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Listening for and to survivors of sexual abuse and misconduct in Buddhism 2

While the survivors we were able to interview all identify as female, this is not true of

all survivors of abuse in Buddhist contexts. Chögyam Trungpa’s successor, Ösel Tendzin,

used his position of authority to initiate sexual contact with men in the Shambhala com-

munity. The founder of the Triratna Buddhist order, Sangharakshita (born Dennis Ling-

wood), also initiated sexual relationships with male students. In December of 2023, Jack

Hillie III, a senior monk at the Shambhala-aﬃliated Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton,

Canada, was sentenced to sixty days’ imprisonment for voyeurism after he planted a

camera on the wall of the men’s shower (CBS News 2023). In 2020, a civil case was

ﬁled in the state of Vermont against a senior member of Shambhala and the Shambhala

U.S.A. organization on behalf of a plaintiﬀ claiming to have been raped when he was

ﬁfteen years old at the Karma Choling Shambhala center in Barnet, Vermont. There

are also reports of the abuse of boys and teenagers in Asian monastic contexts. For

instance, in 2011 on YouTube, Yangsi Kalu Rinpoche, the reincarnation of a prominent

Tibetan lama also known as Kalu Rinpoche (2011), reported the abuse he experienced as a young teenager from older monks at a monastery. In 2016 two young Bhutanese monks, aged 11 and 12, shared their experience of sexual abuse by older monks with The Raven, Bhutan’s monthly news magazine (Ralph 2016). Chandana Namal Rathnayake documented and analyzed dynamics around the abuse of boys and teenagers in monas- teries in Sri Lanka in his 2023 dissertation. 10 Rathnayake is himself a survivor of child sex abuse in a Sri Lankan Buddhist monastery. Still, while it is important to acknowledge that survivors occupy all gender categories, within our data set the vast majority of survivors of abuse in Buddhism did, in fact, identify as women. This reﬂects general statistics on sexual violence, which, according to RAINN, impacts women (and girls) at high rates (RAINN n.d.).

Insights from feminist analysts of sexual violence

In carefully listening to the experiences of survivors, while also identifying their diﬀer-

ences we shifted away from our initial more conventional Buddhist Studies focus on

formal community structures and major teachings toward a focus on what survivors

themselves know about Buddhist doctrine, practice, and structures of authority.

However, building a survivor-centered methodology involved even more than this

gestalt shift. We were also compelled to engage feminist analyses of sexual violence to

describe and understand the cultural, political, and legal processes through which survi-

vor voices are erased or moved to the margins, even within Buddhist contexts. In particu- lar, we drew on work by feminist thinkers such as Sara Ahmed, Linda Alcoﬀ, Tarana Burke, Alyson Cole, Jennifer Freyd, Roxane Gay, Leigh Gilmore, Judith Herman,

Anita Hill, bell hooks, Kate Manne, Milena Popova, and Amia Srinivasan to address

questions such as: What counts as sexual violence? How are women’s/survivors’ accounts of violence commonly received? What changes when we listen to women/survivors?

Our engagement with feminist work on sexual violence gave us a view of the main-

stream socio-cultural formation that some feminists have termed ‘rape culture.’ 11

Within this complex formation sexual violence is routinely minimized, euphemized,

and misrepresented as less harmful than it actually is. Feminist philosopher Linda

Martín Alcoﬀ argues that we need to come to a more complete understanding of what

counts as sexual violence and move away from simplistic binary categories such as con-

sensual sex versus ‘forcible rape.’ In her book, Rape and Resistance, Alcoﬀ oﬀers the term ‘sexual violation’ noting that it captures ‘a broad set of events beyond those involving explicit forms of violence,’ and acknowledges ‘structural constraints on consent’ (Alcoﬀ 2018, 12). As she explains ‘To violate is to infringe upon someone, to transgress, and it can also mean to rupture or to break. Violations can happen with stealth, with manipulation, with soft words and a gentle touch to a child, or an employee, or anyone who is signiﬁcantly vulnerable to the oﬃces of others’ (Alcoﬀ 2018, 12).

We found that survivors of abuse in Buddhist contexts asked similar questions about

what counts as sexual violence. Lama Willa Blythe Baker was twenty-two and had just

been ordained by her teacher Lama Norlha Rinpoche when he initiated an unwanted

sexual relationship with her. Baker, who published groundbreaking ﬁrst-person accounts of her abuse, is a scholar-practitioner who has inspired the sort of survivor-centered

10 See also Rathnayake 2025.

11 Early feminist discussions of rape culture include Miller 1975; Herman 1984; Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth 1993.

questioning we have employed as a hermeneutic in our work. Since she was unable to

make sense of her traumatic experience using Buddhist narratives of women as consorts

and ḍ ākinīs, she was pushed to ask new questions to try to comprehend it. Though at

times she attempted to understand her experience as that of a consort, she also began

to recognize that her relationship with her teacher involved, as she names it, ‘abuses of

power’ and ‘exploitation.’ Baker ultimately sought language beyond Buddhist categories

to describe herself (‘Victim. Survivor. Consort. Partner. One of ‘those women’’) and to

understand her experience as ‘boundary violation’ and ‘clergy sexual misconduct’

(Baker 2018).

In a published statement about her experience of clergy misconduct at the Greater

Boston Zen Center (GBZC), an unnamed survivor also shared the diﬃculty of naming

the harm and having the harm be acknowledged by others. In her words, ‘It’s hard to

ﬁnd language for the ways in which things feel wrong. It took me time and pain to

come out of that fog and face what had really occurred.’ She identiﬁed how many com-

munity members had minimized her experience through their ‘constant conﬂation of

misconduct with adultery’ and lack of interest in learning about the systemic abuse of

spiritual power (Greater Boston Zen Center 2022).

Feminists have shown how victims are typically blamed for their own victimization

while the category of ‘victimization’ is simultaneously fashioned into a political tool

aimed at those who protest. In Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say

About Their Lives, feminist theorist Leigh Gilmore examines the cultural processes by

which women are constructed as less reliable witnesses than men. She shows that the tes- timony of victim-survivors is discounted as suspicious prior to any investigative or judi- ciary process (Gilmore 2017). In her coining of the term ‘himpathy,’ feminist philosopher Kate Manne has captured the ways in which excessive forms of sympathy are directed toward perpetrators while victims of sexual violence are blamed or ignored (Manne 2018, 195–205).

We observed these gendered dynamics at play in responses to multiple allegations of

sexual abuse against Dagri Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist lama who was aﬃliated with the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), a transnational

Buddhist community. On May 3, 2019, he was arrested at the airport serving Dharam-

sala, India after another passenger, an unnamed woman, alleged he had sexually molested her on the ﬂight (Wangyal 2019). On May 7, a Spanish citizen named Jakaira Perez Val- divia, a former nun and translator, released a YouTube video in which she alleged she had been sexually molested by Dagri Rinpoche in Namgyal Monastery in McLeod Ganj in 2008 (Perez Valdivia 2019). 12 In May 13, a Korean woman, Young Sun Shin, wrote a Facebook post in which she alleged that Dagri Rinpoche had groped her breast while she was a student at Sarah: College for Higher Tibetan Studies in Dharamsala in 2008.

On May 12, 2019, Sera Jey Monastery, now one of the main centers of learning for the

Gelugpa lineage in India, released a statement claiming those making allegations against Dagri Rinpoche were part of a conspiracy to undermine Tibetan Buddhism. Titled ‘A sincere appeal to all faithful and fair-minded brothers and sisters; Upasakas and those ordained,’ it opened with a sharp rebuke of the allegations, declaring them to be

12 Valdivia has since taken the video down, but a description of her experience is available in a public letter she sent to Tricycle magazine. Jakaira Perez Valdivia, ‘Letter of Response.’ May 2019.

‘untrue, fabricated and motivated stories,’ which were ‘deliberately disparaging and

deprecating a holy being.’ It claimed these false stories had been ‘spread mainly by fol-

lowers of Dholgyal who seem to be possessed of the unholy inﬂuence of Mara’s

forces.’ 13 ‘Followers of Dholgyal’ refers to a group of Gelugpa practitioners that split

from those following the Dalai Lama after he criticized the worship of a ﬁgure called

Dorje Shugden, a.k.a. Dholgyal. This group of ‘followers of Dholgyal’ has organized

public protests against the Dalai Lama and because of this they are widely believed to

be backed by the Chinese government. Calling the survivors ‘followers of Dhogyal’ eﬀec- tively identiﬁes them as ontological and politically enemies of the Dalai Lama.

After three other FPMT students came forward with legal representation to make

further allegations about sexual assault and misconduct by Dagri Rinpoche, the FPMT

was pressured into hiring an external organization – the FaithTrust Institute – to

conduct an investigation that ultimately found Dagri Rinpoche culpable for multiple

incidents of sexual assault, groping and harassment. During the FaithTrust Institute

investigation, Dagri supporters sent 39 emails praising his compassionate qualities as a

teacher. As noted in the ‘Summary Report’ posted to the FPMT website, several of

these emails simultaneously ‘described the complainants as mentally unstable, lying, or

misinterpreting Dagri Rinpoche’s actions’ (FaithTrust Institute, October 2020).

The Dagri Rinpoche case is one example of rape culture as described by feminists

operating at will within Buddhist contexts. In the face of an array of structural forces

– institutional, legal, and cultural – that routinely silence, shame, blame, and marginalize

survivors of Buddhist sexual violence, we realized that survivor testimony must be

actively sought and given special weight and attention in order to prevent it from disap- pearing. This is why we have adopted a survivor-centered rather than a merely survivor- inclusive approach in this work. When aggregated, as happened in the #MeToo move- ment and on a smaller scale within our research, survivor testimony presents a devastat- ing picture of rampant sexual violence, harassment, and abuse that demands an ethical and epistemic response. 14

The historical and doctrinal grounds for sexual abuse in Buddhism

While our survivor-centered methodology is fundamentally motivated by concerns about justice, we have found that its impact is also profoundly epistemic. Our relationships with survivors inspire us to ask distinct questions of Buddhist traditions, such as: Is sexual trauma acknowledged as a form of suﬀering? What resources do Buddhist traditions contain for victims of sexual abuse? Do Buddhist practices designed to attenuate the grip of the ego leave room for basic forms of self-protection against sexual harm? Is it possible to question the sexual behavior of one’s teacher without accruing karmic fault?

We contextualize our ethnographic data by drawing on primary and secondary texts

that shed light on Buddhist doctrines, institutions, and structures of authority. We

examine religious biographies about Buddhist women and other important narratives,

texts that theorize the student/teacher relationship, and authoritative texts on sexual

13 The public letter ‘A sincere appeal to all faithful and fair-minded brothers and sisters; Upasakas and those ordained,’ was

posted and circulated online but is no longer available.

14 An important recent study of the #MeToo movement is Gilmore 2023.

ethics such as relevant sections of Vinaya traditions and their commentaries. We also

examine practice traditions common in the Buddhist communities at the heart of our

case studies. In other words, our examination of historical institutions, doctrines, and

practices are not guided by dominant trends in previous Buddhist Studies scholarship

but by the experiences and testimonies of the survivor/victims in our study.

Sometimes posing survivor-inspired questions reveals previously unnoticed contours

in historical sources. For instance, we discovered that texts about rape in the Vinaya

neglect the trauma of the raped person and focus instead on whether he or she can be

deemed guilty of transgressing the rule ordaining celibacy. Similarly, early treatments

of sexual ethics for lay people tend to center the sexual obligations and rights of lay

men and leave aside the harm done to those women who are sexually violated

(Cabezón 2017; Collins 2007).

At other times, asking survivor-centered questions reveal the uniquely Buddhist

dilemmas experienced by survivor/victims. As just one example among many, in his

famous chapter on ks ̣ ānti (patience, tolerance) from the Bodhicaryāvatāra, a text that

the Dalai Lama frequently teaches and that is popular in the transnational Buddhist

organization known as the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahāyāna tradition

(FPMT), the eighth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva gives dire warnings

about the karmic dangers of indulging in anger. For the abuse survivors of the FPMT

teacher Dagri Rinpoche, as well as their defenders and allies, teachings such as this

posed a problem and a risk. Would it be possible to criticize abusive teachers without

accruing the karmic liability associated with anger? Even more directly consequential

for Dagri Rinpoche’s survivors was the advice given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche, the spiri-

tual director of the FPMT, to cultivate a pure perception of their teacher even in the face

of apparent moral ﬂaws. 15 For example, ‘Complainant 5,’ who was a nun at the time of

her abuse, described the predicament in which she found herself as follows: ‘When you’ve taken an empowerment with the person, they are the Buddha for you and anything they do is the actions of the Buddha and need to be seen in that light. These [abusive] actions need to be seen as exhausting your negative karma and you can’t ever have critical thoughts about their behavior, or you’re breaking your tantric samaya vows, which will lead to eons in hell realms.’ 16

Survivors have also demonstrated to us how teachings they received about the dissol-

ution of ego directly impaired their ability to protest against and resist the harm they

were experiencing. For instance, in her unpublished memoir a woman we call Olivia

describes how her teacher, a Zen priest, quoted a famous case involving the Sixth Patri-

arch of Chan Buddhism on the subject of ‘not thinking about good and evil.’ The delib-

erate erosion of the small self, with its conventional habits of diﬀerentiating self and

other, good and evil, male and female, is understood in the Zen she was taught as essen-

tial to spiritual progress. In the context of this survivor’s long relationship with her

teacher – which became sexual and which she eventually characterized as abusive and

traumatic – the erosion of self also resembled a grooming process in which she was

encouraged to distrust her own ethical intuitions and conventional understandings.

Olivia recalls reﬂecting on her teacher’s eﬀort to isolate her from her friends and

15 FPMT 2019a, 2019b.

16 Complainant 5; FaithTrust Institute 2019, 29.

family, and even from her own past, in explicitly Buddhist terms: ‘To continually burn it

up, to not ﬁx myself anywhere but to the teachings of Buddhism felt like I had realized

something esoteric referenced in the sutras’ (273). Olivia’s memoir illustrates how see-

mingly profound Buddhist ideas, in this case aspirational notions about ‘waking up’

and transcendence of small self, can function as part of a grooming process in Buddhist

sexual abuse.

Survivor Rachel Montgomery, who had previously lived and practiced Buddhism in a

Vajrayāna community in Oregon, used the autocorrect function on phones as a meta-

phor to explain how she automatically overrode her own thoughts and judgments in

order maintain a ‘pure perception’ of her Buddhist teacher (Montgomery 2023). The

practice of ‘pure perception’ is connected to both guru devotion and guru yoga in Vaj-

rayāna Buddhism and can be understood as a meditative process in which the prac-

titioner cleanses the aggregates or factors of the self. 17 A person who has abandoned

all conceptual formations sees with pure vision, apprehending the world as a Buddha

realm. The practitioner also applies this ‘pure perception’ to the teacher. Through this

special kind of seeing, any faults of the teacher – a grumpy mood, an acquisitive

streak, exploitative behavior toward beautiful young girls – are reframed as projections

of the dualistic mind of the student (Campbell [1996] 2000, 8–9). In other words,

within this practice system, to think critically of one’s teacher is to damage one’s mind

and to impair one’s progress toward enlightenment, thus risking disaster.

Rachel’s reﬂections capture the ways in which Buddhist doctrine can become a barrier

to preventing abuse. She shares:

It was an aspiration to see the guru as an enlightened being for the purpose of … progressing

in your practice. … [T]hat transitioned from it’s an aspiration to see the teacher as an

enlightened being to … [the] teacher is an enlightened being and your pure perception is

to see the teacher that way. Which kind of put in itself this autocorrect, like a spell

check. … Any time anything negative or not as safe or positive happened with the tea-

cher[—]in my mind I was autocorrecting it to positive because it was what my practice

hinged on … being able to see all the things the teacher did as beneﬁcial to the beneﬁt of

all beings. … It was a slippery slope once you start autocorrecting your thoughts. That

really can take you any number of places. … You’re just auditing your gut instincts and

your thoughts and consciousness constantly or more constantly than you had before.

So for me it was just a ramping up of that and in doing that … I just continuously lost

more and more sight of what was real, what was true, what actually was healthy and

safe and so it took me to places that ended up being very much so not healthy or safe.

(Montgomery 2023)

Montgomery reports that it was only after she was raped by her teacher when she

was unconscious, the violence of which both he and her community denied, that her

Buddhist autocorrect function broke down, allowing her critical faculties to eventually

reassert themselves. 18

As Gordon Lynch notes in his work on whether Christian doctrine can be a contribut-

ing factor in child sexual abuse, ‘Symbolic communication about the good’ – teachings

and doctrines – don’t generate static moral worlds on their own. Religious people activate

17 According to Janet Gyatso, ‘The desired fruit of creation meditation is the personal transformation of oneself, a deluded

being caught in the snare of saṃ sāra, into an enlightened Buddha’ (1998, 189).

18 Montgomery went on to co-organize and co-lead Heartwood Connecting Survivors of Guru and Teacher Abuse, a sur-

vivor support group for victims of Buddhist sexual and other forms of abuse (Heartwood Center n.d.).

doctrine in any number of ways when faced with serious ethical situations such as sexual abuse, including aﬃrmation of doctrine, adaptive interpretation of doctrine, or direct challenge to doctrine. According to Lynch’s research, the ‘shadow sides’ and ‘blind spots’ of any particular religion’s moral system of meanings can actually mitigate

against satisfactory responses to abuse (Lynch 2022). Like Lynch, we have found

through speaking with survivors that Buddhist doctrine can be a contributing factor in

sexual abuse and misconduct cases, depending on how it is activated. However, we

have also found that Buddhist teachers, and Buddhist Studies scholars, often understand

abuse to be the historical, localized product of individual bad faith actors – while assum- ing Buddhist doctrines themselves to be neutral or even salutary countermeasures in abuse. 19

In our work, we call attention to how neutral doctrines are more likely to be used in

the service of power in systems marked by gendered hierarchies, as well as to the ways in which certain Buddhist doctrines can be abuse-prone or easily weaponized to enable

abuse. In response to the harmful role doctrine can play, Buddhist abuse survivors

have begun to highlight alternative doctrinal interpretations. Baker, for instance, oﬀers

a reading of samaya in which the bond between lama and student is understood as a reci- procal commitment of loyalty and care, rather than a ‘one way’ samaya that ‘sanctions students to become apologists for their teacher’s transgressions’ (Baker 2018). 20

The methodological interventions of Gordon Lynch and Robert Orsi challenge scho-

larly responses to abuse cases in Christian contexts, but, as noted, they are also highly

applicable to Buddhist Studies. As a ﬁeld, Buddhist Studies has yet come to terms with

the issue of Buddhist sexual violence, a task made vastly more complex by Buddhist

Studies’ colonial history. While Buddhist Studies has increasingly incorporated ethno-

graphic and historical approaches that illuminate the margins rather than the insti-

tutional and doctrinal centers of Buddhist life, the dominant core of the ﬁeld focused

for many years on the text-critical and historical study of texts and tended to follow

the intellectual contours of Asian Buddhist traditions in its emphasis on great thinkers

and major doctrines. Scholarly rigor in this context was glossed in positive terms as dili-

gent translation and intertextual work, as well as thorough historical contextualization.

At the conservative end of the ﬁeld, this deﬁnition of scholarly rigor was (and sometimes still is) accompanied by an underlying suspicion of any sort of theoretical framing or cri- tique. 21 Certainly, good textual scholarship requires diligent translation, description, and contextualization. However, if scholars study Buddhist doctrines and ethical traditions as historical artifacts or philosophical abstractions, denying the reﬂexive aspects of scholar- ship and erasing themselves as thinking subjects in the process, aren’t they also erasing a good portion of the available data? And aren’t they doing so in a way that aﬃrms certain dominant subject positions and sets of experiences, while rendering others illegible? 22

The demands of the topic of sexual abuse have led us to probe the ways in which dis-

ciplinary norms in Buddhist Studies have often served to reinscribe Buddhist

19 For an argument for compassion as a preventative to and response to abuse, see Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche 2017. For a discussion that centers the beneﬁts of restraint in Buddhist sexual ethics, see Berzin n.d.. For an argument as to why early Buddhist texts don’t include rape within articulations of sexual misconduct (with an appendix arguing that raped girls should marry their rapists), see Pandita 2019.

20 See also Finnegan 2023.

21 For an example of this sort of critique, see Schott 2024.

22 For a more extended discussion of Buddhist Studies past and present, see Gleig and Langenberg 2024.

constellations of dominant power while occluding forms of Buddhism at the margins –

for instance, the Buddhism experienced by victims of abuse. The topic of sexual abuse

aligns our work with that of Buddhist Studies colleagues – including Stephanie Balkwill

(2024), Kati Fitzgerald (2020), Sarah Jacoby (2014; 2024), Scott A. Mitchell (2024), Jessica

Starling (2019), Sharon Suh (2004), and Nicholas Witkowski (2019) – who are working

ethnographically and historiographically to illuminate the Buddhist lives and experiences

of those marginalized or less visible in dominant Buddhist histories and scholarly narra-

tives. While the research focus of these scholars diﬀers, all are united by their commit-

ment to making visible Buddhist ﬁgures, communities, and texts that have been

neglected in the ﬁeld.

A survivor-centered turn in Buddhist Studies?

As discussed earlier, we note the paucity of scholarship in Buddhist Studies on the topic

of sexual violence. Encouragingly, during the period we conducted our research (2019–

2024), a raft of Buddhist Studies scholarship addressing the topic of abuse from a more

survivor-attuned perspective began to emerge. This scholarship coincides with the

impact of the global #MeToo movement and often references it as an inspiration.

Much of this scholarship also comes out of networks of scholars working together in

the context of the Luce Foundation-funded Religion and Sexual Abuse Project or the

Heartwood/Northwestern Symposium on Sexual Violence in Buddhism discussed below.

Ray Buckner’s 2020 article ‘Buddhist Teachers’ Responses to Sexual Violence’ broke

new ground in employing a feminist lens to critique the hegemonic logics upholding

‘cis-masculine innocence’ deployed in response to the allegations of sexual misconduct

against American Buddhist teacher Noah Levine (123). Wakoh Shannon Hickey

(2021) published an article suggesting that American Sōtō Zen organizations look to

the professional training, certiﬁcation, and governance of American Protestant Chris-

tianity to address the structural issues that make sexual abuse more likely. In 2022,

Holly Gayley and Somtso Bhum published an article on the ‘fake lama’ trope in

modern Tibetan ﬁction, in which they examine literary treatments of monks and

lamas who engage in sexual exploitation. Sarah Jacoby’s groundbreaking 2024 essay

‘She Said No: Toward a Survivor-Centered History of Vajrayāna Sexuality’ discussing

themes of sexual coercion and consent in Tibetan Buddhist visionary Sera Khandro’s

life writings, is written from an explicitly survivor-centered perspective. 23

Following from his dissertation, a 2025 article by Namal Rathnayake examines child abuse in Sri Lankan monasteries from a human rights perspective and through the lens of his own lived experience.

In November 2024, we joined Sarah Jacoby in co-organizing a conference at North-

western University with Nancy Floy from the Chicago-based Heartwood Center’s Con-

necting Survivors of Teacher and Guru Abuse group titled ‘Sexual Violence in Buddhism:

Centering Survivor Voices.’ The conference brought together scholars from Bhutan,

Malaysia, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and North America working across Buddhist traditions, sur-

vivors, journalists, lawyers and other stakeholders (Gleig, Langenberg, and Jacoby 2024).

This work continued in June 2025 at the 19th Sakyadhita International Association of

23 See also Jacoby 2014, 188–248.

Buddhist Women Conference in Kuching, Sarawak, East Malaysia, were we presented on

the topic of sexual abuse in Buddhism along with Jacoby, and two Vajrayāna monastics,

Tenzin Dadon, and Karma Tashi Choedron, to an audience of nearly four hundred, a

signiﬁcant number of whom were monastic women from diverse global Buddhist com-

munities. The Kuching Sakyadhita conference also included a workshop on holding Bud- dhist communities accountable for abuse, and a focus group on sexual violence in

Buddhism (Langenberg 2025). We see recent survivor-attuned work in Buddhist

Studies, the Heartwood/Northwestern conference, presentations at the 19th Sakyadhita

Conference, and our own research as representing the beginnings of a global reckoning

with Buddhist sexual abuse that will be suﬃciently sensitive to the complex local, cultu-

rally and ethnically distinct contexts in which it takes place. 24

Our experience as Buddhist Studies scholars echoes that of Catholic historian Brian

Clites. 25 Reﬂecting on the sexual abuse crisis in Catholicism, Clites laments how ‘[o]ur

disciplinary silence is deafening.’ In his groundbreaking work with survivors of clergy

sexual abuse, he notes that survivor activism paved the way for subsequent scholarly

interpretations of the Catholic sexual abuse and emphasizes, ‘I know from my ethno-

graphic work just how robustly survivors contextualize their own abuse, and I often

marvel at their critical awareness of the broader cultural dynamics at play in debates

about the causes and meanings of clergy abuse’ (Clites 2020, 9). We have also marveled

at the critical awareness of survivors as they engage in the diﬃcult interpretive and gen- erative work that their experiences of Buddhist sexual trauma demand of them.

We docu- ment their brilliance as Buddhist exegetes, theologians, and community leaders in our work, and hope that the ﬁeld of Buddhist Studies will acknowledge their contributions to Buddhist thought, Buddhist ethics, and Buddhist community formation in future.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws on research supported by the Religion and Abuse Project and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. We thank the anonymous reviewers and Michael Stausberg for their comments, Amanda Lucia for stewarding this special issue, and Kirsten Janene-Nelson for her meticulous copyediting.

Ann Gleig is an Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida. Her research specialty is Buddhism in America. She is author of American Dharma: Bud- dhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019) and co-editor with Scott A. Mitchel of The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2024).

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.