from arguably the most famous Tibetan in the world after the
Dalai Lama.
Sogyal Rinpoche had
first started visiting Australia in the mid-1980s, nearly a decade before
his book was to become a spiritual classic. Regarded as a master of the
great Tibetan oral traditions, Rinpoche's book
had managed to lay out in simple, eloquent terms various Buddhist concepts
on impermanence, karma, rebirth, compassion for the dying, and the benefits
of training the mind through meditation. In so doing, he slaked a spiritual
thirst and inspired millions.
Comedian John Cleese described the book as
the most important he'd ever read, while the San Francisco Chronicle
called it a "magnificent achievement" and an "inestimable
gift". Around the world, hospitals, health institutions and palliative
care centres began adopting the book as an invaluable aid in dealing with
the sick and dying.
But on July 14 this year, Rinpoche's world
came crashing down, and soon thereafter the faith of thousands of his
devotees and admirers. That was the day he received a 12-page letter from
the eight former senior students accusing him of years of violent and
abusive behaviour.
"This letter is our request to you to stop your unethical and
immoral behaviour," they wrote. "Your public face is one of
wisdom, kindness, humour, warmth and compassion, but your private
behaviour, the way you conduct yourself behind the scenes, is deeply
disturbing and unsettling."
The letter then laid out in spectacular and shocking detail the
nature of the Tibetan master's alleged abuse: "We have received
directly from you, and witnessed others receiving, many different forms of
physical abuse. You have punched and kicked us, pulled hair, torn ears, as
well as hit us and others with various objects such as your back-scratcher,
wooden hangers, phones, cups and many other objects that happened to be
close at hand."
"Your physical abuse – which
constitutes a crime under the laws of the lands where you have done these
acts – have left monks, nuns and lay students of yours with bloody injuries
and permanent scars. This is not second-hand information; we have
experienced and witnessed your behaviour for years."
Among the letter's co-authors: his Australian IT expert Ngawang Sangye, and his
personal assistant, an Australian artist turned Buddhist nun known as Drolma, who fled Rigpa – the
organisation Rinpoche founded – in 2010 after
what she claims was nearly eight years of abuse.
"His behaviour was often wildly unpredictable and
irrational," Drolma tells Good Weekend
in a Skype interview from London, where she now lives. "If anything
went wrong and his anxiety got the better of him, he would take it out on
me. One of those times he grabbed me by the ear and it was torn all the way
along the back. There was blood pouring down my neck."
Sogyal Rinpoche
lectures to a captivated audience in Sydney in 2011. Photo: Mayu Kanamori
According to his accusers, the mistreatment went far beyond the
physical. "Your emotional and psychological abuse has been perhaps
more damaging than the physical scars you have left on us," they
wrote. "You have threatened us and others, saying if we do not follow
you absolutely, we will die 'spitting up blood'. You have told us that our
loved ones are at risk of ill-health, or have died, because we displeased
you in some way."
Then came a range of alleged eye-popping
sexual misdeeds. "You use your role as a teacher to gain access to
young women, and to coerce, intimidate and manipulate them into giving you
sexual favours."
"Some of us have been subjected to sexual harassment in the
form of being told to strip, to show you our genitals (both men and women),
to give you oral sex, being groped, asked to give you photos of our
genitals, to have sex in your bed with our partners, and to describe to you
our sexual relations with our partners."
"You have for decades, and continue to have, sexual
relationships with a number of your student attendants, some who are
married. You have told us to lie on your behalf, to hide your sexual
relationships from your other girlfriends. Publicly you claim that your
relationships are ordinary, consensual and proper because you are not a
monk. You deny any wrongdoing and have claimed on occasion that you were
seduced."
The letter was an incendiary device dropped in the heart of one of
the world's major religions. It was sent not just to Rinpoche,
but also copied to the Dalai Lama, a select group of Tibetan Buddhist
teachers, and a number of Rinpoche's senior
students.
It was leaked almost immediately, going viral on social media and
creating the kind of uproar we've become accustomed to seeing lately in
Hollywood, or indeed the Catholic Church, but seldom in the serene,
do-no-harm world of Buddhism.
Here was the spiritual director of a global organisation, Rigpa – the name is a Tibetan word meaning an awareness
of the innermost nature of mind – being accused not just of physical,
psychological and sexual misconduct, but also of maintaining a
"gluttonous" lifestyle that had been funded by – and kept hidden
from – his thousands of students for decades. And this from a man who had
taught so masterfully on how to find inner peace and contentment.
"I have a complex PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] that
comes from long-term devaluation, neglect and assault," Ngawang Sangye tells Good
Weekend.
"I was a monk for 14 years and that's why I had very close
access and saw things like Sogyal punching women,
men, slapping, hitting with objects. There is an element of shame in how
long it took me to break [away] because I thought it wasn't as bad as it
looked. "It was much worse than it looked. Harvey Weinstein has
nothing on this person."
Sogyal Rinpoche was six months old when he entered the monastery of
his spiritual master Jamyang Khyentse
in the wild, mountainous Kham province of eastern
Tibet known as the "Land of Snows". For centuries monasteries had
provided Tibetan children with their main source of education, occasionally
finding among their young charges the reincarnations of great masters who
had passed away.
By his own account, Rinpoche was one of
these select children. Although born into a family of traders known as the Lakars, he was given the name Sogyal
by his master, who recognised him as the incarnation of the great
19th-century visionary saint, Tertön Sogyal, a teacher to the 13th Dalai Lama, predecessor
to the current Dalai Lama.
At the time of Sogyal Lakar's
birth in 1947, Tibet was under the nominal protection of India, but soon to
become one of the world's most troubled countries following the Chinese
invasion in 1950. In 1954, Sogyal escaped with
his family over the mountains to India, five years before the Dalai Lama
fled the country and more than a decade before the full horrors of the
Chinese genocide began to reveal themselves.
As American author John Avedon describes in his celebrated book, In Exile
from the Land of Snows: "The obliteration of entire [Tibetan]
villages was compounded by hundreds of public executions, carried out to
intimidate the surviving population. The methods employed included
crucifixion, dismemberment, vivisection, beheading, burying, burning and
scalding alive, dragging the victims to death behind galloping horses and
pushing them from airplanes; children were forced to shoot their parents,
disciples their religious teachers. Everywhere monasteries were prime
targets. Monks were compelled to publicly copulate with nuns and desecrate
sacred images before being sent to a growing string of labour
camps."
Like all Tibetans of his generation, Sogyal
Lakar almost certainly carried the traumas of his
ravaged country into exile. After being schooled in India and attending
university in Delhi, he arrived in London in the early 1970s to study
comparative religion at Cambridge University's Trinity College. He soon
assumed the honorific of Rinpoche (meaning
"Precious One") and began establishing himself as a teacher,
finding a receptive audience among young Westerners searching for the kind
of spiritual enlightenment Buddhism seemed to offer.
Sogyal Rinpoche became
a Buddhist superstar after the release of his book, which has
sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. Photo: Mayu
Kanamori MKZ
Buddhism's appeals were manifold. It taught that true happiness
could never be achieved while humans were governed by negative emotions
such as attachment, pride, jealousy, hatred and ignorance. This ignorance
related to the ego's perception that reality was solid and permanent when –
according to Buddhist precepts – the opposite was true. Everything was
impermanent – thoughts, feelings, judgements, opinions, life itself – and
it was only through training the mind that the true nature of reality could
be discovered and suffering ended.
Buddhism had first come to Tibet in the seventh century as a complex
philosophical and ritual system known as Vajrayana
Buddhism. This form of Buddhism emphasised transforming the mind through
"skilful methods"; and this was what Sogyal
studied from childhood.
Vajrayana Buddhism was no easy path. In order to
slip the shackles of the ego, a student needed to give total obedience to
the teacher, no matter how unreasonable or irrational the teacher's
behaviour might seem. "Crazy Wisdom" was the name given to this
form of instruction, where a guru could employ all sorts of outlandish
methods to challenge a student's ego.
Tibetan Buddhism is filled with such stories and Sogyal
Rinpoche cited a perfect example of one in The
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. He described how a Tibetan master, Patrul Rinpoche, was
introduced to the nature of mind by being knocked unconscious by his own
master, Do Khyentse:
"As Patrul Rinpoche
approached, prostrating all the time, Do Khyentse
hurled pebbles and then larger rocks and stones at him. When he finally
came within reach, Do Khyentse started punching
him and knocked him out altogether."
"When Patrul Rinpoche
came to, he was in an entirely different state of consciousness. Each of Do
Khyentse's curses and insults had destroyed the
last remnants of Patrul Rinpoche's
ordinary conceptual mind, and each stone that hit him opened up the energy
centres and subtle channels in his body."
In Sogyal Rinpoche's case, the
"channels in his body" were less than subtle, according to
British journalist Mary Finnigan, who was to
spend nearly two decades trying to expose him. "I'm one of the people
who launched Sogyal on his career as a teacher in
London in 1973, when he was very young and very inexperienced," she
told a Canadian documentary team in 2011. "There was just this
continuous stream of seductions. He didn't even hide it in those days. He
was absolutely flagrantly promiscuous. He would pick girls up – usually
vulnerable, needy – and entertain them for a short while and then dump
them."
One of those young women, American Victoria Barlow, first met Rinpoche in New York in 1976 after grappling for years
with her own childhood sexual abuse. Rinpoche was
visiting Chogyam Trungpa
Rinpoche, the pioneer of Tibetan Buddhism in the
US, and Barlow wanted Sogyal Rinpoche's
advice on the dharma, or Buddhist teachings.
"He opened the apartment door without a shirt, holding a bottle
of beer," Barlow recalls now in a written response to Good
Weekend. "I [had] just turned 22 and I arrived in an almost
floor-length dark brown tent dress that I had made a few months before in
Calcutta.
"I thanked him for taking the time to see me and was in the
process of asking him my question when he reached over and touched my
cheek. He said, 'I think we have a special connection.'"
"My face flushed. I had just been touched by a lama. This was
such a blessing … but as I spoke, he reached toward me and literally mashed
my face with his face. He was literally slobbering all over me.
"He roughly put his hand up my long dress, groped my privates,
unzipped himself and lay on top of me, literally grunting for the minute or
two until he released. Immediately, he got up, said he had things to do,
that he was getting ready to travel across America."
Barlow was mortified, but still willing to believe that – in the
spirit of "Crazy Wisdom" – Rinpoche had
just transmitted a powerful "source of enlightenment".
In the following months, she received several calls from him,
including one from Trungpa's spiritual centre in Boulder,
Colorado, where Rinpoche "spoke with
amazement about how Trungpa had girls lined up
outside his door like a rock star and that he wanted that, too. I thought
he was joking and only later realised that was his actual aspiration, to
have a conveyor belt of groupies."
Despite growing doubts, Barlow allowed her spiritual mentor to
convince her to fly to Berkeley, California to receive teachings from
another Buddhist master. She was invited to stay with an American couple,
both Tibetan Buddhist students who showed her a room with two beds.
"They said, 'That's Sogyal's bed next to
yours. He told [us] to put you in here.' I felt a combination of shock,
shame, humiliation, defeat and anger."
"Within a minute of his arriving in the room, Sogyal said he'd had a fight with his girlfriend in
London. He made it apparent that he wanted sex with me, so that made me
just some lay he'd arranged to use in Berkeley." Barlow concluded then
that Rinpoche was a "charlatan"; that
she needed to get away as soon as possible. "Eight weeks later,"
she says, "I miscarried his child."
The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying became a spiritual cause célèbre almost from the moment it
was published, eventually selling more than three million copies worldwide
and being translated into 34 languages in 80 countries. In a world
dominated by greed, cynicism and personal grandstanding, the 1992 book
presented a compelling philosophy for modern life, drawing deeply from
ancient Buddhist teachings.
Rinpoche was suddenly a Buddhist superstar, soon
appearing in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1993 film
Little Buddha, and travelling the world establishing new centres for Rigpa, the organisation he'd set up under the patronage
of the Dalai Lama.
After starting out in a London squat in the early 1970s, he was on
his way to building a global organisation with 130 centres in 41 countries,
including Australia, relying mainly on the generous donations of his
growing legion of students.
In 2007, the then Irish president Mary McAleese
opened his spiritual care centre in south-west Ireland. The following year
the Dalai Lama, together with France's first lady at the time, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, attended the inauguration of his $12
million temple, named Lerab Ling, in Roqueredonde in southern France.
Sogyal Rinpoche (right)
in 2008 with the Dalai Lama and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
Photo: AFP
Through his efforts, millions of people were becoming exposed to the
wise and gentle teachings of Buddhism; hospitals, palliative care centres
and healthcare practitioners were beginning to adopt Buddhist methods in
tending to the dying and their families; international conferences were
being held on ways of creating more compassionate societies.
"Mindfulness" was becoming the new buzzword, in no small
thanks to this Tibetan son of traders.
In 1989, Rigpa established itself in
Australia, with hundreds of people flocking to the first of its annual
retreats on the shores of Myall Lakes, north of Sydney. (Rigpa would later spend more than $1 million having a
Glenn Murcutt-designed home built for Rinpoche at nearby Blueys Beach.)
The Tibetan lama's appeal was self-evident. Not only did he have a
great command of English and a mischievous sense of humour, his teachings
were lucid and accessible. "If you really know how to take the
teachings to heart, happiness is in ourselves,"
he told his rapt audience during one retreat.
"It's the way we think. And there we can think of what Buddha
said: 'We are what we think, all that we are
arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.' "
For the purposes
of disclosure, I attended a few of his retreats in the early 2000s. I wanted to
learn how to meditate, but also to understand better how Buddhism could be
integrated into modern life. In 2001, I reported on a historic meeting at
the Commonwealth Bank's Sydney headquarters where 200 Australian business
leaders – chief executives, bankers, brokers, management consultants,
investment advisers and fund managers – met with Rinpoche
to explore ways of bringing "wisdom" and "compassion"
into their businesses.
Two days later, the Tibetan teacher spoke to leaders of the future
at the Australian Graduate School of Management about "values-based
leadership". Rinpoche had been urged to do
so by Ian Buchanan, one of Australia's leading management consultants, who,
in turn, had been asked to become involved by Sue Pieters-Hawke,
the eldest child of former prime minister Bob Hawke and his wife Hazel.
Both Buchanan and Pieters-Hawke were students of
Tibetan Buddhism.
Buchanan had been introduced to The Tibetan Book of Living and
Dying nearly a decade earlier after being told he was dying from an
incurable illness. (He underwent three years of treatment for what he
describes as "a cross between tuberculosis and leprosy".) Based
in Singapore, Buchanan flew to Sydney to attend a Myall Lakes retreat and
then, after, relocating to Sydney in 2000, visited the retreat on a regular
basis to receive more of Rinpoche's teachings.
The two men developed an instant rapport.
"I'd been advising government and business for many
years," he explains now, "and so I started to talk to Rinpoche about what I thought was a desperate need of
business leaders to get into meditation, given that they had few ways of
letting go of their stress. Rinpoche said, 'I
don't know anything about business. Will you teach me?' And so we pulled
together a small group and we became his business coaches."
From this initiative, the "Practical Wisdom" leaders'
retreat was born in 2002. It was the business offshoot to Rigpa and, uniquely, it involved a select group of
Australian business figures meeting annually with the Tibetan teacher to
learn how to apply Buddhist principles to their personal and professional
lives.
Gordon Cairns, currently the chairman of both Origin Energy and
Woolworths, became one of the organisers while serving as chief executive
of Lion Nathan Breweries. He'd just finished reading The Tibetan Book
of Living and Dying and was attracted to its themes of
interconnectedness and the requirements of acting with compassion.
"I've always believed we have to find the answers to the big
questions: Why are we here? and What's the meaning
of life?" he tells Good Weekend. "It was more than
running a beer company or being the chairman of Woolies.
To me it was the whole [Buddhist] principle of bodhicitta
– which is loving-kindness.
"I think [these teachings] helped me change in ways for the
better: from being a tough perfectionist, internally competitive,
nothing-is-ever-good-enough chief executive, to one who is humanistic,
encouraging, inspiring."
Over the 15 years that Buchanan and Cairns helped convene the
"Practical Wisdom" retreats, there was nothing in Rinpoche's behaviour to suggest scandal. Yes, there had
often been questions about his inner circle of beautiful young women, and
how it was that a teacher of loving-kindness could so often publicly
humiliate his senior students. But never a hint of physical or sexual
abuse.
According to Drolma, his former personal
assistant, that was because the abuse only ever happened behind closed
doors. "Sometimes he would just lay into me in the stomach and I'd be
winded and he'd bring me to tears," she recalls now. "Then he
would sometimes follow up with a slap … but I had to help him put on his
ceremonial robes and get ready to put him on stage with all the other
Tibetan lamas and monks. Sogyal would then walk
on and be part of the ceremony and I would have to follow him, holding his
ritual objects, with tears streaming down my face. Nobody else had seen
it.
"I'd always thought it was due to my imperfections, that this
was my fast-track to enlightenment … but when the humiliation and abuse
didn't stop, that's when I started thinking, 'This is just an abusive man, it's not an enlightened person working on my spiritual
wellbeing.' "
Barbara Lepani, a senior policy officer
with the federal Department of Communications and the Arts, poses a
different view. As a senior student of Rinpoche
for nearly 35 years, she knows what it's like to be on the receiving end of
his "crazy wisdom".
She remembers once being whacked over the head with a wooden
umbrella after failing to distil his teachings. "My first reaction was
anger: 'How dare you?' But then the story of Do Khyentse
knocking Patrul Rinpoche
unconscious came to mind, and I thought, 'Hang on, is this what's going on
here?' Because Rinpoche didn't do such things
with just anyone. He always checked to see whether you were 'with him' and
could take him on as a Vajrayana master."
This was the point that another Buddhist master, the filmmaker and
writer Dzongsar Khyentse
Rinpoche, tried to make recently after being
asked to comment on the scandal. "Frankly," he said, "for a
student of Sogyal Rinpoche
who has consciously received abhisheka
[initiation into any Vajrayana teaching] – and
therefore stepped onto the Vajrayana path – to
think of labelling Sogyal Rinpoche's
actions as 'abusive', or to criticise a Vajrayana
master even privately, let alone publicly and in print, or simply to reveal
that such methods exist, is a breakage of samaya
[the sacred spiritual bond between student and teacher].
"[But] if no proper warnings and no fundamental training were
given prior to the Vajrayana teachings, then Sogyal Rinpoche is even more
in the wrong than his critical students."
Dzongsar Khyentse seemed
to be having a bet each way. He also expressed puzzlement that
"intelligent" students hadn't better analysed their teacher
before signing up. "I really don't understand why they waited 10 or
even 30 years before saying anything. How come they didn't see all these
problems in the first or second year of their relationship with Sogyal?"
For those who
wanted to look, the signs had been on the public record for more than two decades.
In 1994, an American student – using the pseudonym Janice Doe – filed a lawsuit
in the Superior Court of California seeking $US10 million in reparations
from Rinpoche for sexually and physically abusing
her. The case was settled out of court and, in those pre-internet days, the
matter quietly faded, although not without a number of outraged devotees
deserting ship.
The following year, the UK's Telegraph magazine published
new allegations of sexual abuse by two more women. In 2011, a Canadian
documentary In the Name of Enlightenment aired, with Victoria
Barlow going public, as well as a young Frenchwoman, "Mimi", who
described years of Stockholm Syndrome-like abuse. "You are locked up
in this tiny environment," she said, "where someone is beating
you up every day, but he's also the person who's giving you [your] only
emotional attention."
The dam finally burst last year at Lerab
Ling in France, when Rinpoche punched Ani Chökyi, a Danish nun, in
the stomach in front of 1000 students.
Ani Chökyi later
issued a statement insisting that Rinpoche had
been "loving beyond any ordinary description" and that the blow
was a "soft punch". Not according to Gary Goldman, a former US
army ranger and long-term Buddhism student seated up the front. "I
guess the footstool wasn't in exactly the right position," he told the
UK Telegraph. "He had this flash of anger and he just punched
her – a short gut punch."
That was enough for Goldman to leave Rigpa
and put his name to the letter accusing Rinpoche
of abuse. Four days after receiving their letter, Rinpoche
replied, expressing his sadness and distress, but claiming his conscience
was clear.
"From the bottom of my heart I humbly ask your
forgiveness," he wrote. "Since reading your letter I have been
thrown into deep reflection and I'm finally resolved that if this is the
way that my actions are perceived, then I do need
to take real action. If I am the problem, that can be solved. There's no
need to bring everything down. I implore you to keep this bigger picture in
mind."
Less than four weeks later – on August 11 – Rinpoche
announced his decision to retire as spiritual director of Rigpa, while also reaffirming his decision to enter a
three-year retreat. That same day, the international Rigpa
board announced the establishment of an independent investigation by a
"neutral third party" and a new "code of conduct and
grievance process".
The Dalai Lama himself made it clear he was in no mood for
equivocation. At a Buddhist seminar in northern India's Ladakh,
he declared emphatically – and not for the first time – that ethical
misconduct was often caused by Tibet's traditional feudal system and that
students should never follow their guru unquestioningly.
He then said his "very good friend Sogyal
Rinpoche" was "disgraced" and he
encouraged all such misconduct to be made public. It was a devastating
rebuke from Buddhism's most revered figure.
While no charges had been laid at the time of writing, a number of
complaints have reportedly been filed with police in various countries,
including France and England, and the Charity Commission in the UK has
begun a preliminary investigation. Sogyal Rinpoche has also been diagnosed with colon cancer and
undergone surgery on two tumours.
On that late September evening in the Sydney boardroom of Port
Jackson and Partners, 10 weeks after the abuse allegations were first made
public, 22 business leaders convened to vent feelings ranging from
"shock and anger to dismay and confusion". Some were so visibly
moved, they cried.
As Ian Buchanan recalls now: "A number of them said, 'I will
never be able to watch the videos of him teaching again.' And I said,
'Well, I will.' It's not that he might not have let us down very badly, but
the teachings and the way he teaches them are invaluable and precious, and
for me have been of incalculable value in having a relatively peaceful,
stable life in the face of some near-death experiences."
While not defending the alleged abuses, Buchanan voices his sorrow
at Rinpoche's stunning fall from grace – a man
who has given his life to bringing Buddhism to the West after fleeing
his country as a child refugee. "He's done a wonderful job of sharing
the teachings, but that does not preclude him having that damage as a human
being."
Jillian Broadbent, a former member of the Reserve Bank board and
currently chancellor of the University of Wollongong, agrees with Buchanan.
"I have found the teachings of mindfulness most valuable, both in
difficult times and in my daily living," she tells Good Weekend.
"They have similarly brought value and contentment to many
others for more than two millennia. I certainly see merit and increased
effectiveness in a wider adoption of Buddhist ethics across the Australian
business community. I am aware of the allegations against Sogyal Rinpoche [but] I
remain appreciative of my own learnings and
benefit from the teachings, and respectful of their long lineage. It would
be really disappointing if these allegations damaged the teachings and the
benefits their adoption can bring."
Gordon Cairns echoes these sentiments, acknowledging how deeply he
has been influenced by Buddhism and how important it is now not to conflate
the teachings with the teacher. At the same time, he urges his colleagues
to separate from Rigpa and find another Buddhist
master (a position the group has since adopted).
"This teaching has had a wonderfully profound effect on the
West," he tells Good Weekend. "It's had a wonderfully
profound effect on business leaders here in Australia, and a wonderfully
profound effect on me."
The chairman of Woolworths then offers a Buddhist parable to sum up
his sympathy, not just for Rinpoche's alleged
victims but for Rinpoche himself: "When you
see a man beating a dog, you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the
dog."
In a perfect world, that is a wonderful testament to forgiveness,
but for Sogyal Rinpoche's
strongest critics, perhaps not in this lifetime.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/sogyal-rinpoche-and-the-abuse-accusations-rocking-the-buddhist-world-20171115-gzm7ra.html
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