Right Use of Power^TM (RUP) is an approach to ethics that we found significantly damaging to our community. It presented our sangha with a distorted view, positioned outside the mainstream research consensus (see Resource List), about teacher/student boundaries—topics that require rigorous, clear-sighted guidance. In this essay, we outline our concerns with RUP’s modality as it was taught in 2019-21 and how it impacted our sangha at a time of profound crisis, the sexual misconduct of our spiritual director. It is our hope that this narrative will help inform other well-intended sanghas, looking for guidance in ethics, about teachings we found harmful.

Background

According to the RUP webpage, the Right Use of Power^TM paradigm offers “a dynamic, inspiring, and relational approach to the ethical use of power to promote well-being and the common good.” Our community hired Right Use of Power-affiliated professionals on two occasions: In 2019 we hired a trainer (an individual who was also at the time the President of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association) for a Right Use of Power workshop. In 2021 we hired the founder of the Right Use of Power^TM Institute and a colleague as consultants in response to our Spiritual Director’s sexual boundary violation. (In keeping with our commitment to foster dialogue that leads to healthier Buddhist sanghas, we foreground systems and paradigms as the subject of our critique, and thus refer to roles and not people.)

Summary

In painful retrospect, we’ve come to see the extent of harm we feel was inflicted on our community both by the training and the consulting aspects of RUP, in the following regards: 

• The training we received in 2019 did not prepare us for sexual misconduct by a teacher. In fact, the content of the training made it more difficult to respond appropriately to sexual misconduct, requiring sangha members to unlearn some of the key content we’d been taught in order to take compassionate action.  
• The consultants we hired in 2021 replicated and reinforced abuser dynamics in their interactions with the survivor, and instructed our sangha members and teachers to do the same. 

About the consultants’ work with our community, the survivor of the sexual misconduct writes, “The Right Use of Power consultants worked against my currents of understanding, insight, intuition, and felt response; indeed, their process represented a continuation of my teacher/counselor’s abuse on almost every psychological and spiritual level.” 

We have tried to engage with the trainer and consultants about the impacts of their interventions and areas for improvement, but have not been met with receptivity to feedback. We stand ready and willing to work with them on improvements to their program, when they are ready to engage.

It is almost unfathomable that those who purport to be experts in responding to sexual misconduct would actually deepen the harm. This reality deserves deep investigation. That they would be held in such high esteem within the greater Buddhist community deserves action. We cannot un-hire the trainer or consultants, but we can alert other sanghas to the difficult path we’ve tread. So that others can benefit from our painfully earned insights and find a safer path to healing, we are sharing at length our concerns with the Right Use of PowerTM  modality and its consulting arm. 

Deficiencies of Right Use of Power Training as Prevention

The training in the RUP program that we received in 2019 was, in our view, dangerous both in what it taught and in what it left out. 

At its heart, the program had a preoccupation with listing and classifying types of power, the primary of which are role, status and personal power. Upon first encounter, differentiating these types of power appears to be merely a ratification of the obvious: just because a spiritual teacher is in a position of power (a combination of “role” and “status” power), that doesn’t mean they can steal a student’s inherent power (“personal” power or the other kinds of role/status powers a student may possess). What we saw in our community, however, is that this framing laid the groundwork for the notion that victims always bear some measure of responsibility: since they never relinquish the other “kinds” of power they possess, they are in effect always co-responsible for their abuse. 

This isn’t merely a theoretical implication of RUP’s power taxonomy: in 2021, the trainer sent an email to the President and Vice President of the GBZC board sharing her view that the student who was abused at our center had also mis-used her power and that the student should apologize to her abuser’s wife. This guidance, seemingly inexplicable for a trainer in ethics, was actually coherent given the training they had given our sangha. It was a vivid demonstration of our experience of the broken foundations of the RUP approach. 

Here are  highlighted concerns of our experience with RUP as prevention:

• The program taught that the person in the up-power position is “150% responsible for good relations and conditions” while the person in the down-power position is “100% responsible for good relationships and conditions, and for resolving problems and conflicts.” This formulation of teacher/student responsibility in the context of sexual misconduct is victim-blaming. Research on clergy and therapist abuse, and policies of major counseling and religious organizations, recognize that the person in the low-power position is being exploited (see Resource List). Abuse of spiritual and/or emotional power is 100% on the person in the high-power position, 0% on the person abused. In the words of the survivor in our community, “Right Use of Power’s abstract math of 150/100 only aided in the smoke screening and perpetuating of abuse.” 
• In addition, the slides presented at the training said that the goal is assuring “well-being for both teacher and student.” Yet the teacher, in offering themself as a trusted spiritual guide, is (like other client-serving professionals such as therapists and lawyers) promising, as a matter of professional ethics, to make the student’s well-being the goal of the relationship, not just “a” goal on a co-equal standing with improving their own well-being. 
• The program also left out very important preventative measures. In a much later post-misconduct training for our community, Jan Chozen Bays (currently with Buddhist Healthy Boundaries) presented a simple list of “red flags,” including private communications, private meeting spaces; special attention, advancement, gifts or favors; secrecy (demands for). None of these are included in the RUP slides. (Warnings about private meetings, special attention, and demands for secrecy may have helped in our case, as they were all very much a part of the abuse.) 
• Lastly, to the extent this preventative program tries to prepare communities to deal with abuses of power should they occur, the training we received was inadequate. Our training presented the idea that the individual who caused injury should come to a personal decision to offer a sincere apology and make amends. There was no mention of the legal responsibility of clergy to maintain appropriate boundaries, nor of the legal “duty of care” that non-profit boards have, which includes dealing with misconduct by staff or volunteers. Nor was there any hint that, according to research, clergy rehabilitation is a process that requires expert help and may take years, if successful at all—not something to be left to an individual to decide for themself. And, lastly, there was no mention of the fact that the teacher’s idea of “amends” may not correspond to the needs of the person abused or of the community.

Deficiencies of RUP-Associated Consulting for Addressing the Consequences 

In late 2020, upon the advice of the trainer, the GBZC board hired the founder of the Right Use of Power Institute and the author of the self-published Right Use of Power: The Heart of Ethics to give us initial advice about how to respond to our Spiritual Director’s misconduct. A month or so later, in early 2021, we entered a separate agreement to hire both the author and one of their colleagues to conduct a longer process involving the whole sangha—a decision that almost tore the board apart, as some board members could anticipate the failings of the consultants’ approach. If you look at the Right Use of Power^TM website, it is clear that their primary focus is training. However, RUP also offers consulting. The second consultant, listed as part of the RUP “core faculty,” has long been affiliated with the Right Use of Power Institute, and has their own consulting business built around “restorative practices.” While what the two consultants delivered was a mix of RUP principles and the second consultant’s “restorative practices,” and not just what corresponded to the RUP training, the written contract was explicitly between RUP and our community. 

Because the abuser in our situation admitted the basic facts of his sexual misconduct, the consultants seemed to have mistakenly presumed that he was fully repentant and ready to engage directly with the student he had abused. (The consultants appeared to express no curiosity about whether or not this was appropriate for the student). As they facilitated interactions between survivor and transgressor, both directly or as go-betweens, the consultants came across as attempting to control the survivor’s engagement in order for the survivor to be compliant with their vision for the process. This control included attempting to censor the survivor’s narrative of events, asking her to center the abuser’s needs over her own, and requiring the survivor to keep the abuser’s mediated interactions with her confidential. Again, these demands mirrored the demands the abuser made of the survivor during the year-long tenure of his abuse. 

Here are the highlighted concerns we experienced with RUP as crisis respondent:

• The consultants demonstrated what we believe was a deficient understanding of the issue of consent in a case of clergy abuse of power. Some weeks after the disclosure of misconduct, the board sent out a “FAQ & Resource List” to the sangha, including materials about the impossibility of consent in a teacher-student context. The consultants wrote that this resource “could be confusing to community members about the seriousness of [the teacher’s] misuse of power,” worrying that it could “possibly inaccurately escalat[e] perceptions of what might have happened.” Yet lack of consent is the core issue in the case of clergy abuse; it is the reason the behavior is considered illegal under both civil and criminal law, and it is the reality sanghas must turn toward if they are to appropriately prevent or respond to cases of abuse. Their deficient understanding was further illustrated by their insistence that communications to the sangha should use the soft-pedaling and inaccurate phrase “secret romantic relationship” rather than “abuse.” 
• The consultants’ “restorative process” approach drew explicitly on the better-known Restorative Justice literature, while—at least as we saw applied in our case—dangerously distorting that notion. What these consultants offered was totally inappropriate for a case of extremely recent abuse in which spiritual and psychological healing had not even begun. Restorative Justice is a well-established process that can only take place under very specific circumstances—none of which were present here. It typically takes years (not weeks) for an offender to be ready to enter into a restorative justice process; among other things, the offender needs to be ready to wholly accept their own status as “offender” and the status of the other party as “victim” (see letter from Kara Hayes, explaining necessity of language the consultants rejected). An authentic restorative justice process requires that the mediators determine that “the victim will not be further harmed by the meeting with the offender” (source) and that the offender, in a sincere apology, will be willing to “ced[e] to the victim…control and power” (source). In our community, the teacher attempted to gaslight the student even in their very first mediated session facilitated by these consultants. (While, we believe, taking on this consulting job was wrong from the beginning, the RUP consultants should certainly have realized their mistake at this point and withdrawn.) 
• The consultants treated sexual misconduct in the same framing one might use for a collegial misunderstanding or an argument between spouses. Thus, the survivor was submitted to a rote formula they deployed for conflict (misnamed “restorative justice,” see bullet above) which included a culminating hours-long sharing circle where representatives of affected parties spoke in a series of semi-rehearsed interactions, including a round of gratitude-sharing for and about the perpetrator. According to the survivor, “It was me who had to suggest to [the consultants] that I not be part of the ‘gratitude circle’ they’d plan to hold at the reparative circle for everyone to thank my abuser for his teaching. So much of the dynamic between me and the teacher had been based on my gratitude for his teaching. That was the very thing indeed that had become warped and utilized for abuse. It was me who had to say to our consultants that I would not participate in that part of the circle.” The survivor further elaborates, “They thought it would ease his shame to hear all the good people had gotten from him, but they did not ask me about its potential impact on me, whether or not I felt my own shame or a demoralizing lack of spiritual confidence after this experience, worried how people would see me, etc. I was pretty invisible to the whole process to [the consultants] except as a caricature of ‘the student.’” In fact, the only actionable item coming out of the three-hour session was an item that the transgressor’s support person demanded at his request – a “ceremony of apology” before the sangha for the transgressor that the survivor did not attend out of protest.
• Their process focused disproportionately on the teacher’s desires while neglecting the student’s needs. The student was exposed to further harm in the form of exceedingly premature “mediation” sessions with the teacher while she was still reeling from the spiritual and emotional abuse. Their model did not include the student having a support person at these meetings, and the student was told that she should keep them confidential–including anything her abuser shared, replicating the dynamic of secrecy he had required of her. She reports that in response to her detailed communication to these consultants about how the teacher’s account (during these sessions) did not accord with her experience, they told her, “This is not a time for facts, gathering evidence, or shaming and blaming.” According to the student, the consultants’ “focus on ‘subjective narrative’ over ‘truth’ or ‘facts’ allowed a continued manipulation of the narrative by my abuser, which had been part of the abuse all along. It further confused me. It’s like knowing something is deeply wrong but not even having words for it. Overall, their process thickened the fog, created more fog, and did not cut through to compassion or wisdom for me and nor for, I imagine, anyone else.” 
• The RUP consultants further isolated and undermined the student and downplayed the facts of the abuse by encouraging the board and senior teachers to take a position of “neutrality,” not seek to get more “information,” and not prioritize any one “perspective.” As a result, a number of senior teachers failed to give appropriate support not only to the student but to the entire community and even discouraged many in the community from giving her appropriate support.  According to the survivor, the consultants “reinforced my isolation by guiding GBZC leadership to keep me “anonymous” (rather than allowing me to decide who to talk to, when and how, although I ended up doing that anyway). They further allowed my abuser and the community as a whole to process the situation without me. Yet at the same time they allowed my main source of support (the board and other leaders who did know my identity) to be under attack for not remaining in some perceived ‘neutrality’ as if ‘neutrality’ were fair in this case.” Having already been cut off from her support network for over a year by the teacher’s insistence that their relationship be kept secret, the consultants’ work largely increased her feeling of isolation and of being unheard.
• The process the consultants introduced also did not serve the true needs and interests of the teacher who abused. Someone who commits this kind of abuse needs time to come to terms with their actions, learning about the seeds in themselves that led to the abuse, and needs to be supported by trained professionals in an ongoing therapeutic relationship. The consultants’ process instead forced the transgressor to engage with others prematurely while still in a mode of crisis-oriented self-justification and self-defense. Not surprisingly, we observed the abuser turning to gaslighting and attacking others, thereby creating more content for remorse, if/when he comes to terms with the enormity of his misdeeds. Although the transgressor in our community advocated to work with RUP, we believe it was an enormous disservice to his own learning and recovery to be involved in this kind of process.
• The RUP consultants’ process attempted to sideline the sangha’s governing board. In seeming ignorance of the structure of nonprofit organizations, they told the board it should be “neutral” and encouraged the board to totally rely on them to address the situation. Instead of facilitating the healing of relationships within the sangha, this process created further divisions since those whose sympathies lay mainly with the teacher used the consultants’ advice to cast aspersions on, and sow distrust of, the elected board whenever it attempted to fulfill its “duty of care.” 

GBZC, like many Buddhist communities, was pulled in by Right Use of Power’s promise of a spiritually informed approach to power. However, we’ve seen that the “spiritual” approach adopted by Right Use of Power during 2019-2021 was based on theories of power and responsibility that we found to be well outside mainstream consensus on how to frame these matters, the logical endpoint of their approach being victim-blaming. Cloaked in a rhetoric of compassion and forgiveness, their model enabled deflection by transgressors and led to further victim shaming. A rhetoric about forgiveness and compassion unaccompanied by meaningful justice-making and accountability resulted in complicity with the transgressor and their violation, and further harmed the victim, the community and the spiritual path. 

Next: Sangha Responses to Misconduct: Rebuilding and Revisioning

First posted Oct. 3, 2022
Last revised Nov. 22, 2023

Boards are responsible for responding to and preventing sexual misconduct. When that’s not clear, difficulties will arise. We hope other sanghas won’t have to learn this firsthand as we did. Here is what we would like other sanghas, and especially other boards, to know about the board’s role:

What it means to be a nonprofit
Founder syndrome and puppet boards
Legal and ethical duties of a board
Boards and sexual misconduct
The (ir)relevance of lawsuits
Pushback
Differences between board power and clergy power
Shared leadership
An offer of mutual support

What it means to be a nonprofit

Many Buddhist communities in the U.S. begin informally, with a group of people deciding to meet regularly in a living room, in some other borrowed space, or over the internet. The question “Who’s in charge here?” might be answered, “Oh, there’s not much to decide” or “All of us—we do everything by consensus.” If the group was founded by a teacher, the answer might instead be, “Of course it’s the teacher who’s in charge; after all, this is their group.”

Incorporating as a nonprofit changes things in ways that are easy to underestimate. Becoming a nonprofit is not just a matter of making donations tax-deductible. Once a group has become a nonprofit, it is a legal entity in its own right, separate from its founders. This new legal entity is bound by legal documents (the articles of incorporation and bylaws), and the question “Who’s in charge here?” is definitively settled: a nonprofit governs itself, via its board of directors.

This is true regardless of the mission of the nonprofit. There is no special exemption for nonprofits founded by spiritual teachers. Once an organization has been incorporated as a nonprofit, it is a different organization: it is an organization run by a board and not by founders or teachers. If this change is glossed over or trivialized, it is a major warning sign for future problems.

Founder syndrome and puppet boards

Founder syndrome can affect any organization, whether for-profit or nonprofit. Wikipedia defines founder syndrome as “the difficulty faced by organizations…where one or more founders maintain disproportionate power and influence following the effective initial establishment of the organization, leading to a wide range of problems.”

Founder syndrome is a predictable growing pain. It is not easy for founders to let go of the power they initially exercised, even if they are enthusiastic about incorporating as a nonprofit (which by definition requires them to relinquish power to the board). Nor is it easy for nonprofit board members to exercise the power they actually hold (and must hold) if it means overriding the preferences of a founder—particularly if that founder is also their teacher. 

What does founder syndrome look like? Having founders or spiritual teachers serving as board members is not necessarily a problem, as long as they don’t expect to have “disproportionate power and influence.” It is a problem, though, if other board members think of themselves as a de facto staff and the founders as their de facto bosses. Founder syndrome can also be seen when, in times of urgency or crisis, the board is pressured to fast-track decisions in line with the founder’s wishes. Founder syndrome can be written into an organization’s bylaws through attempts to create a lifetime board appointment for the founder or clauses to make it more difficult to remove a director who is a founder than it is to remove other directors. Founder syndrome can take place even after the founder has left the organization if, for instance, there is pressure to give a transgressing teacher inappropriate latitude because of their status as the founder.

In the worst case scenario, the boards become “puppets” of the founder, relegated to merely adding their stamp of approval on decisions already made.

Puppet boards are bad for organizations and for their directors. Organizations with puppet boards suffer because they lack transparent, independent leadership. Directors suffer because serving on a puppet board puts them at risk of violating their legal and ethical duties as fiduciaries of the organization.

Legal and ethical duties of a board

What does it mean for board members to be fiduciaries of the organization? Many people misunderstand the word “fiduciary,” thinking it just means “something to do with money.” This misunderstanding pairs easily with a “puppet board” concept of board duties: perhaps a board is just supposed to manage an organization’s finances (taking in donations, paying the rent), leaving all other decisions to the organization’s real leaders; that is, to its founder(s) and/or—in the case of Buddhist organizations—its teachers.

The truth is the opposite. Being a fiduciary means being entrusted with accountability for an organization’s well-being. It means taking on the highest possible standard of care under the law. It’s a big responsibility. As fiduciaries, board members promise to act on behalf of the organization they serve. They must determine, as best they can and using their own judgment, what is in the best interests of their organization across every dimension (not just finance), and then they must act in those best interests, no matter what kind of pushback they encounter.

Board members’ fiduciary duty is often broken down into three overlapping aspects: the duty of obedience requires them to follow the law and carry out the organization’s stated mission; the duty of loyalty requires them to place the organization’s interests above their own at all times; and the duty of care requires them to take their board duties seriously: they need to be active, not passive, in looking out for the organization’s interests.

Boards and sexual misconduct

Board members’ duty of care requires them to take active steps to try to prevent sexual misconduct from occurring. This is not a matter of ensuring that there are “no bad apples” among the teachers. Sexual misconduct is not a “bad apple” kind of problem; it is a systemic risk that demands systemic solutions. 

What might systemic solutions look like? This is a question boards should ask themselves continuously since there’s always room for improvement. Among other things, boards should consider these preventative measures:

• Giving teachers ongoing access to relevant training, such as the Buddhist Healthy Boundaries course;
• Providing regular training to sangha members on teacher-student boundaries, ethics, non-profit structure, and related matters;
• Adopting clear and detailed bylaws and governance policies, including ethics policies and procedures;
• Empowering an ethics council to work on education and prevention and recruiting an ethics ombudsperson to help with remediation;
• Ensuring that students have clear channels to seek information and assistance; and
• Offering support for teachers and students around “personal shadow.”

Of course, boards must also take effective corrective action if sexual misconduct occurs. This could include:

• Offering support to the victim;
• Conducting an investigation, using outside providers as necessary;
• Reporting the matter to arguably relevant external bodies such as the SZBA (which has a reporting clause in its ethics statement) or the AZTA;
• Imposing any necessary sanctions, restrictions, or path-to-recovery requirements on the transgressor; and
• Sharing information as transparently as possible with the sangha.

Note: Despite what these two separate sets of bullet points might suggest, the distinction between prevention and correction is not a sharp one. In fact, studies show that taking effective corrective action when sexual misconduct occurs may be, in itself, the most powerful form of prevention.

Also, a caution regarding requirements for a path to recovery: members of an injured community may be eager to recognize any movement toward regret on behalf of the transgressor as sufficient for reinstatement or absolution. The board must bear in mind that prior to reinstatement, a transgressor must demonstrate true rehabilitation through following a suite of actions, such as those recommended by the FaithTrust Institute, bulleted below. Resistance to these steps on the part of the transgressor often indicates a resistance to the gravity of what they’ve done:

• Express and demonstrate true remorse;
• Take full responsibility;
• Step down from teaching [or similar roles] until restitution work is done;
• Notify professional organizations;
• Engage in therapy with a counselor who specializes in clergy abuse/professional misconduct;
• Submit (vetted) written apologies;
• Submit reports by teacher and therapist to board; and (only then)
• Apply for reinstatement.

Note: If a transgressor does apply for reinstatement, it is important to consult with the student (or students) harmed in order to center their needs.

The (ir)relevance of lawsuits

Sometimes people recognize that boards are responsible for responding to and trying to prevent sexual misconduct but mischaracterize the basis of that responsibility as being grounded in the need for the organization to “avoid expensive lawsuits.” 

Of course, all other things being equal, it is in an organization’s best interest to avoid being sued, and board members should do what they can to act on that interest. However, it is a mistake to focus on this outcome rather than on the organization’s core interests. The board of a sangha should focus on preventing and correcting sexual misconduct not to keep the organization from being sued (or from being sued themselves, in their capacity as directors), but rather because doing so will make the sangha a safe (or at least safer) place for Buddhist practice. The shorter slogan might be: just do the right thing so that your sangha can carry out its mission. 

The FaithTrust Institute makes a similar distinction between an “Institutional Protection Agenda,” which prioritizes defending the organization in civil litigation, and a “Justice-Making Agenda,” which prioritizes restitution for survivors and prevention training. Even those labels can be confusing, though, since protection of the institution’s real interests entails justice-making.

Focusing on doing the right thing rather than avoiding lawsuits at all costs allows board members to prioritize their organization’s core interests. It also sets up the right priorities in cases where the two bases of responsibility conflict. In the case of teacher misconduct, the best thing for the sangha would not be to resist liability at all costs by minimizing or obscuring the harm done, but rather to settle a lawsuit on reasonable terms or otherwise compensate a victim for the harm that they’ve suffered. (How could this be so? Because good corrective action is also good prevention, and because care of victims is part of a board’s duty of care for the sangha, it is not necessarily appropriate for a board to resist a lawsuit at all costs, should one be brought. The correct choice, where the sangha is arguably liable for harms, could be to reach a settlement that makes the victim whole.)

Pushback

To reiterate: in order to carry out their fiduciary duties, board members must try to determine what is in the best interests of their organization and then act in those best interests—and they must do so no matter what kind of pushback they encounter. 

Pushback may take the form of the “DARVO” dynamic (short for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender”), with the board accused of supporting a victim who is the “true” offender, and/or with the board itself in the role of offender (“We wouldn’t have a problem if it weren’t for what the board is doing”). (See below for a more detailed discussion.)

It may take the form of pressure from distraught, confused, or frustrated sangha members, who argue that the board is overreacting, overreaching, or making things worse by “wallowing” in the issue, when in fact the board is simply exercising its duty of care and making space for everyone’s recovery. 

It may take the form of pressure from teachers who disagree with board actions and—more fundamentally—dispute the board’s ultimate authority to address sexual misconduct matters. Among other things, teachers who wish, consciously or unconsciously, to undermine board decisions may end up:

• Arguing that the entire board must recuse itself because board members are personally impacted by fallout from the sexual misconduct

(in fact, it is both possible and normal for boards under such circumstances to carry out their duties, and to do so ethically, among other reasons because there simply are no completely unimpacted people ready to step into board roles); 

• Arguing that the board should “just hand the whole matter over” to some third party to handle

(in fact, the board must retain ultimate responsibility, given its fiduciary duty to the organization);

• Arguing that “this is a spiritual matter” and that board actions—and especially any reference to the law or legal and ethical duties—somehow corrupts a spiritual solution

(in fact, this is a false dichotomy: board members may well be acting on their highest spiritual aspirations when they try to carry out their duty of care for the sangha);

• Taking systemic preventative measures personally, as if comprehensive ethics policies or teacher training requirements were an insult to “good apple” teachers

(in fact, studies show we are all safer when organizations treat misconduct as a systemic risk rather than an issue of “good” and “bad” teachers); or

• Attempting to control key decisions, such as (1) which outside consultants or providers to work with; (2) whether, when, or how a teacher who has committed sexual misconduct should be invited to speak to the sangha; or (3) whether, when, or how the sangha should publicly discuss any aspect of the misconduct

(in fact, all of these decisions fall under the board’s purview, given board members’ fiduciary duties).

Board members may find these various forms of pushback to be intense and difficult to bear. Serving as a board member can definitely be, to use a common Zen phrase, “a field of practice.” Board members do well to brace themselves, try to stay centered, and rely on each other for support. 

Differences between board power and teacher power

What if the alleged victim of a teacher’s sexual misconduct is also a member of the board? This is not an unlikely scenario, given the small size of most sanghas and the large overlap between the most engaged sangha members (who are particularly likely to be exposed to teacher misconduct) and those sangha members who are willing to serve on the board.

Does the power that an individual carries by virtue of being a board member counteract the power dynamics of the teacher-student relationship so that a board member cannot possibly be a victim of clergy misconduct? Or more than that: would misconduct rules actually be reversed under these circumstances so that the burden of boundary-keeping would be on the board member rather than the teacher?

The answer is no, because there are critical differences between board and teacher power. The nature of board leadership does not entail the kind of vulnerability and transference/countertransference as described with teacher roles and is therefore not governed by the civil and criminal laws that clergy and spiritual teachers (as well as therapists, chaplains, and other care providers) are subject to. Thus, misconduct rules would not place the burden of boundary-keeping on the board member rather than the teacher (thereby reversing their roles and making the teacher into a victim). Nor does the type of power exercised by a board member protect them from being vulnerable to a teacher’s abuse of power. Board members may be victimized just like any other member of the sangha.

The only relevance of a victim’s status as a board member is this: per ordinary conflict-of-interest principles as laid out in board bylaws, they must be recused from any board decision making in which they might be seen to have a conflict of interest.

Shared leadership

What does an appropriate balance of powers look like in a healthy and resilient sangha? How should the board and teachers share leadership? There is no single prescription, but this chart of GBZC’s newly clarified structure describes one possibility:

It’s important to recognize that this structure still permits input from founders and/or teachers to the board. As noted above, founders or spiritual teachers can even serve as voting board members, as long as they don’t expect to have “disproportionate power and influence.” At GBZC, we’ve decided to strike a prophylactic balance (minimizing the risk of puppet boards) by adding the following provision to our bylaws: “Members of the Senior Teaching Community shall not stand for election as a Director, though a Director who becomes a Senior Teacher may finish their term as a Director.” 

Furthermore, founders and/or teachers are always welcome to serve in an ex officio manner on the board (attending regularly and giving input without being voting members). They may also be invited to serve on the ethics response teams that guide the sangha’s response to incidents of sexual misconduct, with the understanding that, by virtue of its fiduciary duties, the board will always hold the ultimate responsibility for decision making related to matters of sexual misconduct.

An offer of mutual support

We noted at the outset that at GBZC, the process of recovering from sexual misconduct was made particularly difficult due to a lack of clarity or assent regarding the board’s role in responding to and preventing misconduct. We hope these materials about power structures and power struggles are helpful to other sanghas and particularly to other boards. If we can provide any further support, please don’t hesitate to contact us at resilientsangha@bostonzen.org. 

(last updated 2/27/23)

Next: Sangha Responses to Misconduct: Common Dynamics (DARVO)

Published June 12, 2022

As is established elsewhere in this project, because of the power dynamics in a situation of teacher abuse, no meaningful consent from the student is possible. That means that 100% of the responsibility for the harm falls on the teacher. Justice-making and healing therefore require that priority be given to the needs of the survivor. 

The first step in centering the needs of the survivor is for members of sangha leadership to educate themselves. Most people in their ordinary lives do not need to understand the subtle dynamics at play with clergy misconduct. When a situation like this emerges, it is thus vital that all leaders educate themselves (or refresh their education) on clergy boundaries, transgressions, and best practices in response. The student harmed may also not yet fully understand the nature and severity of what happened to them and can also benefit from this education, lovingly shared over time.

Dr. Marie Fortune, in her book Responding to Clergy Misconduct, recommends ways an organization can enact justice-making that center survivors. Her experience and research suggest that survivors’ needs tend to fall into seven areas. These areas are listed here, along with commentary drawn from the experience of our sangha:

1. Truth-telling. A survivor needs to be able to tell their story, in their own way, to people they choose, and especially to people with power such as board members, teachers, investigators, or authorities in the Buddhist mahasangha. Providing safe spaces and bearing witness to their experience is invaluable. Individuals can offer to listen; sangha leaders can organize listening circles. 

2. Acknowledging the violation. But the student needs more than listening if the student and the sangha are to heal. The student needs support—preferably unequivocal and public support—from those in power. The leaders of the sangha (and mahasangha) need to name the situation as abuse, state that the student was wronged, and state clearly that such conduct by a teacher is not to be tolerated. A written statement carries more impact than verbal assurances. Silence or vagueness may be interpreted as acquiescence to the abuse. The sangha leadership should reach out to any larger membership bodies with which the offender may be affiliated to notify them of the breach. 

3. Compassion is to suffer with the victim. The student needs the leaders (1) to understand how the student has been deeply harmed and (2) to feel that suffering as their own. Unfortunately, the first inclination of those who had previously developed a close relationship with that teacher (but not with the student) may be to express compassion only or primarily for the teacher. It is essential for leaders to resist this form of attachment-driven neglect of the student’s need for emotional support.

4. Protecting the vulnerable. Both while dealing with the current abuse and thinking about the future, the sangha must place the top priority on the safety of those who have been or could be harmed. Leaders who instead prioritize protecting an organization’s assets or reputation or the abuser and their family have not understood the depth of harm caused by abuse.

5. Accountability. It is imperative that leaders understand that holding the offender accountable for their behavior is a compassionate action and essential to healing and justice-making. Accountability does not mean simply an apology—especially if that apology is made before the extent of harm is understood. It means that the offender is asked to take full responsibility for all the harm done and bear the consequences.

6. Restitution. Restitution isn’t merely about making amends but about making every effort to “make whole.” Leaders need to do what they can to restore what was lost. This can include paying for the student’s therapy or other expenses. Ideally, the offender should also offer restitution. The sangha needs to make every effort to ensure the sangha is a safe and welcoming place for the student to continue practicing, if they so choose.

7. Vindication is not vengeance. Justice-making is centered on relieving the burdens unfairly imposed on the student. Negative repercussions for the offender, while no doubt unpleasant to them, are required for true accountability, and true accountability is required for any lasting healing or any hope of reconciliation. 

Of course, the student should also be encouraged to express their particular needs to the leadership. We recommend self-education as the first step, however, because it can be hard to make clear and informed decisions during the emotional and spiritual turmoil that immediately follows abuse. This list can offer a helpful starting place, especially if the student is still coming to terms with the nature of the relationship and abuse.

Next: Sangha Responses to Misconduct: Power Structures and Power Struggles: The Role of the Board 

Published June 12, 2022

The research on how to respond to sexual misconduct in religious communities is vast and cannot be thoroughly reviewed here (see “Resources” for some possible starting points). For the purposes of this document, we’d like to highlight one salient and powerful concept which illuminated many of the dynamics we experienced. DARVO, a concept introduced by researcher Jennifer Freyd, is short for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” Our sangha was first exposed to this concept through a training by Jan Chozen Bays of the FaithTrust Institute. DARVO is a common defensive tactic of offenders who find themselves being held accountable for their actions. It is also frequently adopted by their allies or bystanders. It is not necessarily a conscious strategy.

• “D” stands for “deny.” Denial can be an outright denial that something happened or a minimization by claiming that what happened wasn’t serious. It can also include framing the victim as a willing participant or as someone who also bears shared responsibility for their abuse. 
• “A” stands for “attack.” Attack entails the use of language to further harm the victim and their support community. It includes the use of bullying, intimidation and threats to make the person harmed back down and think that even if they are in the right, they won’t be successful in being heard and will be punished for speaking.
• “RVO” stands for “reverse victim and offender.” As the offender is being held accountable for their actions, they suggest that in reality they are the one who is being persecuted. They may also bring forward all of the alleged harm the victim will do by speaking the truth. 

It is predictable, though saddening, when a teacher who has transgressed engages in these tactics, however consciously or unconsciously. But sanghas should also be prepared for the possibility that other beloved teachers, whether they be co-teachers or peers in other Buddhist institutions, will exhibit these behaviors as well, magnifying the transgressor’s own DARVO through their acts of omission and commission. In our experience, other teachers’ adoption of DARVO behaviors can in many ways be more painful and more spiritually wounding than the initial transgression. This is part of what makes responding to misconduct so difficult. The initial abuse can be hard enough to understand and deal with, and DARVO efforts serve to further distress those already in crisis.

The chart below is a summary of how DARVO can operate in instances of sexual misconduct, even when some basic facts (“a teacher transgressed boundaries, and that’s not OK”) aren’t in dispute. We hope it will be of benefit in understanding how these dynamics can manifest. If you have witnessed or been on the receiving end of these strategies, you are absolutely not alone.

Next: Sangha Responses to Misconduct: Tips for Informing and Communicating

Published June 12, 2022

Based on these common patterns and dynamics (and our own experience), we recommend the following tips for communicating with the sangha.

• Care for the survivor—listen to their story and make sure they are supported. 
• Notify the sangha of the breach with sensitivity and clarity. 
• Make sure both the transgressing teacher and the victim have clear lines of communication with the board—perhaps designate board members as their liaisons so decisions can be relayed back to them; do not leave either in the dark as to what the board is doing.
• Investigate what happened. As early as possible, the board should begin establishing the basic facts: ask questions of all relevant parties, request copies of any relevant documents, and establish a basic timeline. Then, if possible, consider hiring a qualified external investigator to carry out a complete investigation. This will require some money, but it can be worth the expense.
• If the misconduct is confirmed or undisputed, fire the teacher. They can always reapply to teach once they have sufficiently demonstrated rehabilitation. (Research what rehabilitation looks like. One key fact: it’s demonstrated over years, not months.)
• Communicate basic facts to the sangha. Do not let the matter rest on vague statements or rely on hearsay. This does not have to be explicit, but it needs to be clear. “Sexual misconduct” is preferred to “personal matters,” “inappropriate conduct,” or other vague terms. See DARVO.
• Do not assume you know how many are affected by this transgressive behavior. Seek to understand if others have similar stories and treat any further testimony with all due care.
• Do not ferry communications from the teacher to the sangha. The teacher is on their own journey that is necessarily separate from the journey of the sangha. It is inappropriate for the board or other leadership to help the teacher repair their relationship with sangha members following this breach. Individual sangha members can reach out to the teacher and vice versa, of course, but the institution should focus on care of the survivor and the sangha. This is not neglect of the transgressor but actually appropriate boundaries. The transgressor absolutely should get support, but their support should take place outside the community where they broke trust.
• Provide opportunities for the sangha to process their experiences with clear ground rules and an experienced facilitator. 
• Provide information about the nature of these transgressions and the impossibility for consent. Do not assume that our culture prepares people to understand the nuances of professional boundaries. Proactively educate on this matter, and often.
• Report the transgression to all relevant membership organizations of which the teacher was a part (such as the SZBA or the AZTA in the Zen context).
• Do not ask students to choose sides or declare allegiances. Many students practice with multiple teachers and communities, especially in the age of hybrid or Zoom sits. While the transgressing teacher has (we hope) ceased teaching for an appropriate amount of time, students may be practicing with a range of teachers who have a range of viewpoints on what transpired. While teachers should have clear views on ethical matters and express those views, students should not have to “get in line” behind a teacher in order to be welcome.

Next: Sangha Responses to Misconduct: Keeping the Board Together

Published June 12, 2022

The board of directors is tasked with responding to instances of misconduct. This is likely a time of unprecedented intensity and turmoil, and it can be a challenge for board members to continue working productively together. In addition to their own wrestling with what just happened within their beloved community, board members will inevitably become the targets of intense pressure campaigns from various interest groups within the sangha seeking certain outcomes. How does a board stay together in the face of these and other powerful challenges? One lawyer we spoke with, well-versed in the fallout following a teacher transgression, said they could “count the number of boards who stayed together on one hand.” For this project, we want to share some factors that helped the GBZC Board of Directors continue working together during a crisis, offered from the perspective of the board itself.

• Approaching board service as sacred duty and spiritual practice. We begin every meeting with a sit and then a brief check-in, when we honor how people are arriving. This simple practice grounds us in mutual respect and listening and reminds us that we can invest our full selves in how we approach our responsibilities. There were times we found ourselves saying, “I wish I didn’t have to do these board activities so that I could return to my practice,” after which we would catch ourselves with the reminder that this was the dharma gate, appearing before us.

• Prioritizing relationships. There were many times that we as a board disagreed amongst ourselves, often strongly. When emails could get testy or views increasingly misaligned, we addressed these fissures as quickly as possible with an emphasis on first repairing the relationship. People went on walks together, jumped on videoconference calls for 1:1 conversations, or had regular small-group meetings until the conflict was sorted out.

  Sometimes the best format was that of circle practice rather than discussion or debate. In circle practice, we addressed not just the substance of the concerns but the felt and underlying dynamics of strained relationships. People who were in conflict would speak from the heart, non-combatively, and then be invited to listen as others shared. In circle practice, the goal wasn’t agreement or even decision-making but mutual understanding. We were fortunate that all board members wanted to understand and work together and were committed to this ongoing process. None of these strategies would work if someone had already given up interest in collaboration or had adopted a fixed view.

• Practicing humility. Board members aren’t typically tempted toward arrogance in the way that those in powerful teaching roles can be. The teacher role breeds a certain expectation of deference, which is a systemic liability we want to continue to examine. Board roles, by contrast, are typically more invisible and entail more grueling and thankless activity. This enables board members to see changing their mind or learning new things from others as part of their role, rather than undermining their authority. Taking responsibility for the impact of our actions, regardless of our intent, is a practice of humility and non-defensiveness and was a way to continue to communicate our goodwill to each other.

• Commitment to independence. Empowered by the board, our sangha has been developing a horizontal and dispersed leadership structure, characterized by activity-specific working groups who operate with a great deal of independence in making choices to run the operations of the center. This structure enables people to see each other as acting in service to the sangha, rather than serving as assistants to the teachers. No one on the board saw themselves as obligated to carry out the teachers’ wishes or felt that they were hand-picked by a teacher to do the teacher’s bidding. 

• Commitment to democracy. When operating well, democratic practice can strengthen outcomes. In debate and discussion, ideas get refined, complicated, and recast, with the result that a more nuanced and thoughtful outcome can result. Sometimes a compromise can emerge that demonstrates flexibility on all sides. Democracy is an art and a practice, and it can be done well or poorly. In our best moments, one person’s self-proclaimed “good idea” was then tempered and in some cases debunked by others in discussion. In sanghas where a single teacher’s viewpoint is prized, this opportunity for wholesome challenging and refining is lost, and outcomes are poorer.

• Good fortune. It always helps to have a little luck on your side! The board had the good fortune of having an attorney as a director who had extensive experience in non-profit law and gender justice. This director acted as a counterforce to the relentless pressure to conform to teacher direction. Another director was a skilled facilitator with experience in settling agreements and conducting circle practices and other meetings.

  Additionally, while no board member had lots of “free time” in their schedules, many were able to temporarily reprioritize their lives to dedicate extraordinary amounts of time to this response. Keeping lines of communication open and attending to subtle dynamics while identifying best courses of action while responding to hostile emails and juggling other responsibilities is an incredibly time-intensive and emotionally demanding enterprise.

  Finally, the survivor in our community should get an incredible amount of credit in creating a tone of collaboration and mutual respect. She was a great teacher throughout this process in how to approach challenges with full heart, honesty, and integrity.

• The practice of mutual respect. Our lineage has a practice of “dharma dialogue” or “dharma discussion,” where dharma talks are followed by opportunities for members to come forward with reinterpretations, challenges, objections, their own insights, and so on. In our way, we talk about the dharma talk as merely priming the pump for the full teaching, which emerges when the whole sangha comes forward with our offerings. This model enabled us to see many sangha members as having wisdom and authority, rather than as merely recipients of teacher wisdom. Board members were also formed by this ethic and brought it to our interactions.

Next: Sangha Responses to Misconduct: Atonement Is Part of the Process

Published June 12, 2022

In the process of responding to our teacher’s misconduct, the GBZC leadership and the Board of Directors in particular made some mistakes we’d love for others to learn from. Even now, some of us are haunted by our poor choices. Wise mentors who have preceded us on this tortured path have assured us that there has yet to be a perfect and flawless response to matters of misconduct. What’s important is recognizing our missteps and seeking to remediate them as best as possible, and learning from those mistakes. Furthermore, we consider it an act of dana, or generosity, to share our mistakes and subsequent learnings with others. Here are some highlights of our missteps, in service to all beings:

• We hired Right Use of Power (RUP) consultants.
  • This was a critical mistake and caused much harm. Because Right Use of Power^TM is an influential modality within American Buddhism, we are particularly concerned that other sanghas might engage their services to similarly damaging effects. Please see the next tab, Our Concerns with “Right Use of Power,” where we explain why we found Right Use of Power (as taught in 2019-2021) to be a dangerously flawed paradigm for this issue. We would not recommend RUP consultants for response to sexual misconduct, unless in the future their program can be greatly improved, along the lines we describe. (And we welcome them to notify us, if so–we would love nothing more than to hear that our feedback has resulted in meaningful change.) 
  • In particular, agreeing to any kind of approach based on the transgressor and victim engaging in a joint process was extremely inappropriate, especially given the time frame and the transgressor’s complete lack of readiness.
  • The choice to work with these consultants was not unanimously supported by the board and was a result of a majority-rules vote. (Democracy doesn’t always guarantee the right decisions! But it is a better method for governance than authoritarian rule, and over time, when members are operating in good faith and responsive to feedback, it’s self-correcting.)
    

• An early report sent to the sangha by the “Response Team,” advised by our consultant and assembled by the board, characterized the teacher’s abuse as a “secret romantic relationship.” 
  • This characterization is woefully inadequate. It’s important to use the language of “sexual misconduct” and “abuse of power” from the beginning.

• We initially avoided facilitated conversations about the transgression within the sangha on bad advice about the dangers of “group processing.” Instead, our initial approach was for communications to be top-down and then processing to happen 1:1 with teachers or other senior leaders or in self-organizing groups.
  • This approach did not take into account how unlikely self-organizing discussions could be during pandemic lockdown. It was also too controlling. The sangha needed opportunities to connect to each other and listen and speak from the heart, unmediated by teachers or board and in group forums.
    • As a note: We attempted to remediate this omission and subsequently held “Listening Circles,” where we followed a set of agreements to create a safe space (no cross talk/confidentiality/etc.) and had participants take turns sharing. These spaces must be thoughtfully and well-facilitated, with ground rules enforced by the facilitator. If these ground rules are in place, such spaces can help, not hinder, sangha healing.

• We allowed the transgressing teacher to be personally supported by other teachers in the community.
  • It is difficult for a teacher to be fully in support of the sangha’s awakening to a teacher’s abuse while serving simultaneously as the transgressor’s emotional support. A teacher wishing to support the transgressing teacher in this way should have resigned from all of their roles, ceased seeing students, and focused on supporting their friend. 
  • GBZC should have set up expectations in advance that teachers get emotional and personal support outside the community in which they serve. This is a standard professional expectation in established religious communities.

• When the transgressor sent a resignation letter, the board sent a letter to the membership announcing his resignation with excerpts from that letter.
  • The transgressor registered dismay at the board’s letter. When we subsequently learned he objected to us using quotations rather than simply sending the sangha the letter in its entirety, we sent him a letter of apology.
  • In reality, publishing any of his words to the sangha was itself preferential treatment. He should not have had a platform to express his views unless that platform was shared with the victims of his harms. An announcement that he had resigned would have been sufficient.

• We permitted the transgressor’s “Ceremony of Apology” to move forward. The victim’s permission for this event was not freely given, and she did not attend out of protest and disgust. 
  • A “Ceremony of Apology” that does not center the victim’s needs is inappropriate. The victim knew the transgressor to be actively engaging in DARVO with her and others at the time of the ceremony.

• We did not reach out to the broader sangha to see if others had similar stories. 
  • If we had truly prioritized the well-being of all in the sangha, we’d be thorough in understanding if others had also experienced this harm. We succumbed to those lobbying to protect the transgressor and his relatives’ privacy and only sent out messages on this topic to a mailing list of current members and attendees.

There are surely many other mistakes we made, both large and small. We are still learning. We have made our best effort not to give excuses for our choices here. Whatever our intent was, our impact was harmful, and in this section, we wanted to center the impact of our actions. 

Next: Sangha Responses to Misconduct: Our Concerns with “Right Use of Power”  

Published June 12, 2022
Last revised November 22, 2023

A message from the survivor of clergy abuse at GBZC:

I write this in the hope that it will serve other individuals and communities who have gone through clergy abuse.

I found a Buddhist contemplative therapist and started attending GBZC because I wanted to study and practice seriously with a Buddhist teacher. After over a year of a cultivated therapist-teacher / client-student dynamic, that teacher breached boundaries with me. What ensued was based entirely on a power dynamic. Part of the nature of abuse from a spiritual leader is that it is hard to see from the inside. 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. Holding that story and learning how to express it will be a lifelong journey for me.

It has been very difficult for all those affected, myself included, to re-build community in the wake of teacher abuse. Those in the sangha who understood the nature of this abuse and manifested wisdom and compassion in the face of it unfortunately endured even further betrayal and spiritual pain from the larger teaching community.

Having been through this, I can understand why victims of teacher abuse in most Buddhist/religious communities leave (often quietly and often never to practice that spiritual path again). Some in this community fought hard to find a different way, to turn toward the power dynamics and structures in our practices that contribute to this kind of systemic abuse of spiritual power. They aspired to provide a safe space for survivors, including me, to continue practicing rather than the more typical response of shielding the teacher from accountability and/or sweeping the matter under the rug. Those who supported me were up against a lot.

In the wake of a teacher who abused my spiritual love for his own needs/wants, additional harmful experiences I was subject to included:  

• The lack of education on the topic of teacher abuse by the majority of the teaching community, accompanied by their apparent feeling that they had nothing to learn
  • the constant conflation of sexual misconduct with adultery, which are two separate issues
  • the perspective that our community did not need an ethics policy because it sounded “too corporate,” paired with the argument that  only “ethical principles” and “trust between teacher  and student” were needed (as if nothing had breached that)

• The misdirected “prevention” and “education” our community did receive from sources recommended by a former SZBA president, which focused on the teacher and alleviating the perceived shame he must be feeling
• Being targeted by the teacher as the real manipulator/problem (common in systemic abuses, and unchallenged by and large by the teaching community)
  • being faulted by the abuser for speaking to leadership about what had happened, after he had isolated me from any supports 
• Dharma talks given by other teachers that excused or ignored the transgression, including:
  • a talk drawn from a koan in which a teacher pulls a stool out from under a student and the student’s heart “breaks open in gratitude” for the teacher’s clumsiness, because really, it leads to enlightenment 
  • a talk about how great teachers are, and how we all need them as our guides, with no mention of the abuse that had just occurred in our community
• Some transmitted teachers requesting I not speak to them about what had happened, utilizing spiritual bypassing language (i.e., “it is not our practice to ‘tell stories’” or “memory is not reliable”) in order not to listen
• …and much more.

Why I stayed:

In the wake of the abuse, all the transmitted teachers left the community–some wanting to simply “move on,” others investing themselves in relationship with the abuser. I stayed as a member and regular participant because many others in the sangha responded differently– with incredible resilience, wisdom, and compassion in turning toward. Leadership in this community lives into the commitment to social justice that we vow. They live into embodying bodhisattva values even amidst the most trying waters of spiritual betrayal and spiritual bypass. 

As we see, the issue of sexual misconduct is rampant across many spiritual communities. I stayed in this community because they fought to have me. They prioritized my healing and re-finding my footing on a path that had caused me harm. Board members and the sangha at large, as well as two Senior Assistant Teachers, responded to this issue with wisdom and compassion. That is the light I want to grow toward; that is the light I want to follow. I was lucky, for it is very rare to have people care for a victim after this kind of misconduct, particularly when the teacher is the beloved public figure. In this community, there were those deeply practiced enough to know how wrong this was, to come to my aid as a member of the community who got hurt, and to move forward in a way that held space for safety. I have seen how hard-won their steadfast compassion has been to one who could have become simply invisible. 

I owe the pace of coming out of the “fog” and healing after such an isolating experience to GBZC leadership. Board Members, Practice Leaders, and Senior Assistant Teachers did the following with steadfast tenderness:

• listened to what had happened, believed me, and expressed over and over that it was not my fault
• came to my aid and support because of their knowledge of ethics, including the rule requiring spiritual teachers to maintain boundaries, not cross them 
• spent time with me even when it may have been uncomfortable 
• met me with patience and understanding
• encouraged and emboldened me to reach out to resources (friends, family), while modeling the lack of judgment and compassion required to let a victim know she is not to blame
• reached out in ways people can for one another moving through injury: making soup, sharing their own triggers, and letting me know they are by my side, sheltering together amid the communal earthquakes, calibrating and keeping sane together
• planning and holding a Circle of Care for me despite many obstacles
• offering a Dharma Talk about sangha–utilizing Seung San’s metaphor of potatoes in a bucket being cleaned more quickly when they bump against one another in the bucket, rather than individually scrubbed: “However, sometimes one of the potatoes becomes bruised, and then we care for that hurt.”

In many ways, caring for the victim in this situation necessitated going against the current or grain of Zen power structures. The transmitted teachers at GBZC were more focused on the teacher who had breached boundaries. The way I and we have been able to move forward is together. It took me many months to remember I was no longer alone, and would no longer have to face teacher abuse alone, would no longer feel the need to protect him against all costs to my own life. This community, due to its stellar leadership as example, came together to support me and one another, and that is what we want the Resilient Sangha Project to carry forward, in our community as well as others. 

Next: Additional Roots & Risk Factors: A Potentially Cultish Culture

Published June 12, 2022

At the heart of a systemic approach to clergy misconduct is the understanding that culture matters. The riskiest possible culture, arguably, would be that of a cult: a community in which every single thing revolves around the whims of a single leader. In a cult, clergy sexual misconduct is almost a given.

To be clear: Greater Boston Zen Center was not, and is not, a cult. Nonetheless, we have found it useful to consider whether any aspects of our culture could be seen as “cultish” and, if so, to consider how we might change those aspects of our culture.

Our reflections have been, by necessity, specific to our particular Soto Zen practice—that is what we know—but we offer them here in case they are useful to other Zen communities or to other Buddhist communities more generally.

Note: We owe these reflections to Julie Seido Nelson; see original posting of them here.

It can be disconcerting or even eerie to realize how many typical Zen practices are also techniques used by cult leaders as part of a gradual and insidious campaign of “thought reform.” Psychologist Margaret Thaler Singer describes the latter in her book Cults in our Midst: The Hidden Menace in Our Everyday Lives. She mentions, for example, maintaining silence, moving and chanting in unison, and peer pressure (even in such subtle forms as following the group in removing one’s shoes). She goes on to describe displays of warmth and affection, sleep deprivation, systems of rewards, notions of special knowledge, encouragement to suspend one’s rational thought, spiritual hierarchy, and complex and ever-changing rules. The use of somewhat obscure language or phrases with changed meanings, she writes, is an additional “thought reform” technique.

If you’ve ever sat zazen, bowed with a group, walked in a kinhin line, chanted a sutra service, looked to others in the group to figure out what to do, or felt welcomed, these should sound familiar. Have you ever gotten up at 4:30am at sesshin, received a teaching status, heard about “enlightenment,” or been encouraged to “let a talk wash over you”? Have you sat with a group that distinguishes students from various levels of teachers, or experienced screwing up time after time in a complicated practice of oryoki or in a demanding retreat role such as Ino or Shusho? If you’ve also attempted koan practice or struggled to understand the writings of Eihei Dogen, you know how far removed from typical understandings of language and logic Zen can be.

Singer also writes about who it is that cults attract. You are probably already aware that people who are lonely, depressed, isolated, or in crisis may be particularly susceptible. While we may resist the idea, that description could fit many who are drawn to Zen. If we weren’t desperately looking for something, why would we give up beautiful days and entertaining pursuits to spend hours sitting silently on a cushion? But Singer says that cults also tend to attract good, altruistic people—people who want to be on the side of the right and true, people who want to do good things, people who want to save the world; in other words, people who want to “save all beings,” as we chant in the Four Bodhisattva Vows. 

If we think of cults as only those groups that isolate their members in some far-off rural compound and lead them into sexual orgies and murder, then of course your typical Zen group is not a cult. But cults, Singer writes, come in a variety of kinds and degrees. She defines a cult as “a group that forms around a person who claims to have a special mission or knowledge, which they will share with those who turn over most of their decision making to that self-appointed leader.” Some cults are more mild and under the radar, letting members stay in their families and live apparently normal lives. Some have single leaders, while others are led by a team. Not uncommonly, the leaders will be educated, apparently rational, successful, and even professional people.

So when is a Zen group a healthy, supportive environment for Zen practice, and what are signs that it is developing cultish aspects? Singer enumerates many distinctive aspects of cults, all along the theme of manipulating students’ admiration and love for teachers towards the teacher’s own ends, while suppressing dissent and criticism. 

The essence of cult-like behavior is the over-extension of authority by people who have established an attitude of devotion in their followers. We hope that Zen teachers and other leaders will keep in mind Keizan Jokin’s exhortation (from “At Ease and in Harmony”): 

Do not use the Way to make yourself important. This is the foremost point to remember. Remain always in Great Compassion and dedicate the limitless power of zazen to all beings.

Our hope for all students is that we do not confuse reverence for the dharma with excessive reverence for our human teachers—a subtle form of idolatry. Zen teachings can liberate us from our delusory self-identities and put us in touch with the realm of vast emptiness. We may experience a surrender of self to the greater harmony of the cosmos. Zen teachers, unfortunately, if they get too full of themselves, distort this into total submission of one’s self to mere human authority. Because we live in a world of emptiness and form, we do well not to totally abandon our personal autonomy and critical facilities. It is also the job of the collective, led by the board of directors and other senior leaders, to continuously educate ourselves on these dynamics and proactively ensure the safety of our communities.

Next: Additional Roots & Risk Factors: An Imperfect Past

Published June 12, 2022

One way to prevent future harms is to look at the past with clear eyes. We can do this in the compassionate spirit of Shunryu Suzuki, thinking, “Our sangha was perfect the way it was, but could it have used a little improvement?”

Sangha members can ask themselves, for example, “How were we formed? What shaped our current culture? Is there anything about our lineage or history or norms that worked, however accidentally, to increase the risk of harm? If so, what can we do about it now?”

The goal in asking these questions is not to shame or blame our dharma ancestors, founding teachers, previous boards of directors, or anyone else. The goal is transparency, honest grappling, and creative problem-solving, with the end product being a safer sangha going forward.

More specifically, a sangha could ask itself:

• Did any of our past teachers commit clergy misconduct? If so, how was it handled? If it was ignored or swept under the rug, if the victim was blamed, if nothing changed afterwards, can we speak clearly about it now? Can we set matters straight? Can we atone and clarify the ways in which our current understandings differ from those of “olden days,” even if those “olden days” were only five or ten years ago? What are the names of the victims? Do we know them or have we attempted to reach out to them? Do we honor them in any way in our materials or rituals?

• What has our past leadership said about the topic of clergy misconduct or other abuses of teacher power? If past leaders were on record stating views that we now find misguided and harmful, can we ask them to revisit the topic, disavow the harmful parts, and share new views? If these past leaders are unable or unwilling to revisit their prior statements (perhaps because they have retired or passed away), can we speak out to correct the record from our own position as their dharma heirs?

• When we look back at the history of our sangha, were there other issues with concentrated teacher power or teacher abuse of power (perhaps related to finances or other matters)? Can we recognize how those patterns fed into a culture that increased the risk of clergy sexual misconduct? 

Next: Additional Roots & Risk Factors: Inadequate Care for Students and Teachers

Published June 12, 2022