Buddhist Gaslightenment

The Death of Western Buddhism: Part 9

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.“

George Orwell, 1984

This is the penultimate chapter in the series “The Death of Western Buddhism”. I understand that these pieces might at times be a challenging, difficult read for many, but articulating my thoughts and feelings through them has proved very important for me. The process has allowed me to finally draw a clear line under many disturbing issues that have been swept under the carpet by others, but which have nonetheless occupied far too much of my mental space over the past few years. On completion I will compile the series into a book with some extra material, and then will pivot my future Substack writing towards more creative, positive, and inspiring presentations of the Dharma.

When the Dharma Cops Call

If you expected Buddhist institutions to greet the virulent outbreak of scandals and abuse with any compassion or wisdom, prepare for a rude awakening. In fact, pull up a chair and welcome to the Bardo of bitter disappointment — that liminal waiting room where your illusions go to die while filling out insurance paperwork.

Buddhist groups, it turns out, behave exactly like every other human institution when crisis strikes. The first reflex? Go defensive. Then, as René Girard’s work on mimetic desire¹ masterfully demonstrates, communities seek out convenient scapegoats to hurl into the sacrificial flames — thereby expelling collective guilt, ensuring group cohesion, and allowing business to roll on as usual while leaving any systemic faults unaddressed.

We see this scapegoating response play-out everywhere: from politicians pointing to immigrants to mask their own failed economic policies; to your neighbors airing their personal grievances while locating the blame squarely within recent media talking points. You can even see it at play when your wacky uncle starts to spout his conspiracy theories at family gatherings. It’s become such a common response that calling it deluded might seem strange.

It was perhaps naïve of me to expect anything different from Buddhist organizations. Yet tragically, I could have chosen from any number of imploding Sanghas that endured teacher scandals to write this piece. I opted for Sogyal Rinpoche’s Rigpa organization as it received the most media and online interest. Yes, Rigpa won this dubious honor through sheer market penetration — when your scandal goes viral enough to trend alongside celebrity divorces, you’ve achieved a certain institutional immortality.

So, what follows is the at times painful dissection of the institutional response that unfolded to mitigate the reports of Sogyal Rinpoche’s misconduct. It was a response that turned into a case study in how Buddhist leadership deployed every weapon in its dialectic arsenal to deflect, obscure, and redirect blame away from systemic failures towards… well, towards pretty much everyone and everything except the actual problem. You see, this isn’t just about one disgraced teacher or one compromised organization. This is about the mismatch — glaring, structural, increasingly unbridgeable — between traditional Buddhist forms and the modern educated practitioners who’ve tried to inhabit them.

The Scandal That Wasn’t Surprising

In July 2017, eight senior students of Sogyal Rinpoche released a letter detailing decades of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse within Rigpa, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist organizations in the West. The allegations weren’t new. Sogyal had settled a lawsuit for similar claims back in 1994. But this time, the students went public, documenting severe beatings, coerced sexual acts, humiliation, financial exploitation, and a culture where abuse was rationalized as “crazy wisdom”. Yes, that old chestnut.

An independent investigation by UK law firm Lewis Silkin confirmed in 2018² that students had been “subjected to serious physical, sexual and emotional abuse” and that senior Rigpa figures “were aware of at least some of these issues and failed to address them.” Sogyal’s carefully manufactured public image as a compassionate rinpoche and bestselling author, stood in stark contrast to private conduct characterized by violence, manipulation, and exploitation.

The scandal forced an uncomfortable question: How would Buddhist institutions respond? Would they acknowledge systemic problems in guru-student dynamics, or would they defend traditional structures at all costs?

Enter the Clown Prince of Apologetics

When things go catastrophically wrong in a circus, they rush in the clowns to distract the audience from the trapeze artist currently plummeting toward the sawdust. In the Rigpa scandal, that clown arrived in the form of Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche (DJKR). He was shipped around Rigpa centers to “address” the scandal, his talks recorded and uploaded to YouTube, culminating in his pièce de résistance: a sprawling 10,000-word essay titled “Guru and Student in the Vajrayana”³, words that were destined to become one of the most spectacular exercises in victim-blaming and institutional protection ever committed to Facebook.

All-round entertainer and thespian DJKR

DJKR as he’s known to friends and critics alike, embodies a particular brand of Buddhist celebrity. He makes films, writes Dharma books in English, photographs well in designer robes, and has cultivated a reputation as the edgy, intellectually sophisticated voice of traditional Vajrayana in the modern world. He ironically self-identifies as a Buddhist fundamentalist and defender of the dharma. Think of him as that aging uncle trying hard to be like Ricky Gervais. Provocative, boundary-pushing, unafraid to say what others won’t. Except, except instead of puncturing celebrity pretension, he’s defending institutional abuse while wearing it like a badge of doctrinal purity. You see, what he brought to the table wasn’t any desire for real dialogue. He was fighting a war against dissent.

French philosopher Michel Foucault described how this dynamic plays out in his critique of polemical discourse. Foucault spent his career unpacking how institutions produce and maintain power through the strategic deployment of knowledge — what he termed “power-knowledge”⁴. In religious contexts, this operates through what Foucault called “pastoral power”: the authority to define truth, interpret experience, and determine who belongs inside or outside the community.

DJKR’s essay exemplifies what Michel Foucault calls the “sterilizing effects” of this discursive weapon perfectly⁵. Foucault describes how a polemicist arrives “encased in privileges that he possesses in advance”. In DJKR’s case, that privilege translates as lineage authority stretching from Naropa to Tilopa right up to our old friend ‘Tipsy’ Trungpa Rinpoche; plus scriptural dexterity; plus institutional standing; and plus the nuclear option of threatening critics with “vajra hell” if all else fails. Foucault describes how the polemicist “possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and make that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat.” DJKR was by no means conducting a conversation between equals, for he was armed , as Foucault reminds us, “with a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.”

Consider how DJKR framed the central issue. Students reported being beaten, sexually coerced, and psychologically manipulated. The evidence is documented. Independent investigators later confirmed it. But in DJKR’s telling, the problem isn’t what Sogyal did. It’s that students perceived it as abuse. “Everything Sogyal Rinpoche’s critical students are accusing him of is based on their projection,” he writes. Their suffering isn’t real; it’s a failure of spiritual development. If they maintained “pure perception,” they wouldn’t experience abuse as such.

This is Foucault’s insight made flesh: knowledge of what counts as reality gets determined by those with institutional power. Victims’ testimony — their direct, lived experience of harm — gets reclassified as “impure perception,” a category error requiring correction through better devotion. Meanwhile, the guru’s behavior, no matter how violent, gets sanctified through the same theological framework. It’s not abuse; it’s teaching that advanced students would recognize as such. If you don’t recognize it, that’s proof of your inadequacy, not evidence of wrongdoing.

Foucault would recognize this immediately as discourse functioning to maintain hierarchical power relations. The system is perfectly circular: the guru defines reality, your experience must conform to that definition, and any gap between the two reveals your failure, never the system’s.

The Scapegoat Carousel

René Girard’s mimetic theory provides another crucial lens for understanding such a response to crisis⁶. When communities face internal conflict that threatens group cohesion, they unconsciously activate the “scapegoat mechanism” I mentioned earlier. Scapegoating converges collective anxiety onto a single victim whose expulsion or condemnation temporarily restores peace. Crucially, this mechanism only works when participants genuinely believe in the victim’s guilt. As Girard writes, “to have a scapegoat is not to know you have one.”

DJKR’s essay operates as a scapegoat-generating machine, and he doesn’t limit himself to one target. Like a man wielding an AK-47 at a carnival shooting gallery, he sprays rounds at roughly a dozen convenient scapegoats, each designed to redirect attention away from institutional responsibility and toward external threats.

Scapegoat #1: The Victims Themselves
Most directly, DJKR scapegoats the letter-writers. Students who publicly criticized their teacher face “extremely grave consequences” — specifically, vajra hell, described as a state where “you will not hear Buddhist teachings for aeons and aeons and aeons.” The actual perpetrator of documented abuse disappears from moral consideration while victims become objects of righteous condemnation.

Scapegoat #2: Western Culture
DJKR dismisses potential critics as “liberal, puritanical, Abrahamic, or individualistic activists” pursuing “quasi-atheistic secularism, coated with moralistic ethics and bloated with dogmatic liberal self-righteousness.” This rhetorical move is elegant in its efficiency. Any critique becomes a cultural imposition — Western contamination of pure Eastern wisdom — rather than a legitimate concern about abuse. Defending abusive gurus transforms into an act of cultural preservation against colonialism.

Scapegoat #3: The Media
Taking a leaf straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook, he opens his essay attacking journalists across the political spectrum — CNN, Fox News, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, The Guardian, Breitbart — claiming they “cut up texts” and “pick and choose bits and pieces that fit their preconceived ideas.” This preemptive strike against media serves to discredit criticism before it’s even voiced. The problem isn’t what journalists might expose; it’s that they’re exposing it at all.

Scapegoat #4: Unprepared Students
DJKR suggests victims suffered because of inadequate preparation — ”some students had been Christians until perhaps the day before,” then suddenly received advanced teachings. While potentially containing truth, this deflects attention from whose responsibility that preparation was: Sogyal’s. But DJKRJ never sustains this line of critique against the teacher. Instead, he returns to questioning students: “Why weren’t they smart enough to examine the teacher before signing up?”

Scapegoats #(5 -12) A Greatest Hits Collection
Beyond these primary targets, DJKR deploys a rotating cast of secondary scapegoats: Buddhist magazines, secular mindfulness teachers, European and American Buddhist elites removing reincarnation from teachings, lifestyle gurus plagiarizing dharma, liberal intellectuals justifying violence, Tibetan lamas who give public initiations, preservationists in Sikkim/Nepal/Bhutan embalming culture, sectarian attitudes within Buddhism, and even karma itself.

Each scapegoat serves Girard’s identified function: deflecting collective responsibility while protecting systems and those who benefit from them. Rather than examining what went wrong within Rigpa — the specific mechanisms enabling Sogyal’s abuse, the institutional failures, the complicity of senior students who enforced the system — DJKR identifies external threats to bear responsibility. The problem becomes not internal corruption but external contamination.

DJKR operates here in war mode, not truth mode. The strategy transforms a teacher accountability crisis into a civilization-level culture war where critics become enemies of the dharma itself.

Polemics as Institutional Defense

Foucault identifies how the polemic “locates the root of error in moral failing” and finds “passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable.”⁷ DJKR deploys this mechanism like he’s reading from a script.

The critics aren’t wrong because their arguments have flaws — they’re wrong because they have karmic deficiencies. Their perception is impure, not as a philosophical disagreement but as a character defect rooted in bad karma. They fell for “glossy pamphlets and Tibetan exoticism” because they’re essentially spiritual tourists with compromised faculties. They’re infected with “liberal self-righteousness and dogmatic secularism.”

This is textbook polemics. It reduces legitimate concerns about abuse to symptoms of the accusers’ moral and spiritual failure.

DJKR writes: “I know many of you will roll your eyes and accuse me of copping out when I say this, but everything Sogyal Rinpoche’s critical students are accusing him of is based on their projection.”

There it is. The perfect closed loop. If you feel abused, that feeling is proof of your impure perception, which means you were never qualified to make the accusation in the first place. Abuse disappears as a category — no matter how severe the actions, they can be redefined as opportunities for spiritual development that students failed to properly utilize.

As one critic notes, “this idea did so much harm in Rigpa. One of the reasons students stayed and kept taking the abuse was because they wanted to be at that advanced level.”⁸

The Vajra Hell Insurance Policy

Perhaps the most insidious weapon in DJKR’s arsenal is his threat of cosmic punishment, specifically rebirth in vajra hell, described in medieval texts as a realm of incessant torment where you are severed from positive paths for eons.

Conjouring such fear to silence victims and critics is spiritual terrorism. Plain and simple.

From a Girardian perspective, these accusations function to establish the victims as guilty parties deserving punishment. Rather than recognizing whistleblowers as heroes who revealed systematic abuse — following, in fact, the Dalai Lama’s explicit instruction to expose misconduct — DJKR portrays them as spiritually condemned.

The actual perpetrator disappears from moral consideration while victims become objects of righteous judgment. This inversion characterizes the scapegoat mechanism: the community’s genuine problem (systematic abuse enabled by unchecked authority) gets projected onto those who exposed it.

Pure Perception as Theological Teflon

DJKR grounds his defense in the Vajrayana concept of “pure perception” — the practice of viewing one’s guru as an enlightened being. As a contemplative practice of mind training, pure perception serves legitimate purposes — training practitioners to look beyond surface appearances, recognize Buddha-nature in all beings, and dissolve reified projections.

The practice becomes pathological only when institutional authority weaponizes it, demanding that devotees maintain ‘pure perception’ specifically toward abusive teachers regardless of observable harm. As DJKR argues, once students receive initiation, they are obligated to maintain pure perception regardless of the guru’s behavior: “if his students had received a Vajrayana initiation… then from the Vajrayana point of view, there is nothing wrong with Sogyal Rinpoche’s subsequent actions.”

Nothing. Wrong.

This theological framework creates an impossible bind for abuse victims. The very act of recognizing abuse violates their spiritual commitment, marking them as failures rather than identifying the guru’s behavior as problematic. DJKR makes this explicit: “to think of labelling Sogyal Rinpoche’s actions as abusive, or to criticize a Vajrayana master even privately, let alone publicly and in print… is a breakage of samaya.”

From a Girardian lens, this represents a sophisticated mechanism for preventing revelation: the exposure of victimization. By defining any critique of the guru as a spiritual failure, the system ensures that abuse remains hidden, victims remain silent, and the scapegoat mechanism continues functioning.

The theological framework becomes not a path to enlightenment but a tool for maintaining systems of exploitation and deflecting accountability.

Moreover, DJKR pushes the logic to its absurd conclusion: practitioners must “apply pure perception to everyone and everything without exception, which means we must also apply it to Donald Trump and even Hitler.”

This isn’t spiritual courage. This is carte blanche dressed as devotion.

The Gish Gallop

DJKR’s essay exemplifies what’s known as a “Gish gallop”, overwhelming an audience with a high volume of rapid claims so no one can address them all. The text sprints from Nalanda scholasticism to Hitler-Trump pure perception to secular mindfulness theft. DJKR is stacking claims faster than they can be vetted, overwhelming readers with sheer volume rather than coherent argumentation.

This isn’t accident. It’s technique.

Foucault distinguishes between “the serious play of questions and answers” and discourse that proceeds from a position of unassailable authority to pronounce verdicts. DJKR’s text lives entirely in the second category. The length and complexity of his response doesn’t change the mechanism, it just makes it harder to see what’s happening.

The conversation is over before it begins. The verdict is already in. And if you disagree? Well, that just proves you weren’t qualified to have an opinion in the first place.

Power-Knowledge and the Foreclosure of Inquiry

Foucault’s analysis of power-knowledge relations illuminates what’s happening here. Power doesn’t simply repress, it produces knowledge, subjects, and truth-regimes. Those who control institutional discourse determine what counts as knowledge, who counts as qualified to speak, and what forms of critique are permissible.

DJKR arrives with the authority to define the terms: what Vajrayana “really” means, what samaya “actually” requires, who has standing to make claims. Students, by contrast, arrive already marked as unreliable: their perceptions “impure,” their karma “compromised,” their cultural conditioning “disqualifying.”

This is power maintaining itself through symbolic violence. And the darkest part? DJKR admits that “the person with the greater knowledge, power and therefore responsibility is also more culpable when those obligations are not fulfilled.” He knows power imbalances matter. He knows teachers have greater responsibility.

But then he spends 10,000 words explaining why, actually, if you received initiation, your teacher’s actions are beyond criticism, and if you criticize anyway, you’re the one headed for supernatural punishment.

Foucault would recognize this instantly. It’s polemics operating to validate real political practices through theological warfare.

What the Silence Screamed

Perhaps most damning wasn’t what prominent teachers said, but what they didn’t say. Following the letter and subsequent investigation, most Tibetan Buddhist figureheads hid behind a wall of silence. Despite mounting evidence, despite independent reports corroborating victims’ claims, despite the Dalai Lama himself stating that Sogyal had disgraced himself — the institutional response was largely... crickets.

This silence speaks volumes. To Western practitioners, it looked like exactly what it was: the secret boys’ club prioritizing institutional preservation over victim welfare, choosing lineage loyalty over moral courage. It brought to mind every other institutional abuse scandal — the Jeffrey Epstein FBI files, the Catholic Church’s decades of coverups — a similar pattern where those with power and knowledge chose reputation management over accountability.

A former Rigpa member’s plea captures the devastation: “We only wanted reassurance from the Tibetan Buddhist community that harm was harm and not acceptable. They didn’t need to mention Sogyal by name. They could be circumspect. We just needed reassurance. Sadly, only two lamas responded with clear statements condemning the actions.”⁹

That reassurance never came. What arrived instead were equivocations, theological complexities, reminders about pure perception, and barely-veiled threats about samaya violations. The message landed with surgical precision: the system will protect itself, and if you’re hurt by that system, you’re the problem.

Institutional Priorities

Here’s the bitter irony that would make the Buddha weep. Institutions claiming to preserve teachings on compassion demonstrated nothing resembling it when confronted with actual suffering. Notably absent from DJKR’s 10,000-word essay is any sustained acknowledgment of harm suffered by abuse victims or any practical suggestions for supporting survivors. While he briefly mentions “grave consequences” for abusive teachers, the vast majority of his attention focuses on defending the guru-student relationship, explaining Vajrayana theory, and warning students about maintaining pure perception.

This absence speaks volumes. In a crisis precipitated by revelations of severe abuse, a response that centers on theological abstraction rather than on victim welfare reveals institutional priorities. The focus remains on protecting the system — Vajrayana tradition, guru authority — rather than on those harmed by that system’s failures.

This pattern mirrors institutional responses to abuse in other contexts: Catholic Church scandals, organizational misconduct, corporate coverups. When institutions face crisis, self-preservation trumps accountability.

The Authenticity Trick

Throughout his essay, DJKR performs an interesting sleight of hand: defending abuse in the name of preserving “authentic” Vajrayana. We can’t “modify Vajrayana’s fundamental view just to suit the 21st century western mind-set,” he insists. The implication: any reform, any accountability measure, any ethical boundary that might prevent abuse constitutes cultural corruption, Western imperialism, a dilution of precious teachings.

But this confuses form with essence, container with content. Vajrayana’s “fundamental view” — the recognition of emptiness, the union of wisdom and compassion, the possibility of awakening in this lifetime — has nothing inherently to do with tolerating violence, protecting abusers, or threatening victims into silence. Those things aren’t the dharma. Those are institutional pathologies dressed in dharmic drag.

DJKR’s Tasteful Self-Promotion (Source: Facebook)

Real authenticity would require asking: What conditions allow abuse to flourish? How do power structures get weaponized? What accountability mechanisms exist, and why did they fail? Which traditional forms serve awakening, and which primarily serve institutional control? These questions threaten not the dharma but the systems built around it—systems that benefit those who currently wield power.

The Structural Mismatch

Most contemporary practitioners came to Buddhism seeking liberation, not submission. They learned to question authority from Sesame Street to graduate school. They live in cultures where “because I said so” stopped working around age twelve, where consent is revocable, where checks and balances prevent tyranny, and where “trust me, I’m enlightened” carries roughly the same credibility as a used car salesman’s promises.

Then they encounter a system that demands absolute obedience, forbids analysis post-initiation, reframes abuse as teaching, threatens cosmic punishment for criticism, and presents all this as not negotiable because, because… tradition. The collision isn’t a bug; it’s inevitable.

DJKR himself identifies this problem—Tibetan lamas teaching Westerners as if they’re Tibetans, failing to distinguish dharma from Tibetan cultural habits, giving advanced initiations to people who “had been Christians until perhaps the day before.” But having diagnosed the structural issue, he does nothing with it except blame students for being Western.

The Dying Tradition’s Last Gasp

Meanwhile, Tibetan Buddhism in exile slowly hemorrhages credibility and participation. Monasteries struggle to fill their chanting halls, at times desperately recruiting Indian and Nepali monks while young Tibetans abandon the tradition for more secular Western opportunities. Young tulkus run around like princelings, content to lap up adoration from dwindling audiences, often skipping the years of retreat and practice that made their predecessors stand out.

The institutional response to the Sogyal scandal — defensive, victim-blaming, more concerned with lineage purity than ethical clarity — accelerated this decline. Watching prominent teachers either remain silent or actively defend the indefensible proved devastating to Western sanghas. Many practitioners who survived the initial scandals couldn’t survive the response.

The exodus reveals something important: people can tolerate imperfect teachers, they can forgive mistakes, they can even work with complexity. But they can’t stomach institutions that gaslight them, threaten them, and prioritize tradition over basic human decency. The refusal to clearly state “harm is harm” proved fatal not to critics but to the institutions that refused.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Let’s be honest: Tibetan social and institutional forms are not for us. The insights of Vajrayana Buddhism may be valid — the view of emptiness, the practices of transformation, the possibility of liberation — but the forms and structures that transmitted them in Tibet cannot be transplanted wholesale into Western soil without catastrophic failures. If Buddhism is to survive in the modern world, not as museum artifact or cultural preservation project, but as living tradition of awakening — it will require the courage to let go of those forms that no longer serve: to center victims over institutions, to embrace accountability over theological immunity.

As Dagyab Rinpoche & Norden Dagyab point out:

“In traditional Indo-Tibetan culture, a clear hierarchy has existed, and it has been an accepted norm to worship the teacher. But in this day and age we need to rethink these norms. Or as Buddhist literature puts it, “The vows in the Vinaya must be adapted to time and place.”¹⁰

This doesn’t mean abandoning the dharma. It means recognizing that awakened beings manifest “in ways that are suitable for our current lived experience.” If a contemporary Vajrayana is to emerge, it will require forms appropriate to our culture, our legal systems, our assumptions about authority and autonomy.

It takes courage to accept that some forms are dead, and that’s okay. Tibetan feudal monasticism produced extraordinary contemplatives. It also produced the conditions for systematic abuse. We can honor the former while releasing the latter. If key Vajrayana insights are truly profound, they’ll manifest in new forms appropriate to contemporary practitioners. Or they won’t, and that will tell us something too.

The alternative is watching Buddhism continue on its path of slow death in the West — not from external persecution but from internal rot, as institutional responses to scandal drive away precisely the educated, sincere practitioners most capable of carrying the teachings forward.

The Signal Through the Wreckage

The institutional response to Buddhist scandals provides clear signals about the mismatch between current forms and modern practitioners. When student safety conflicts with guru authority, institutions choose authority. When transparency threatens power, they choose opacity. When victims speak truth, institutions deploy theology as a weapon to silence them.

These aren’t philosophical disagreements. They’re governance failures that enable real harm to real people. And they’re predictable: Foucault mapped how institutional power perpetuates itself through discourse; Girard showed how communities sacrifice victims to maintain cohesion. Buddhist organizations aren’t exempt from these dynamics. They’re exemplars of them.

The tragedy isn’t just individual abuse, devastating as that is. It’s the squandering of profound teachings through institutional malpractice. Generations of Western practitioners encountered genuine dharma: teachings that transformed their understanding of mind, reality, suffering, and freedom. Then they watched institutions prioritize everything except those teachings when crisis hit.

The Sogyal scandal didn’t destroy Tibetan Buddhism in the West. The response to it did. The defensive polemics, the scapegoating of victims, the theological obfuscation, the wall of silence — all reveal systems designed for a different world trying desperately to maintain themselves in this one.

What DJKR’s 10,000-word essay clearly demonstrates is that when you make everything the issue, nothing gets solved. And that’s not accident, that’s technique. It’s polemics as institutional defense, scapegoating as crisis management, theology as immunity shield. Once you see institutional self-preservation operating under dharmic cover, you can’t unsee it. The revelation, as Girard noted, becomes irreversible.

The Only Way Out Is Through

So what’s left? For some: nothing. They’re done, and reasonably so. For others: a painful process of separating wheat from chaff, teaching from teacher-worship, insight from institutional control. This requires exactly the kind of fearless investigation Buddhism claims to promote but institutions actively resist.

If Vajrayana has a future in the contemporary world, it won’t look like Tibet. It can’t. The forms that worked for medieval monks in mountain retreats don’t map onto 21st-century practitioners who read investigative journalism, understand power dynamics, and expect institutional accountability. That’s not cultural contamination. It’s reality.

Maybe authentic Vajrayana for us means modern practitioners fully realizing emptiness and compassion, then manifesting new forms, new structures, new training methods appropriate to this time and place. Or maybe it means something we can’t yet imagine. But it definitely doesn’t mean cosplaying Tibetan feudalism while threatening abuse victims with eternal damnation.

And that’s the real scandal — not that one teacher abused power, but that an entire institutional apparatus mobilized to defend the system that enabled it, revealing in the process exactly why these forms must die before something authentic can be born. When structures fail this catastrophically, collapse isn’t corruption of the dharma. It’s compost.

The question now: what grows from the wreckage? The answer depends on whether practitioners find the courage to choose awakening over institutional loyalty, accountability over tradition, and the messy work of building new forms to counter the false comfort of preserving broken ones. The dharma doesn’t need defending. It needs liberation from those who claim to protect it.

“It is unwise to disregard karma either through pretending to have a high point of view beyond karma or through nihilism, since it keeps us from trying to affect our karma through decreasing negative actions and increasing positive actions.“

Thinley Norbu , White Sail

1. For a general introduction to Girard’s work see The Girard Reader ed. James G. Williams Crossroads Publishing Company New York 1996.

2. See https://www.rigpa.org/independent-investigation-report

3. See Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche. (2017). Guru and student in the Vajrayana

4. From the French pouvoir-savoir, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/ and https://iep.utm.edu/foucault/ for introduction.

5. All Foucaults direct citations here are from Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault, from Michel Foucault Ethics Subjectivity and Truth, The New Press 1997

6. For general introductions to Girards work see https://iep.utm.edu/girard/ and https://violenceandreligion.com/mimetic-theory-2/. For further reading on the victims perspective see article at https://www.compactmag.com/article/rene-girard-and-the-rise-of-victim-power/

7. Again from Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault, from Michel Foucault Ethics Subjectivity and Truth, The New Press 1997

8. See https://beyondthetemple.com/victim-blaming-disguised-as-dharma/

9. Only two Rigpa teachers responded when petitioned, in addition the Dalai Lama and Mingyur Rinpoche commented publicly. See https://beyondthetemple.com/dzongsar-khyentse-his-dance-with-nihilism/

10. See https://info-buddhism.com/Taking_Responsibility_Seeing_Eye-to-Eye_with_the_Guru-Dagyab_Rinpoche+Norden_Dagyab.html