Of the Shadows of the Past, and the Road That Goes On

Dhammaketu, Gent

Reprinted with permission from Articles Shabda May 2003

Yashomitra's article in February Shabda is the latest of a series of events - mainly the Guardian article and its aftermath, and a series of resignations or considerations to resign of senior OMs feeling out of tune with the movement - which indicate we have not yet fully left behind the growth pains and even traumas of the early years of the Movement.

Now there are basically two unhelpful ways of dealing with traumas, and one helpful one. It is unhelpful to repress, to refuse to see, to cover up what has gone wrong, but it is equally unhelpful to keep them alive by constantly analysing them, finding more and more details, and more and more grounds for feeling unhappy about them. Helpful is to acknowledge them (which may need a fair amount of analysis), accepting they are a shadow on our otherwise impressive Dharma heritage, and then finding ways to let go.

I have not gone personally through all that, I am second generation, ordained in 1995, so for me it is relatively easy to write this. It will evidently be much harder for those of us who have gone through it, especially if there are still old wounds not properly healed. But we all have to deal with the shadow of the past, if not because of personal traumas and pain, at least because Bhante's attitudes to sex permitted some wrong views to develop within the Movement, which influenced our ways of operating in an unhelpful way.

In this article I will first try to clarify my thoughts about these Shadows of the Past, and then reflect a bit on the Road that Goes On - hoping we will walk it all together.

1. THE SHADOWS OF THE PAST

The present discussion is limited very much to questions as whether Bhante acted unethically, and whether things where covered up, and who were the culprits in what went wrong. I will not go into the covering-up question, I take the publication of Yashomitra's article and the present possibility of discussing the whole area fully and openly as the uncovering of whatever might have been covered up. And as for seeking culprits - and having them pay for it - I think this is not a helpful attitude; maybe it is just an attitude we carried over from our Christian past, and which I think we’d better leave behind. I prefer a more constructive approach: frankly acknowledging what went wrong, redressing whatever can be redressed, healing whatever can be healed, and getting on with what has to be done, hopefully a bit wiser for the experience.

But the question of what went wrong is much farther-reaching than just the question of unskilful behaviour. There was evidently quite some unskilful behaviour going on in those early days, but to me it is far more important to dig up a few doubtful or downright wrong views, which were connected with the sexual mores of the day, and which influenced and hampered - and partly still do so - the way the movement operated.

1.1 unskilfullness on Bhante's part

Yashomitra's article put into the foreground the question whether or how far Bhante acted skilfully or unskilfully. This question is not unimportant, but I think it is essentially unanswerable, because skilfulness and unskilfullness are based on mental states, and the only judge in this is the person acting. Bhante says he acted out of friendliness, and whether this is true, or a rationalisation, or a mix of both, or whatever, he is the only one to know, and the only one to bear the karmic results, both good and bad. The question whether there was appetite present, whether a little or a lot, is really irrelevant: contrarily to our Christian conditioning, there is nothing wrong with appetite, it becomes unskilful only when indulged at the expense of others.

Vishvapani's moving article in the Threads section of April 2546 (see A Letter to Norman Fischer), which gives us a bit of a clue. It reads like the kind of story Bhante might have written himself, if he had been able to do so. I gather from it his sexual activities were largely the result of his needs for friendship and intimacy in a situation which must have been lonely to the extreme, and it makes understandable the idea that he really had the feeling of acting out of friendliness.

But there is more to it than the question of (un)skilful behaviour. It is quite evident in this situation he developed a blind spot - in stark contrast with his usual clarity - to things that were essentially in contradiction with his vision of the Dharma. In the first place, a blind spot for the projections of probably quite a few of the youngsters involved, and of their inevitable suffering when left behind. It must have been very deep indeed, looking at Yashomitra's article, written more than twenty years after the facts. I felt deeply sorry when I read it, in the first place for his suffering and the suffering of probably many others, but also for Bhante, for the OM who insulted Yashomitra when he left Aryatara, for Padmaraja, for all those wounded in Croydon and elsewhere. We cannot take away the suffering, but we can acknowledge it and respond to it with metta, which takes the aspect of karuna in this context.

And in this way I am sure we can help those who suffer(ed) to leave it behind.

1.2 Wrong Views

However detrimental to the Order in itself, these possibly unethical actions and the suffering they caused are not the last thing, but only the consequence of something even more disruptive: a set of doubtful and sometimes downright wrong views about sex and the spiritual life which developed implicitly - and sometimes explicitly - in the wake of the sexual practices, views to which Bhante developed a blind spot also, or maybe encouraged, tacitly or even explicitly.

As late as 1992 or 1993, on one of my first GFR retreats in Padmaloka, I heard someone affirming gay sex is better for the spiritual life than straight sex. By then I was well aware of Bhante's sexual preferences and former activities, and of the general (F)WBO attitudes to homosexuality, which I shared and still share - although I myself am as straight as they come.

But to me this statement sounded simply absurd, and I thought it was just one man's illusion, until later on I learned it was much more widespread, and at one time and in some places even was the dominant mood. Underneath and behind this opinion I discovered some other views, such as "homosexual sex is liberating" or "homosexual relationships are supportive of spiritual guidance".

Stated that bluntly, it is not hard to see they are simply wrong. Sex, whether hetero or homo or solo, is a hindrance to spiritual development, and a very strong one at that. In my experience, the best thing one can do with it is to keep it within ethical channels, and so avoid gross unskilful mental states - but even then there remain plenty of still quite gross but less evident mental attitudes present, such as mutual exploitation, violence, dependence, possessiveness....

It is only because the sexual experience is so violent that they seem relatively minor, but they are not. And they are in no way any good for furthering spiritual growth.

1.3 doubtful, or wrongly applied views

The above-mentioned views were rationalised by calling in other ones, some of them rather doubtful, and some applied wrongly. For instance, the view that homosexual sex is liberating was linked with the promotion of a doubtful entity called "manhood", and the view that homosexual relationships are supportive of spiritual growth/guidance was linked with a wrong application of an in-itself correct analysis of heterosexual relationships.

When doing the GFR retreat on Spiritual Friendship, I was thrilled with the subject (and still am), but I had no use whatsoever for some of the ideas proposed, such as "leaving the woman's world" and "developing manhood" - and not just because by then I was already 53. I felt then that it did not fit my life experience, but later on I began to see more clearly it is a very un-dharmic way of looking at things. It is making fixed things out of what are very complex mental and physical processes, which are widely different for different human beings. "Manhood" and "the woman's world" are, from a dharmic viewpoint, just as unreal as "soul" or "self", such 'dharmas' are nowhere to be found, and making them up and acting on them can be very misleading - and cannot but lead to suffering.

Such ideas may be or may have been helpful on the level of psychological development, but the development and liberation we strive for is of an altogether different quality. Using them beyond the sphere where they can be useful reduces the dharma to mere therapy, and using them to underpin the idea that homosexual activities are useful or even almost required to develop this "manhood" and thus further "spiritual" growth, is just asking for trouble.

Leading to trouble also were the wrong conclusions taken from Bhante's critique of the illusions our society has about romantic love and the family. I am a family man, and from a 35-year experience I can fully underwrite his misgivings about these two sources of all blessings and full happiness. This is probably the most widespread wrong view of our times, and as such a source of massive suffering. Single sex activities were the standard answer the movement developed to avoid or counter these illusions, and although they had their limitations they were by and large quite successful and spiritually helpful. But the same cannot be said about the illusion that homosexual relationships are, at least to a large extent, free from the faults of heterosexual ones, or even that they can support spiritual development: holding those views is also asking for big trouble.

1.4 A new light on the Croydon crisis

Rereading Yashomitra's article, the thought struck me that the FWBO’s Croydon crisis may have been the ultimate consequence of the wrong views we are reviewing here. This crisis, in all likelihood, was not just Padmaraja turning a guru and manipulating the Croydon sangha to this end, as it is usually presented, and as I saw it up to now. Yashomitra's description of the way he was treated (corroborated with what I heard before over the years from first-hand witnesses, mainly my good friend and kalyana mitra Bodhimitra, and my ordination brother Dhammasena and his wife Vijayasri) made me see the basic creed of Padmaraja's Croydon must have been this set of wrong views: homosexual Buddhism as the pinnacle of spiritual development, and developing "manhood" as paramount to developing transcendental Insight. They were present and must have done some harm elsewhere in the Movement also, but in Croydon they were applied undiluted and rigorously.

No wonder they left such deep wounds, even after all those years.

1.5 Men, women and the spiritual life.

It looks very probable that Bhante's sexual preferences have had a bearing on one of the most controversial issues in the Order: the question of the ability of women for the spiritual life. He has regularly pointed out that, according to the unanimous Buddhist tradition, women are at a handicap in leading the spiritual life. The fact is there, of course, but what does it mean?

According to the same unanimous tradition, the Earth is constituted of four continents around Mount Sumeru, which is 80, 000 yojanas high, roughly 400,000 km., and therefore well beyond the orbit of the moon. This example highlights the fact that not all tradition, even if held unanimously, is dharma: it has been clothed in the representations of the world current in the cultures and the times in which it spread, and sifting out dharma from culture has been the main task Bhante took on when he founded the Order and the Movement.

In fulfilling this task he has been hugely efficient, but on this point I am afraid he failed to do so. For in all the said cultures women were held to be second class beings - as, by the way, they were also in our culture up to a century ago. Among the Indian Aryans, they could not be warriors and they were too impure to be priests, in China they could not be Confucian scholars, so they had no part in the groups which made the spiritual discoveries of the Axial Age, and thus appeared as incompetent in such higher matters. All of this is culture, not dharma.

Dharma is the frank statement of the Buddha, made without any reservations or additions whatever, that women can, when they lead the spiritual life fully, reach as well as men the four aryan levels, from Stream-entry all the way up to Arahantship. And we have the Therigatha as a witness to their success. But this went so strongly against the grain of cultural preconceptions that very soon they were put back in their place, and pushed to the fringe of spiritual life, or even pushed out entirely, and so the truth of the cultural preconceptions was established again: everybody could see that women were no good for the spiritual life, that this was a men's business really. (Much of this is just jumping at the eye, as soon as one starts reading the relevant texts through the eye of higher criticism. I intended to do this for this article, but it takes some research I had no time for, because of the threatening deadline. So expect a sequel on this subject soon.)

And it is fairly easy to see why in this question the Buddha was right and the later tradition wrong. Just as there is not such a dharma as (superior) "manhood" there is not such a dharma as (inferior) "womanhood". Both men and women are just very complex bundles of processes, of skandhas, and for both of them the core processes are mental, at the level of the samskaras.

Both men and women have the same work to do: getting out of greed, hatred and delusion, and developing their positive counterparts. And I honestly fail to see any difference between men and women at this level.

There is a difference, though, but only at the material, rupa, level. Rupa is inextricably linked with the mental processes, but does not dominate them at all, at least not when one learns to handle the mental processes, which is what the spiritual life is about. The remaining, and real, difference is that rupa can influence mental processes in different ways, because of differences in hormones and brain functioning, but this is really a difference at the surface, not at the core of the matter, and it becomes more and more negligible the more one is effective in the spiritual life, i.e. the more one learns to handle the mental processes towards giving, love and clarity.

Happily, Bhante must somehow have seen there is no difference at the core, when founding a unified Order. But it looks later on the surface differences were overstressed, and when the single-sex principle was carried through so rigorously it almost developed into "apartheid" between men and women. This may have been a needed skilful means in the formative years of the movement, when the pioneers were learning to handle mental processes, but I hope most of us by now have developed this skill so far we can have a fresh look at it, as I intend to do further on.

2. THE ROAD THAT GOES ON

So having - hopefully - disposed of the shadows of the past, or at least indicated how we could handle them, I turn to the real subject of this article: what to do next? And there is an enormous amount to be done, not least because -

2.1 Our world desperately needs the dharma.

Greed, hatred and delusion are as rampant as they ever have been, but our world has lost its instruments to do something about them. Traditional religion, including traditional Buddhism, have been out-competed by science, technology and consumption, and so have lost their impact on society. The materialist "religions" such as Marxism and consumerism cannot fill the hole, nor does the fundamentalist revivalism in Christianity and Islam, who merely go back to the externals, not to the positive inspiration behind them, and preach hatred instead. And the whole of humanity is heading, in a mad race of greed, into ecological disaster and maybe into its own self-destruction.

To this madness I see only one possible remedy: the realistic and clear vision of the Buddha, with its penetrating insight in the functioning of the mind and its effective instruments to do something about it. This I see as an inestimable surplus value over any other teaching, analysis or way of life I have tried out before in my life (mainly: Christian monasticism, rational philosophy, Marxism, ecological life, and political action), and, having it tried out myself, I am confident it will work with other human beings also. But our world needs the Dharma not dressed up in the garb of pre-industrial oriental cultures - this can appeal only to a fringe minority - it needs to be translated into our (post-) industrial ways of thinking and living. And this exactly is what Bhante has set out to develop.

2.2 Bhante's position as our teacher.

So to me there is no shred of doubt possible about this: in Bhante's teaching there is such a wealth of clear thinking about the essence of the Dharma, such a wealth of insight into the practical applications, and such a supporting setup of institutions, all of it geared to the situation and the mentality of the industrial world. The consequences which were the result of his blind spots and human shortcomings are just a shadow on all this, but in no way diminish its value. They can easily be removed, and in doing so his teaching is not weakened, but strengthened. No other teacher I know of combines the same breadth with the same depth, and I would not be surprised if future generations recognise him as the most important Buddhist teacher of the twentieth century.

With many others, I deplore he has not spoken out explicitly about the shadows of the past, but I take his returning to brahmacarya himself and his renewed urge to us to move in that direction as an implicit distancing of them. And somehow I feel the Croydon debacle may have been a decisive element in this change of attitude, which to me is his real message in this matter.

2.3 A fresh look at our institutions.

Our Movement has largely been shaped by Bhante, so it is not surprising his personal preferences at times may have had a disproportional - but not necessarily negative - influence.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the standard Order Member seems to read literature, to go to art galleries, to have Blake on his bookshelf, to read the more imaginative Mahayana Sutras - and if one reads Greek philosophy instead, has no eye for visual arts, has the Bible and the Quran on one's bookshelf, and prefers the Pali and Prajnaparamita texts one can sometimes get the feeling of being a bit of an oddity as an Order Member. But Bhante himself has urged time and time again we should be individuals, not clones of a teacher, so we may need to have a look at our institutions and habits to see what is just Bhante, and to develop more oddness where it is called for.

The above examples are perfectly innocuous, but this mechanism has played also with respect to Bhante's sexual preferences and the views associated by them. Here I will limit myself to just one area which many of us feel the need of looking into, the "single sex principle".

Building further on my analysis of the fundamental identity of men and women with respect to the core business of the spiritual life but different angles at the surface, I think it remains sensible to provide some single sex activities. But contrarily to the accepted wisdom of our movement, the more we grow spiritually the less - underline, please! - this may be necessary! And the strict and almost mechanically applied apartheid from the mitra level onward needs to be broken down. I have no simple answer to what should be single sex and what not, we probably will need to work it out experimentally. Some activities are more likely to stay single sex, communities for one; but it may surprise you to hear intensive meditation retreats need not be at all - as I experienced to my own surprise on Varamitra's brilliant Dutch winter retreats. Doubtless this is because on them we worked so intensively at the core level at developing positive samskaras, that the surface effects lost most of their hold for the duration of the retreat.

Especially at the Order level something needs to be done. I hear that in bigger Centres Order Members who are not involved in Centre work may live almost their whole Order life without any contact with Order Members of the opposite sex, except for the meagre 4 days every two years at the mixed Convention. The newish Order Forums I experience as helpful in this respect, we could try having a longer mixed Convention (seven days each women - mixed - men?), and we could do with some mixed Order weekends also.

2.4 Taking our institutions further.

As Bhante pointed out frequently enough: because of the samsaric pull, standing still is sliding back. As long as we are not an Order of predominantly Stream-entrants, our task is to move on.

In March Shabda I pointed out this implies we need to go for a higher spiritual goal than just being good Buddhists and healthy human beings (another dharma nowhere to be found), we need to develop Transcendental Insight itself. And this has implications for our institutions.

The first 35 years of the Movement - I will call it the Bhante period - was essentially geared to developing an Order of committed individuals, taking the Dharma as their life guide. And it has been a spectacularly successful period: we have a large Order, an even larger Movement, and most of us are very different from what we would have been without this all, and the difference is unambiguously to the credit side. But our efforts and our successes have largely been limited to the psychological level, to building only the foundation for what the spiritual life really is for: Transcendental Insight, and our institutions are essentially serving this need.

Do not expect me to say now they have become obsolete; they will be needed probably for most of us for a long time to come. But when we mark up our goal, they will not be sufficient any longer as the growth point of the movement.

For this we need a new instrument: vihara-style communities, where people commit themselves to live, not just for an experimental period, but indefinitely - with the resolve of the Buddha who decided he would not leave the foot of the Bodhi Tree until death or until Awakening, whichever came first. (Luckily for us, Awakening came first). What is needed is full commitment, not for a limited period with the perspective of time-off for a sabbatical afterwards - and of course no time-off for boyfriends or girlfriends. As far as I can see, none of the present initiatives really fulfill the bill, not even the very laudable experiments at vihara-style life in Guhyaloka and elsewhere.

Even a few pioneers starting this could have an immense uplifting influence on the Order and the Movement - not just by living the life itself, but also by offering the occasion to share their life, for a weekend, a week, a month... to those of us who - like me - are not yet up to, or not in the possibility of leading this kind of life ourselves. This means the viharas have to be established not too far away from the inhabited world, hereby following the example of our Christian (and the early Buddhist) monastic tradition. The project Varamitra has set out for is of this kind, and I hope many of us will follow his example.

Unfortunately, to the great majority of us this is almost certainly not what we are ready for yet, but there are other ways of working toward Insight. Insight is Wisdom-Compassion fully interlinked, and one can work towards it from both sides. Vihara life is more to the Wisdom side, working among and for beings may be an alternative more from the Compassion side. And here I see two wide-open possibilities.

One is developing TBRL in the direction of vocational activities: old age care, hospice work....

This will have no easy start, as it needs highly trained people, and a commitment over a far longer period of time than what is usual at the moment, comparable to the commitment in the future viharas. I am glad some initiatives are already taken in that direction, and I hope they are the first steps to what in the long run should become the dominating form of TBRL in the Movement.

A second alternative is a consequence of what I wrote earlier about the world desperately needing the Dharma. During the Bhante period of the Movement, our Centres were - and still are - largely inward turned. All energies went into deepening the commitment of those coming to them. One could say, almost without exaggeration, the Centres were essentially the breeding ground for new Order Members. Consequently, almost all who came along and were not ready for that intensity dropped out sooner or later - both Friends, and Mitras who did not go on to ordination. Up to now, this was almost inevitable, because the danger of watering-down was lurking around the corner.

But I think we have come to a stage of development where we safely can start catering for the needs of those we had to leave behind before, and have a kind of "Buddhism-lite" activities suited to what they can handle. This our Beginners Nights and even our Regulars Nights cannot provide: they are far too much embedded in our habitual vision and so are just temporary stepping stones to higher activities. From what I hear, Buddhafield is working along those lines already, but we need much more: not just reaching fringe groups in our society, but offering something which can attract people from far more standard settings. One big warning here: this will work only if we set it up as a gift to the participants, not as a recruiting ground for the Order.

And an even bigger warning: it will work only if we keep our intensity intact - which means going on upgrading our spiritual life.

I hope these reflections will be of some use to you, reader. It was hard work getting them a bit coherently into my word processor, and some of them arose while writing, so they are not all as mature as I would like them to be. I will be glad to hear of any thought or reflection which might improve on them.

My e-mail is: dhammaketu [at] gmail.com

May all beings be happy.