When harm arises at the CENTER of the Dharma, what is “care”?

The goal of the current study is to identify the sexual grooming strategies used by a Buddhist religious leader and to examine whether these behaviors align with those in the SGM [ ‘To date, the only content-validated model of sexual grooming is the Sexual Grooming Model (SGM)’].”

Article: Survivor Testimony

The term sexual grooming does not have a single legal definition. Generally, it refers to a process in which sexual offenders select and gain access to potential victims, develop trust, and use various strategies to facilitate sexual contact. These offenders also seek to avoid disclosure of the abuse.”

Cult Media Messaging

“Are you interested in sharing your story but feel intimidated by the thought of navigating a tumultuous media landscape alone? Are you unsure if you’re ready to go public at all?…We understand the challenges that come with going public but also believe in the importance of sharing stories that haven’t been told before.

We offer media consulting, research, copy editing, and communication services. We are not a licensed therapy practice or publicity service. But if you need help preparing for that big interview or want a second read on your opinion piece, please get in touch.”

The definition of ‘dHARMa’ is: the compounding of harm that occurs in Buddhist, and spiritually-adjacent, spaces when teachers, leaders and institutions dismiss or mishandle reports of abuse.”

The consequences [of child sexual abuse in Buddhist monasteries in Sri Lanka] cannot be measured easily. Many survivors develop anxiety disorders, depression, and other psychological difficulties. The risk of suicide can increase too. Mental distress can affect education, employment, relationships, and daily functioning. There is also a risk of getting addicted to substance use.”

Incidents of [sexual abuse] occur to almost every novice monk [in Sri Lanka], sometimes with the knowledge of senior monks and sometimes without it. Because it was treated as something normal within that environment, it took me nearly two decades to recognise that what I had experienced was abuse.”

For generations, Buddhist monasteries in Sri Lanka have been seen as places where children could receive religious education, discipline, and spiritual guidance or even a way out for impoverished families who cannot provide for their children…However, incidents of child sexual abuse within monasteries have continued to emerge from time to time, leading to discussions about the safety of children living in religious institutions and the systems in place to oversee their welfare.”

Video: Survivor Testimony

A 1983 study titled ‘The Structure of Empathy’ found a correlation between empathy and four major personality clusters: sensitivity, nonconformity, even temperedness, and social self-confidence…’The relationship between social self-confidence and empathy is the most difficult to understand,’ the study admits. But its explanation makes sense: social confidence is a prerequisite not a guarantee; it can ‘give a person the courage to enter the interpersonal world and practice empathetic skills.’ “

Empathy comes from the Greek ephatheia – em (into) and pathos (feeling – a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of inquiry: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze here?“

Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must be really hard – it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.”

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.”

The Zen tradition will need to respond to the claim, made by Brian Victoria, D.T. Suzuki, and others that, whatever its other impressive strengths, Zen training in its current form leaves even the most awakened practitioners in a state of moral immaturity and vulnerability. It will need to respond by rethinking and expanding Zen training, extending Zen meditation to include practices that are relevant to the cultivation of moral excellence, as well as to other reflective powers that are essential to admirable forms of human life.”

To the extent that Zen practitioners are ‘without thinking,’ they will have no choice but to take it on faith that their inherited goals are adequate because they will not have developed the skills that would allow them to think clearly about or enter into conversation and debate about the kind of life that they seek, live, and teach to others…Zen training also inculcates a certain relation to authority and hierarchy that undermines the opportunities for monks to develop these skills [of reflection, conversation, reasoning, debating, organizing, or planning].”

Meditation Safety Toolbox

“The toolbox contains documents, protocols and best practice guidelines from the UMASS Center for Mindfulness, Bangor and Oxford Mindfulness Centers, and other mindfulness researchers.”

[W]ithin 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.”

In the context of [one] 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 family, and even from her own past, in explicitly Buddhist terms.”

RETIRN (Re-Entry Therapy, Information & Referral Network)

“Since 1983, the Re-Entry Therapy, Information & Referral Network (RETIRN) has been providing counseling, forensic (legal), consultation, information and referral services to individuals and families adversely affected by high demand groups, manipulative and totalistic social, political, transformational and/or religious movements…RETIRN Associates are consultants, psychotherapists, and counselors, many of whom themselves are former cultists or have been exposed to destructive cults or other coercive influence techniques.”

The dangers…(which often surround the evolution of ‘new’ religions in the west), have been well documented and highlight the caution people muse take when approaching any charismatic leader who makes use of esoteric practices and the imposition of rigid power structures in order to promote ‘spiritual teachings.’ “

Diane Shainberg, a psychotherapist who has dealt with many such cases [of Tibetan teachers having sexual relationships with their students], was askid if these relationships could ever be described as ‘transcendental’. She replied:

‘Never. In each and every case, the woman was not able to make sense out of it, and…was not in touch with her own needs and wants. She had gone to the figure of authority to validate her, and it had not happened. She was turned into a sexual object and she ultimately felt that she had been abandoned, not only by the authority figure, the spiritual teacher, but by the sangha…and finally, abandoned by herself…’ “

In this study of gender, identity and Tibetan Buddhism, I have set out an historical context in which religious concepts concerning the male and the female developed, and have shown how egalitarian ideals of gender equality can fail to materialize when dominant groups in society, selectively use (consciously or unconsciously) philosophical ideals to promote self-interest.”