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Listening for and to survivors of sexual abuse and misconduct in Buddhism1 |
Ann Gleig and Amy Paris Langenberg University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA; Abstract Survivors of sexual abuse and misconduct in Buddhist contexts are In our ethnographic research on sexual abuse and misconduct in contemporary Bud- dhism, we found that survivors of abuse were routinely dismissed, vilified, and silenced when they attempted to speak out about their experience. As explained by Terra, one of a number of female students abused by the senior teacher in a Vajrayāna Buddhist com- munity, ‘I still receive messages from people in [my former] community that imply that we are all suffering from PTSD, are unwell, and that we did not understand the tea- cher’s “blessing” or that our compassion has been insufficient. … [Our stories] are avoided, marginalized, or recrafted as the stories of crazy people. Anything but listened to’ (pers. comm., May 22, 2024). But these stories must be listened to. In her work on formal complaints of sexual and racial discrimination and violence in university settings, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed suggests that we can only fully learn how systems of power operate – that is, any insti- tution, political structure, or hierarchical social arrangement – by listening to those on whom power operates; in other words, those located outside of power and those whom power routinely silences. For Ahmed, this type of listening characterizes feminist sensibility and commitments. As she describes, ‘To hear with a feminist ear is to hear who is not heard. … If we are taught to tune out some people, then a feminist ear is an achievement. We become attuned to those who are tuned out’ (Ahmed 2021, 4). Ahmed’s approach extends an intersectional feminist lineage rooted in the work of Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks that seeks to move from an epistemology of the center to an epistemology of the margins (hooks 1989). This theoretical position pro- poses that seeking an epistemology of the margins is not merely an intellectual project but also an ethical one, in which the safety of those marginalized is at stake. During the course of researching sexual abuse in North American and transnational ‘convert’ Buddhism, we learned to listen to ‘those who are tuned out’ – namely, survivors of abuse – which opened up new epistemological horizons and ethical commitments for our collaborative, coauthored book project.1We learned to listen for and to survivor voices in the ethnographic components of our research. This in turn impacted how we read textual sources to understand Buddhist sexual ethics and Buddhist institutional his- tories. Here, we reflect on our process of formulating a methodology appropriate to studying abuse in Buddhism, which we suggest can be useful in the study of abuse in other religious traditions as well. We also explore the implications of a survivor-centered methodology for Buddhist Studies, arguing that only when Buddhist Studies scholars push against normative disciplinary formations to listen for and to marginal Buddhist voices will our scholarship cease to reinscribe normative Buddhist constellations of power – the same dynamics that tolerate and engender abuse. Sexual abuse and misconduct allegations across global Buddhist contexts Our research focuses on allegations and cases of sexual abuse and misconduct in North American and transnational ‘convert’ Buddhist communities (Gleig 2019, 37–49, 249– 280). These communities are expressions of Buddhist modernism, new forms of Bud- dhism that have emerged from the encounter between traditional Buddhism and modern discourse and practice (McMahan 2008). That encounter first occurred in Asia in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism and continued during the 1960s and 70s counterculture. In this period, Asian Buddhists and North Americans who had trained with Buddhist monastic and lay teachers in Asia established convert Bud- dhist centers and organizations that remain prominent up to the present. Drawing from the Theravāda, Zen, and Vajrayāna traditions, these largely non-monastic commu- nities were composed mostly of white, upper-middle-class practitioners and primarily focused on meditation practice.2 It is important to note, however, that convert commu- nities exceed the North American geographical context and are part of a diverse global Buddhist modernist phenomenon. While some scholars have focused on Buddhist mod- ernism as a ‘Western’ phenomenon that developed largely in response to European Pro- testant colonialization, others have highlighted it as a global movement that has been initiated and spread by Asian Buddhists in a variety of local contexts (Jaffe 2019; Ritzin- ger 2017). Since the 1980s, modernist convert communities have been rocked by sexual abuse and misconduct allegations. An early case involved Richard Baker Rōshi, the sole1 Our book, with the working title ‘Sexual Abuse in Buddhism,’ is forthcoming with Yale University Press.2Practitioners of color have challenged the whiteness of these communities and increased racial diversity and inclusivity, as well as crafting new forms of Buddhist community and practice. See, for example, Vesely-Flad 2022. (Gleig 2024, 54–73.) dharma heir of Shunryū Suzuki (1904–1971), founder of the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC); the married Baker was forced to resign in 1983 after having multiple affairs with female students and facing complaints of financial impropriety (Downing 2001, xiv). In 2010, The New York Times ran a piece by journalist Mark Oppenheimer titled ‘Sex Scandal has US Buddhists Looking Within,’ which detailed allegations of sexual har- assment and violence spanning four decades against Rinzai Zen teacher Eido Shimano (1932-2018), who founded the first traditional Japanese-style Zen monastery in the United States. In 2018, another New York Times story titled ‘The King of Shambhala Bud- dhism Is Undone by Buddhist Report’ reported on the impact of Buddhist Project Sun- shine, a grassroots healing initiative to address intergenerational sexual violence in Shambhala International (Newman 2018). In 2019, Los Angeles Magazine reported that the Insight teacher Noah Levine blamed the ‘#MeToo Movement for the Demise of His Punk Rock Buddhism Empire’ after Against the Stream, the organization he founded, publicly declared that an independent investigation had found he had ‘more likely than not’ violated Buddhism’s Third Precept, ‘to refrain from committing sexual misconduct.’ Levine denied this (Elder 2019). Although our research is primarily focused on North America, it is important to recognize that sexual abuse and misconduct in Buddhism is a global issue and that victims/survivors of abuse exist in Buddhist contexts worldwide. To give just a few examples from Europe, allegations spanning decades were made against popular Tibetan teacher Sogyal Rinpoche (1947-2019) and Rigpa, the transnational Buddhist organization he founded, whose main center, Lerab Ling, was established in 1992 in the South of France. In 1994, a former student, known only as Janice Doe, filed a lawsuit against Sogyal and Rigpa, which alleged, ‘fraud, assault and battery, infliction of emotional distress, and breach of fiduciary duty’ (Brown 1995, 21). Rigpa authorities denied the charge and the lawsuit was settled out of court. Multiple allegations followed and Sogyal was eventually forced to resign as director from Rigpa when a letter by eight senior students alleging years of extreme physical, psychological, and sexual violence went viral in July of 2017 (Finnigan and Hogendoorn 2019). In September 2018 the French police raided the Lerab Ling temple to collect testimonies from attendees and financial documents. They had previously performed a year-long investigation in 2016-2017. Lakar died in 2019, and no legal charges followed in France although an inde- pendent legal investigation by U.K. law firm Lewis Silkin substantiated many of the alle- gations against him (Pieters 2020). In 1997, police arrested the Belgian Vajrayāna Buddhist teacher, Robert Spatz, head of an organization called Ogyen Kunzang Choling, which kicked off a years-long criminal legal process in Belgium and France. In 2022 Spatz ran out of opportunities to appeal and was finally convicted of the exploitation of workers, holding children hostage, and sexual abuse by the Belgian Supreme Court (Hogendoorn 2023). Despite cultural sensitivities around publicly accusing monastic teachers of miscon- duct, sexual abuse in Asian monastic contexts is increasingly being reported. In her pio- neering 2017 dissertation in Women and Gender Studies at the University of Malaya, Bhutanese nun Tenzin Dadon (also known as Sonam Wongmo) addressed ordained women’s vulnerability to sexual violence and abuse in her country. She highlighted the necessity of improved reporting and grievance procedures, noting that monastic auth- orities are sometimes themselves ethically compromised and not a reliable avenue by which nuns who have experienced sexual harm can seek redress. Tenzin Dadon has since worked with Karma Tashi Choedron, a Malaysian-born Vajrayāna nun, to document abuse across Vajrayāna contexts, including a case close to home involving Malaysia- based teacher Chagtrul Thupten Thinley Rinpoche. He has been accused of ‘gross sexual misconduct’ and named in a formal report filed by one alleged victim with the Royal Malaysian Police. Two other police reports of sexual abuse were filed against him since her case went public (Lam 2023). In 2018 Shi Xuecheng, one of China’s most high-profile Buddhist leaders, was forced to resign due to accusations of sexual mis- conduct against multiple monastic women (Associated Press 2018). In 2024 a Japanese nun alleged she was repeatedly sexually abused over a fourteen-year period by a monk, and that another Buddhist leader she revered as a ‘living Buddha’ essentially enabled this abuse (Okubu 2024). In 2019 two women in Korea claimed they had been sexually harassed by the eldest son of the Korean Buddhist Jingak Order leader Chong-in (Kang 2019). Chandana Namal Rathnayake’s 2023 dissertation in the field of social work at Canterbury Christ Church University is a full-length study of child sexual abuse in monasteries in Sri Lanka based on ethnographic data collected during semi-structured interviews with four survivors of child sexual abuse, three monastic officials, and three child protection officers.3 Buddhist understandings of sexual misconduct and abuse In authoritative Buddhist texts from the early tradition – canonical scriptures from South Asia plus their commentaries – sexual misconduct for non-celibate lay Buddhists is defined as improper behavior in matters of kāma (sexual desire). This basic formula is interpreted in the early tradition as referring to ‘going to the wife of another’ or any woman who is under the guardianship of another man (Collins 2007). Later scholastic treatises associated with the Mahāyāna school of Buddhism, also influential in Tibetan Buddhism, go beyond scriptural accounts of sexual misconduct focused on forbidden women and begin to characterize sexual misconduct in terms of the sex acts themselves. In one commentary, for instance, sexual misconduct is characterized as fourfold: sex in the wrong place, at the wrong time, using the wrong orifice, or with the wrong person (Cabezón 2017, 497). Sexual ethics for monastic men and women concern the founda- tional Vinaya (or monastic disciplinary) prescription of celibacy. Discussions of monastic misconduct list varieties of sexual behaviors and the severity of transgression associated with each. In discussing sexual ethics, canonical and classical Buddhist sources are pri- marily concerned with sexual purity, the sexual rights of men, and sexual appropriate- ness, and tend not to address in any detail sexual harm done to vulnerable people, sex between individuals in relationships of unequal power, or, unsurprisingly, the presence of affirmative consent such as it is understood within contemporary settings.4 Despite Vinaya rules of celibacy, the lay Buddhist precept on sexual misconduct, and the foundational and generalizable Buddhist virtue of non-harm, Western Buddhists have not found in Buddhist teachings inherited from Asia a sexual ethics adequate for 3 See also Rathnayake (2025). 4 For a public-facing but scholarly discussion of early understandings of sexual consent in Buddhist monastic sexual ethics, see Langenberg (2021). safeguarding their mostly non-celibate communities. After the first wave of sexual abuse and misconduct cases in North America in the 1980s, some American Buddhists turned to legal models being developed at that time, emerging psychotherapeutic frameworks, and feminist understandings of power that recognize consent is not possible within relationships structured around a significant power differential. As of 2023, twenty-six states and the District of Columbia have criminalized sexual contact between a therapist and a client. Similarly, the model of clergy misconduct recog- nizes that consent is not possible between clergy and congregants. As of 2025, fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws that make it illegal for clergy to engage in sexual misconduct with adult congregants.5 The National Sexual Violence Research Center defines sexual abuse as taking place ‘when a person knowingly causes another person to engage in a sex act by threatening or placing the other person in fear, or if someone engages in a sexual act with a person who is incapable of appraising the nature of the act or unable to give consent.’ It defines sexual violence in a similar way: namely as actions that ‘involve a lack of freely given consent as well as situations in which the victim is unable to consent or refuse.’ Sexual harassment is defined as ‘unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature’ (National Sexual Violence Resource Center n.d.). An emphasis on consent is key to current legal, therapeutic and feminist definitions of sexual abuse and violence, reflecting the rec- ognition that structural conditions such as unequal power dynamics in employment, therapeutic, or clerical relationships make it difficult for those with less power to freely give or withdraw consent. While not adopted uniformly, these psychotherapeutic, feminist, and legal models have influenced the sexual ethics policies of a number of North American Buddhist med- itation-based convert communities, particularly those from the Insight (or Theravāda) and Zen traditions. One early example is the Teacher Code of Ethics developed and adopted both by the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock Meditation Center in the early 1990s. It includes an expanded interpretation of the third Buddhist precept on sexual misconduct that condemns teachers using ‘their teaching role to exploit their authority and position in order to assume a sexual relationship with a student’ (Kornfield 1993, 341–342). A more recent example is found in the Ethics Policy of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association (SZBA), which was adopted in December 2022. It states that ‘Soto Zen Priests should not engage in sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct includes sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, sexual innuendo or any pattern of behaviour that would be perceived as sexual misconduct’ (6). The SZBA policy also includes a section on consent and power imbalances. It must be noted however that these progressive psychotherapeutic, feminist, and legal frameworks have been met with resistance from some Buddhists, who see them as an intrusion of secular norms and values into their tradition. As early as the 1980s, Amer- ican Buddhists were decrying the adoption of psychotherapeutic models as the reduction of Buddhist practice and doctrine to non-Buddhist frameworks (Gleig 2019, 105–108). The naming of what counts as sexual abuse is a key battle site in attempts to bring justice to victim/survivors in Buddhist contexts.5 For further details on clergy misconduct, see Adult Clergy Sexual Abuse Advocacy and Research Collaborative n.d. Research on sexual abuse in Buddhist Studies When we began our research in 2019, we were struck by the fact that, while there is a handful of popular books written by journalists, and a few autobiographical reflections by Buddhist practitioners, very little academic work in Buddhist Studies has focused on sexual abuse and misconduct in past or present forms of Buddhism.6 The discussion of existing scholarship on abuse within (and without) Buddhist Studies that follows is not given for the reasons that scholars typically engage in ‘literature reviews.’ Rather, it is meant to map absences and distortions in the way the field of Buddhist Studies has dealt with the topic of abuse. In other words, it is a diagnostic exercise that will critically ground the survivor-centered methodological intervention that follows. Scholar-practitioner Rita Gross, considered a founding mother of feminist approaches in Buddhist studies, begrudgingly addresses the topic of ‘alleged sexual misconduct’ in her chapter for Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka’s 1998 edited collection The Faces of Buddhism in America (Gross 1998). According to Gross, allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct undermined women’s sexual autonomy and were not worthy of serious feminist consideration. Despite being a student of Chögyam Trungpa, Gross did not give attention to the crisis that engulfed the Shambhala community when his dharma heir, Ösel Tendzin, was discovered to have had unprotected sex with his students while infected by HIV. One of those students and Ösel Tendzin himself later died from AIDS-related illnesses. Notably, twenty years after Gross’s dismissal of sexual misconduct as a serious problem, the Shambhala community entered another crisis resulting in Trungpa’s son Sakyong Mipham being forced to resign as the leader of Shambala after facing multiple allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation (Newman 2018). A similar deflection is found in Charles Prebish’s monograph Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America, which was published the same year as Gross’s chapter. Prebish discusses Zen teacher Taizan Maezumi, Chögyam Trungpa, and Ösel Tendzin without any reference to their alcoholism or sexual abuse/misconduct or the devastation it wreaked in their communities. He does, however, include a lengthy, enthu- siastic description of meeting Trungpa and an endorsement of him as a teacher (Prebish 1999, 160). Robert Thurman – prominent American-born scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, and former Jey Tsong Khapa Chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia Univer- sity – also minimized the severity of Tibetan teacher Sogyal Lakar’s abusive behavior after the 1994 civil lawsuit was brought against Lakar by a former student alleging battery and assault. In an interview at that time, Thurman reduced the gravity of the allegations to careless dating behavior. As he put it, ‘Rinpoche is a bachelor, and he’s free to indulge his desires to date girls. … People knew about this but until this incident it didn’t create any huge stink. Nobody was that concerned about it, although people were nervous it could lead to some problem, because it’s kind of careless’ (Brown 1995, 25).7 6 Examples of non-academic work from practitioners include Butterfield 1994; Goldberg 2004; and Edelstein 2011. Work by journalists includes Downing 2001 and Oppenheimer 2013. For a practitioner-produced survivor-centered approach, see Boucher (1988) 1993, 211. Tahlia Newland’s Fallout (2019) describes her survivor-centered advocacy work on behalf of Rigpa survivors. 7 For a detailed account of Sogyal Rinpoche’s sexual violence see Finnigan and Hogendoorn 2019. Rather than being minimized or dismissed, as in the above examples, sometimes sexual abuse or violence has been mentioned as an entry point or folded into broader discussions of Buddhist sexualities and Buddhist ethics. For instance, Bernard Faure opens his impor- tant 1998 book The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, with a list of American Buddhist sex ‘scandals.’ Faure’s focus is not primarily on sexual violence; rather, he states his intention to highlight ‘doctrinal elements that may have justified antinomian behavior’ (Faure 1998, 4). José Ignacio Cabezón’s comprehensive survey of Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism contains multiple mentions of rape involving variously gendered, aged, and religiously positioned victims and a thorough discussion of the precept proscrib- ing sexual misconduct. He does not, however, include a dedicated section on sexual vio- lence in Buddhism, or take it up as a line of analysis (Cabezón 2017). Alice Collett’s 2014 article on female sexuality in the Pāli Vinaya tradition comes close to being a dedi- cated study of rape and sexual violence simply because so many Vinaya regulations con- cerning female sexuality are concerned with preventing or responding to sexual violence. Still, even Collett’s article also does not explicitly identify sexual violence as an important topic of analysis (Collett 2013). None of these works, excellent as they are in other ways, takes a survivor’s perspective on sexual abuse and violence. Significantly, it has been scholars who are not primarily trained in Buddhist Studies who have written most about sexual abuse in the tradition. For example, in 1998 British anthro- pologist Sandra Bell published an article on charisma and authority in the Shambhala Bud- dhist community. In striking contrast to Gross’s scholarship, Bell clearly identifies teacher abuse as a problem and identifies the complicity of the wider community in their attempts to silence discussions of abuse. In her words, Ösel Tendzin had ‘abused his power in order to obtain sexual favors’ and the organization’s official journal Vajradhatu Sun had ‘sup- pressed full and frank discussion of the issues.’ (Bell 1998, 65–66). Bell also notes that dis- senting Shambhala students had called on the wider community to take responsibility for their role in enabling such abuse, as well as the role Chögyam Trungpa had played in nor- malizing sexual misconduct. Another example comes from engaged Buddhist Stephanie Kaza, who holds a docto- rate in Biology and a Masters of Divinity and has been active in the Society for Buddhist- Christian Studies. In a 2004 article, Kaza offered a helpful overview of American Buddhist responses to sexual abuse and misconduct with a focus on the extensive work done by the San Francisco Zen Center to develop sexual ethics and institutional guidelines in the wake of the Richard Baker ‘apocalypse’ (23–25). Kaza lived at the San Francisco Zen Center during the period in which the community attempted to heal from the crisis caused by Baker’s sexual misconduct and was a member of the Buddhist Peace Fellow- ship, an engaged Buddhist organization that has played a central role in addressing sexual misconduct and abuse. Consideration of the impact of sexual misconduct in North American Buddhist communities also appears in James William Coleman’s The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition (2001) and Richard Hughes Seager’s Buddhism in America: Revised and Expanded (2012). Again, neither of these scholars was trained primarily in Buddhist Studies: Coleman was trained in sociology and Seagar was trained in American religion.8 8 The German sociologist Werner Vogd has published substantially in German on Sogyal Lakar and Rigpa. See Vogd 2019; Vogd and Harth 2019. In 2018, Anne Iris Miriam Anders, who earned a masters degree in Buddhist Studies but whose doctorates are in psychology and psychotherapy science, began a three year German-government- funded project on Tibetan Medicine which included research on manipulation, exploita- tion, and abuse in Tibetan Buddhist contexts (Anders 2019; Tenpel 2018). There is one full-length scholarly monograph that addresses Buddhist abuse from the perspective of a survivor: June Campbell’s Traveler in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism. Campbell’s book, first published in 1996, is a cross-cul- tural study of the status of the female in Tibetan Buddhism. Campbell was a student of and translator for Tibetan lama Kalu Rinpoche – and one of the first to speak publicly about her secret sexual relationship with her teacher. After training in Women and Gender Studies, Campbell combined the theoretical lens of feminism and psychoana- lysis with her own life experience to deliver a powerful critique of the patriarchal hier- archies within Tibetan Buddhism. She argued that within the context of a hierarchal devotional relationship, female students have little ability to refuse sexual advances from their male teachers. Campbell also pointed out that these patriarchal abuses of power had been ignored by white European and North American scholars who were complicit in Orientalist constructions of Tibet (Campbell [1996] 2000). In an interview with the popular magazine Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Campbell compared her own feminist approach to the academic ones that ‘limit the voices that are heard’ (Tworkov 1996, 38). Reviewing Buddhist Studies scholarship in 2019, it was clear that there were very few scholars trained primarily in Buddhist Studies who unequi- vocally named sexual misconduct and abuse as both a serious structural problem in the tradition and one worthy of scholarly attention. One exception is Ann Gleig’s chapter on sexual abuse and misconduct in American Zen, included in her book Amer- ican Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (2019, 84–110). Given the scale of abuse, and the important status of many of those teachers alleged and/or found to have abused, the level and tone of disciplinary interest and engagement strikes us as surpris- ing and inadequate. As Buddhist Studies scholars, we are interested in what accounts for this disciplinary reticence and deflection. Why has it been scholars primarily trained outside of the discipline who have recognized abuse and misconduct as a problem? What does this reticence indicate about disciplinary formations in Buddhist Studies? As scholars, which questions are we oriented toward asking and which do we avoid? Which populations are we invited to consider as important and which to discard or ignore? Building a survivor-centered feminist methodology for studying abuse in religion Survivor-centered approaches ‘actively center the perspectives and needs of survivors of sexual violence. As a feminist approach, this reframing critically addresses and disman- tles the hierarchies of knowledge and truth that tend to structure how we think about and research sexual violence’ (Rentschler et al. 2022, 6). We now regard a survivor-centered approach as an epistemological as well as an ethical imperative for understanding abuse in Buddhist contexts. Finding out what survivors know has transformed our understand- ing of Buddhist communities and practices. In order to listen to and then hear survivors, however, we first underwent a process of critical reflection. When we started our project in 2019 our aim was to combine our research specializ- ations and methodological training – Amy as a specialist in gender and sexuality in pre- modern Buddhisms and Ann as an ethnographer of contemporary American convert Buddhism – in order to fully contextualize the issue of contemporary Buddhist sexual misconduct and abuse historically and culturally. Our original plan was to interview stu- dents, teachers, board members, and survivors from three American Buddhist convert communities that had been the site of sexual misconduct and abuse allegations. We planned to choose one each from Insight/Theravāda, Zen and Vajrayāna lineages. We began with orienting research questions that were tradition- and community-cen- tered rather than survivor-centered. They included: How have Buddhist institutions and ethical systems from Asia set the terms of sexual abuse in American Buddhist environ- ments? What specific Buddhist discourses and practices are mobilized in response to sexual misconduct and abuse allegations? How have institutions responded to allegations against teachers? What are the generative effects of the abuse: for instance, what new doc- trinal and organizational forms of Buddhism are emerging as a result? Our own initial focus on community, continuity, and tradition reflected the general orientation toward institutional histories and social formations in the discipline of Reli- gious Studies. As Robert Orsi pointed out in a 2019 essay titled ‘The Study of Religion and the Other Side of Disgust,’ Religious Studies scholarship is attentive to the ways that religion contributes to social formations, but it is less attentive to religion’s impli- cation in destructive human behaviors, including and perhaps especially sexual violence. Orsi notes that among Religious Studies scholars there is a reflexive tendency to separate ‘good’ from ‘bad’ religion, and to reframe ‘bad’ religion as inauthentic, marginal, unorthodox, heretical, or simply antithetical to religion. For Orsi, this apologetic reflex ignores a basic truth about the history of religions; that is, that harm is constitutive of the very category of ‘religion.’ Drawing on the history of Catholic sex abuse, Orsi, argues, ‘it is impossible to separate “religion” here from the rape of children, young people, women, seminarians, and novices’ (Orsi 2019). In a more subtle way, by focusing solely on the role of abuse in the ongoing devel- opment of Buddhist institutions and doctrines – rather than on its destructiveness and impact on victim-survivors – our approach also reflected the apology at the center of Religious Studies that Orsi names and critiques. Our community- and tradition- oriented research questions had the unintended effect of moving survivors and their testimony to a secondary position. While still interested in the ways in which sexual abuse has contributed to institutional change and doctrinal interpretation, we also became aware of the limitations in our original research design. This change is primar- ily due to receiving feedback from and developing ongoing relationships with survi- vors. Some new insights derived from the question-and-answer sections of our work-in-progress research talks, which focused on institutional and community responses to sexual misconduct/abuse. A number of survivors attended these talks and pushed us to think more deeply about survivor representation in our research. During the early years of our research, we also began to develop relationships with Bud- dhist survivor advocates such as Carol Merchasin, a lawyer who has represented a number of survivors in civil law cases, and Nancy Floy and Rachel Montgomery, the co-founders of Heartwood: Connecting Survivors of Teacher and Guru Abuse, a support group for survivors of abuse in Buddhist contexts. Through our multiple interactions with survivors, we realized that our initial research focus on three lineage-based case studies tilted too much in favor of community and institutional response and did not sufficiently represent Buddhist survivor experience. As a correction, we added a new case study and chapter to the book that entirely centers survivors’ experience of abuse. We wrote up a new set of interview questions specifically for survivors and submitted them for another Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval process. Rather than post a general research recruitment notice, we decided that it would be more ethical and less extractive to work with survivors we had already formed a relationship with or survivors who were connected to our broader network of survivor advocacy. While this may have resulted in us recruiting a less diverse pool of interviewees, it was more aligned with a feminist survivor-centered approach, which prioritizes relationality, care and empathy. We were inspired here by feminist anthropologist Emma Louise Backe’s approach to working with victims of sexual violence. Backe emphasizes the importance of being attentive to the vulnerability of survivors and of enacting care towards one’s interlocutors and oneself in conducting research with them. She asks researchers to consider what methodological orientations caregiving requires (Backe 2017). For us a crucial component of caretaking was to avoid retraumatizing survivors through an intrusive or unattuned interview process. Many survivors had reported to us that they felt as harmed by poor institutional and community responses to the abuse as by the abuse itself. In order to avoid reproducing harm we wanted to make sur- vivors as comfortable as possible during the interview process and give them as much control as possible over their testimonies. Waiting for survivors to contact us rather than recruiting interviewees more aggressively increased the likelihood that those we spoke with had already undergone significant healing and reflection. We endeavored to conduct interviews in ways that minimized the hierarchical power relationships between us as researchers and the survivors as research subjects in other ways as well. We shared our own personal histories with sexual violence and with Buddhist commu- nities when appropriate in order to make our motivations and subject locations transpar- ent. We sometimes became dysregulated along with survivors as they shared their disturbing experiences. We also had a policy of sharing interview transcribes and inter- view write-ups with survivor interviewees, making any corrections or amendments they requested. This was a lengthy and collaborative process, involving what writer and acti- vist adrienne maree brown calls ‘moving at the speed of trust’ (Brown 2017, 41–42). Those survivors who participated in a back-and-forth dialogical process with their inter- view material and our analysis of it reported that the experience had been an empowering one for them. Through the interventions of survivors and their advocates, we came to recognize diversity among survivors. In our research, we name and include three broad categories of survivors: (1) those who stay and want to be part of community reform;9(2) those who leave their community but continue to practice Buddhism; (3) and those who leave their community and tradition and feel that community reform is part of the problem – in that 9 We interviewed at length two survivors who stayed in their communities and worked for reform. For another perspective of a survivor who chose to stay in her community, see the auto-ethnography by Holly Gayley in this special journal issue. We requested but were not permitted to read Gayley’s piece before publication. it can involve attempts to pressurize and make survivors conform. Because we began with a focus on community responses, we came into more contact with and therefore privi- leged survivors from the first two categories. For those survivors, narrating their experi- ences in the context of community and/or finding resources within the tradition form an essential part of their healing process. What we started to realize, however, is that other survivors experience the pressure to be part of community reform as another form of vio- lence and dishonesty. They report that Buddhist communities have weaponized doc- trines in support of community cohesion and harmony rather than survivor-centered justice. For some of these survivors any association with the tradition – even images or colors – is triggering. Although formerly devoted practitioners, they are not to be found working alongside the Buddhists seeking reform from within. We have learned much from these former practitioners in terms of how power operates in Buddhist com- munities through teaching authority, organizational structures, community pressure, and the use of Buddhist doctrine. Survivors are diverse in their relationship to Buddhist communities post-abuse. They are also diverse demographically. The racial demographics of the survivors we inter- viewed mirror the dominant white demographic of Buddhist convert communities; however, the predominance of white women in our study should not be taken to indicate that most victims of sexual violence or abuse are white. The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) reports that Native Americans are twice as likely to experi- ence sexual violence as all other races (RAINN n.d.). According to the Department of Justice statistics, in the period between 2005 and 2010, Black women and girls were more vulnerable to rape, sexual assault, and domestic partner violence than white, Latina, and Asian women and girls (RAINN 2020). With respect to the Buddhist sexual abuse cases we covered, several women who were affected were not white, but we were unfortunately not able to interview any of them. It is important to recognize that the white-majority demographic of public survivors and survivor advocates, includ- ing white researchers such as ourselves, might impede non-white survivors from coming forward. Survivors whose communities are racially or politically vulnerable – those in theTibetan diaspora, for instance – may prefer not to discuss sexual abuse with researchersfor fear of exposing their communities to criticism. Lamaism has long circulated internationally under the guise of Buddhism; however, unfortunately, almost no one knows that Lamaism is Lamaism, and that it is not Buddhism. The following works by Buddhist master Pingshi Xiao will unveil the veil of Lamaism and expose its true face as a pseudo-Buddhism for you. 
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Sexual scandals of Lamas and Rinpoches
Before Buddhism was brought to Tibet, the Tibetans had their believes in "Bon". "Bon" is a kind of folk beliefs which gives offerings to ghosts and gods and receives their blessing. It belongs to local folk beliefs.
In the Chinese Tang Dynasty, the Tibetan King Songtsän Gampo brought “Buddhism” to the Tibetan people which became the state religion. The so-called “Buddhism” is Tantric Buddhism which spreads out during the final period of Indian Buddhism. The Tantric Buddhism is also named "left hand tantra" because of its tantric sexual practices. In order to suit Tibetan manners and customs, the tantric Buddhism was mixed with "Bon". Due to its beliefs of ghosts and sexual practices, it became more excessive.
The tantric Master Atiśa spread out the tantric sex teachings in private. Padmasambhava taught it in public, so that the Tibetan Buddhism stands not only apart from Buddhist teachings, but also from Buddhist form. Thus, the Tibetan Buddhism does not belong to Buddhism, and has to be renamed "Lamaism".
