With the blessings of the Dalai Lama, a group of American Buddhist women have been running a campaign to expose the alleged sexual misconduct of a prominent Tibetan lama and best-selling author. Sogyal Rinpoche, author of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, was originally accused of "physical, mental and sexual abuse" in a $10 million civil suit filed in 1994 in Santa Cruz County Superior Court. According to the lawsuit, an anonymous woman identified only as "Janice Doe" came to Rinpoche for spiritual guidance last year at a retreat sponsored by the Rigpa Fellowship meditation center in Santa Cruz, but was "coerced into an intimate relationship" with the Tibetan guru. "Sogyal claimed (she) would be strengthened and healed by having sex with him and that to be hit by a lama was a blessing," the lawsuit states. The suit also charged that the Tibetan lama has "seduced many other female students for his own sexual gratification."The suit was settled out of court and Sogyal denied allegations of abuse.
Last week, fresh accusations against Sogyal were recently aired in an investigative documentary called In the Name of Enlightenment, broadcast on Vision TV in Canada. A young woman identified as Mimi described an abusive sexual relationship. She was the first person claiming direct experience of Sogyal's exploitative attentions to go public since the 1994 lawsuit. In this show, Sogyal was described as: "absolutely and flagrantly promiscous" and one interviewee stated, "it was inconceivable to imagine that this teacher who was supposed to teach me how to be enlightened would be out for a quick lay". 
A third, pictured to the left in a darshan, related, "if you were close to him, you were considered to have very good karma, and we were allowed into that circle when we showed that we would do absolutely everything..."
Also, another woman allegedly abused by Rinpoche, Victoria Barlow of New York City, said in an interview with the Free Press that she is "disgusted by the way the Tibetans have manipulated the reverence Westerners have for the Buddhist path." Barlow, 40, said she first met Rinpoche in the mid-1970s, when she was 21, and that she was sexually exploited by him during meditation retreats in New York and Berkeley. "I went to an apartment to see a highly esteemed lama and discuss religion," she said in an interview with the Free Press. "He opened the door without a shirt on and with a beer in his hand." Once they were on the sofa, Barlow said, the Tibetan "lunged at me with sloppy kisses and groping. I thought I should take it as the deepest compliment that he was interested and basically surrender to him," she said.
Jack Kornfield, founder of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, was among a group of two dozen Western teachers who discussed the sexual misconduct of Buddhist teachers with the Dalai Lama last year in India. According to Kornfield, the Tibetan Buddhist leader told the Americans to "always let people know when things are wrong. Put it in the newspapers if you must do so." Sources say the Tibetan Buddhists were trying to handle this issue within their community but decided, especially after the Dalai Lama made the comment about going to the press, to go public now.
Sogyal is the leader for a Tibetan Buddhist organization called Rigpa, which has a worldwide reach with 130 centres in 41 countries. He has a bestselling book and he starred alongside Keanu Reeves in the movie Little Buddha. Sogyal is a formidably successful guru – probably the best known Tibetan after the Dalai Lama. His trajectory into Buddhist superstardom suffered only a temporary setback following the Janice Doe lawsuit – and we must remember that everyone should be presumed innocent before considered guilty. Sandra Pawula, spokeswoman for the Rigpa Fellowship of Santa Cruz, one of many meditation centers in the United States, Europe and Australia, declined to comment about the allegations, but said that Rinpoche is not married and does not claim to be a celibate monk.
Also, investigators raised an interesting question: how does a Tibetan lama manage to attract so many beautiful young western women? They point to the mystique of tantra – the only Buddhist tradition that includes sexual union in the path that leads to enlightenment. Professor Geoffrey Samuel from Cardiff University explains: "In the third initiation of the highest yoga tantra, sexual union is introduced as a parallel to the experience of enlightenment. It creates certain sensations that help towards experiencing the state of ultimate realisation – in other words Buddhahood." Samuel then goes on to mention the neo-tantra movement: "This arcane version of sacred sex is present in Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, it should not be confused with the modern neo-tantra movement and nor is it appropriate for recent converts to Buddhism."
However, in this case, traditional Tantric scholars and gurus could probably learn something from the neo-tantra community, which may have its own complex issues... but always strives to find a way to integrate hidden and furtive sexual desires, aka "Jung's shadow." This goes double for neo-tantra teachers and healers and is in opposition to what organized religion prefers to do - to close ranks and protect the inflow of charitable donations. The community, which is in fact pretty dis-organized, usually does the opposite of closing ranks and suppressing rumors and scandals - it gives rumors full sway. This hypersensitivity to the shadow is due to the fact that sexual healing is so fraught with the potential for "re-wounding" and is currently not certified by any governmental agency. Thus, the community has been happy to intervene and interdict teachers who may be overstepping boundaries (usually with an invitation to "process", and not that the accused will always listen).
Some good perspectives about the ethics of sexual healing can be found in this article by Sunyata Satchitananda, a Bay Area male tantric teacher. Various members of the tantra industry are now establishing standards and practices for "sensuality-inclusive therapy". Additionally, the greater industry has been promoting a healthy self-management program and various certification processes that include ethics training.
Those interested in certification processes for sexual healers and therapists should consider:
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http://www.iasect.com/ - International Association of Sexual Educators, Counsellors & Therapists
- http://aasect.org/ - American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists
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http://goasep.org/ - Association of Sexual Energy Professionals
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http://www.surrogatetherapy.org/ - International Professional Surrogates Association
1) to create standardized terms for various types of tantric services, supported by those schools and agencies presently certifying dakas and dakinis
2) to establish a "sexual healing check-in" process that informs those seeking services what to expect, provides recommendations to healers, and to electronically capture feedback and case histories about the tantric sexual healing process
3) to create a review board of qualified psychotherapists to help resolve difficulties and disagreements, and to identify "repeat offenders" quickly
So perhaps it is time for the entire spirituality industry to pay greater heed to this new area of shadow work. As Carl Jung said, "There can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western spirituality, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."It is the educated and spiritual man who tries to repress the inferior man in himself, not realizing that by so doing he forces the latter into revolt. Instead, we should seek to be more like Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth Dalai Lama. He confronted his shadow, and decided to renounce his vows for an incarnation... because, I suppose, nobody's perfect. And so he became a playboy, but his poems and love songs are still immensely popular in Tibet to this day. Spiritual organizations that are position themselves as "purer than thou" and "beyond the prurience of sex" are likely hiding their shadow, as proven time and again, by the Catholic Church, many false gurus... and now Tibetan Buddhism.
More at: http://www.american-buddha.com/sogyal.htm
