Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism, book review
No, the “editor” who’d have provided those quotes, and much more of the content and form, indeed the very flowing language of the book, would have been Andrew Harvey, Oxford scholar extraordinaire and author of The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi and other works.
So much for a great book — and it was and is great, and Sogyal deserves some, though by no means all, credit for it.
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To sum up:
Sex and violence are paired in the book’s title. The problem with the sex is not that it was sex — Sogyal was no more a monk than Trungpa was, and it was often consensual. The problem was in the tirades, the humiliations, the violence, the abuse — delivered under cover of spiritual authority in violation of trust across a power and gender differential.
The scholarship is, well, Andrew Harvey‘s, and Padmasambhava‘s, and Kubler Ross‘.
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I met Sogyal once. I asked him about the meaning of “skillful means”, and he responded “not entering or leaving a room through the wall, when there’s a door available.” He seemed pleasant enough. Trungpa Rinpoche I befriended at Oxford, and took to visit friends of mine at Prinknash Abbey near Gloucester: later he wrote that the visit had shown him the possibility of living the contemplative life in the west. He opened the first Tibetan monastery in the west shortly thereafter, Samye Ling in Scotland. And Mary is an old friend from hippie days.
As I indicated above, Mary and Rob have a story to tell, and they can tell a story.
Sogyal himself is no longer with us. He has entered, perhaps, the bardo, that liminal space between lives about which The Tibetan Book of the Dead — and to some extent its Sogyal reincarnation, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying — are written.
Go, read.
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mike:
October 6th, 2019 at 3:01 am
William O Douglas, who sat on the Supreme Court for 36+ years travelled extensively in Asia. He spent time in Ladakh, known at the time as “Little Tibet”. Although claimed by India much of it was effectually ruled by Tibetan Lamas. Douglas made no mention of sex and violence. In fact he said the women of Ladakh were enfranchised and had a high status compared to women in the rest of India and throughout Asia. On the other hand he disliked the feudalism of the Buddhist Lamas. He said the large numbers of Buddhist Monasteries and monks were a top-heavy burden on the people of Ladakh who ended up having to support them.
Charles Cameron:
October 6th, 2019 at 4:42 pm
Mike:
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“Douglas made no mention of sex and violence.”
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Right — the book is about sex and violence in the person of Sogyal, and by extension, any “exotic” and charismatic person who claims guru status or equivalent, and turens out to have a harsh streak in his (likely not her) character.
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The Dalai Lama is with Justice Douglas in disliking monastic feudalism..
K:
October 11th, 2019 at 10:52 am
to the first commenter @Mike : this is not the point of the book.
The book is about sexual abuses that enfold in the West by a pseudo tulku-tibetan-master-recognized-by-his-peers-has-such onto western women/adepts/students.
The book is about digging the authenticity of Sogyal based on available research.
The fact that Sogyal is authentic or not has no importance at all in the context of the sexual abuses.
The feudalism of the Tibetan Buddhists “masters” have been imported to the West partially due to a total lack of discernment in the case of the students and partially to the greed but also inspiration of Trunga that intoxicated the entire Vajrayana corpus in the West by crazy-wisdom notions that ultimately lead to the crumbling of Shamabhla, RIGPA, NKT, OKC and others.