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In recent months and years, the young transplant of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has suffered several shocks that have shaken sapling communities in the U.S., and troubled the larger community of Buddhist orders around the world. Given the public controversy and deeply personal introspection stirred by these shocks, including the recent statement by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, I believe the time is right for us as a community to seriously reflect on what they can teach us about the global future of Tibet’s unique culture and its little understood Vajrayana form of Buddhism, also known as Buddhist Tantra.
The death in 2013 of a member of the Three Jewels Vajrayana community founded by American born Tibetan monk-scholar (or Geshe) Michael Roach is still reverberating among his students in New York and elsewhere. More recently, the Canadian Buddhist yoga teacher Michael Stone succumbed to an overdose of street drugs he reportedly used to self-medicate a chronic mental condition, leaving a wife and three children, and sending shock waves through a growing network of students and colleagues. Most recently, one of the senior Tibetan teachers in the West, the founder of the San Francisco based Rigpa community Sogyal Rinpoche, was once again embroiled in an ongoing scandal over allegations of sexual misconduct with students. As if these recent events were not enough, they follow a rift in the Tibetan diaspora formed a decade ago by controversy sparked by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso and his Britain based New Kadam community over a lineage-specific Vajrayana practice called Shugden that His Holiness the Dalai Lama and others believe stirs sectarian tensions among Tibet’s four main schools of Buddhism.
Of course every one of these misfortunes, and the many others like them, raises unique issues and challenges, each of which needs careful consideration on its own. Yet they also share [...]
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