Dan74 wrote: ↑
Fri Oct 25, 2019 2:24 am
Your argument that the behaviour like the Dalai Lama's above leads to sex scandals is patent nonsense. And yes, I will stop wasting my time trying to reason with someone who is wilfully blind.
I was hoping the community could provide more articles that addressed this issues, or ones similar to this, on why basic vinaya rules are so important. I don't want to restate and rehash what has already been eloquently explained many times throughout history.
But until they do, I'll have to spend hopefully not too much time to point out the obvious and spell it out for those of you who don't see the problem with monks hugging women (platonically).
I never argued that hugging leads to sex scandals. I hardly said anything at all in the original blog post, I thought the picture and bare description alone was enough for those who have eyes and basic ability to think and understand ethics could see potential problems.
The Buddha taught for 45 years, and had a vinaya, a code of discipline for monastics, developed and refined over that long period of time. Many of the rules are minor. But the major rules are really important, and they are there exactly as they are, for important reasons.
One of those rules, which the Dalai Lama is not following in the photograph, prohibits intentional physical contact such as hugging (accidentally bumping into a woman is not an offense) between monks and any woman, even their mom or sister.
1. Why not even their mom, sister, or grandmother, or daughter?
Because the rest of the world probably doesn't know that woman is their relative.
They don't know whether the hug is platonic or romantic.
2. A timeless principle is that people learn not just from hearing and thinking about teachings, but probably much more from modeling, following living examples of their teachers and fellow students. Even if the teacher is enlightened and can hug anyone platonically without lust, their students are not. Having special rules for different classes of people complicates things, so they're avoided as much as possible. Enlightened teachers observe their own strict rules to set a good example, not because they personally need them.
So if the Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhist teachers followed the Buddha's rule of not having any physical contact between monastics of the opposite sex, then these things would not have happened, or if they did happened, it would be clear to both the perpetrators and the victims that what was going on was illicit and prohibited.
3. Have you forgotten what its like to be in puberty with raging hormones?
If you have forgotten, just look at dogs and animals in the wild when it's mating season. What do you think it's like for monastics who ordain young? Why do muslim women wear hijab to veil their face? As a college muslim (male) friend attending a decadent American university in the springtime when the weather was warm and beautiful once told me,
"I love America. Where I'm from, when you look at young women, there's nothing to see, it's like looking at a tent."
Some real examples:
1. SANGHARAKSHITA raping hetersexual men, some of them underage (age of consent for homosexual sex), all of them believing it was spiritual friendship and a blessing for spiritual empowerment and not a sick rapist preying on innocent kids he lied to. If no hugging and physical contact was even allowed, then how can this happen? It would be obvious to victims what is inappropriate and illicit behavior. Hugging on its own is not the cause of sexual crime, but prohibiting hugging can prevent or deter victims from being lied to.
https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2 ... al-abuse/
I could go on for pages and pages. Chogyam Rinpoche. And some of this students like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96sel_Tendzin
It was revealed in 1989 that Ösel Tendzin had contracted HIV and for nearly three years knew it, yet continued to have unsafe sex with his students without informing them.[15][16] He transmitted it to a student who later died of AIDS.[17][18][19] Others close to Tendzin, including the board of directors of Vajradhatu, knew for two years that Tendzin was HIV-positive and sexually active but kept silent.[20] As one student reported at the time,
I was very distressed that he and his entourage had lied to us for so long, always saying he did not have AIDS. I was even more distressed over the stories of how the Regent used his position as a dharma teacher to induce "straight" students to have unprotected sex with him, while he claimed he had been tested for AIDS but the result was negative.[11]
Stephen Butterfield, a former student, recounted in a memoir:
Tenzin offered to explain his behavior at a meeting which I attended. Like all of his talks, this was considered a teaching of dharma, and donations were solicited and expected. So I paid him $35.00 to hear his explanation. In response to close questioning by students, he first swore us to secrecy (family secrets again), and then said that Trungpa had requested him to be tested for HIV in the early 1980s and told him to keep quiet about the positive result. Tendzin had asked Trungpa what he should do if students wanted to have sex with him, and Trungpa's reply was that as long as he did his Vajrayana purification practices, it did not matter, because they would not get the disease. Tendzin's answer, in short, was that he had obeyed the guru.[21]
If they followed the Buddha's rules on no hugging, then how can this kind of tragedy happen?
I don't think there's any lustful thinking going on in this picture. Respectfully, I might suggest that any lust you find within is the lust you brought along with you.
ReplyDeleteAnd where exactly did I suggest there was lust? There are rules for monks and nuns, and rules are there for many reasons. In Theravada rules, it's forbidden even for monks to hug their moms or sisters. If you take the time to study the issue carefully and think it through, you'll understand why. This is why in Tibetan and Mahayana Buddhism you find so many outrageous sex scandals, too many to list.
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