Sogyal Rinpoche and the abuse accusations rocking the Buddhist world
Punching. Emotional abuse. Eye-popping sexual
misdeeds. The accusations made against Sogyal Rinpoche – a key lama in the
uptake of Buddhist principles by the West – have rocked devotees, including
many in the top echelons of Australian business.
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| Sogyal Rinpoche |
On a late September evening this
year, a group of leading Australian business figures gathered in a Sydney
boardroom to discuss a series of allegations that had scandalised the Buddhist
world, and shaken their own to the core. The meeting was called by David White,
chairman of business strategy advisers Port Jackson and Partners; Ian Buchanan,
former lead partner with management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton; Diane
Grady, non-executive director of Macquarie Bank and chair of Ascham School; and
Gordon Cairns, chairman of Origin Energy and Woolworths.
What these four had in common was a
long-standing involvement in Practical Wisdom, a series of business retreats
held in Sydney over the past 15 years with Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan
Buddhist teacher and author of the 1992 international bestseller The
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
These
retreats were now up for review, as Rinpoche stood accused by eight of his
former senior students of decades of physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
"There
is such a deep sadness over what has happened," Buchanan tells Good Weekend. "Whatever the facts turn out to
be post investigation, this will inevitably be a tragedy. That this should come
from an organisation that has done so much good, and from an individual who has
done so much good, is very sad."
The
Practical Wisdom group had formed in 2002 as a way of making available to
leaders in Australian business, public health, government and defence
"authentic Buddhist teachings on meditation, compassion and wisdom"
from arguably the most famous Tibetan in the world after the Dalai Lama.
Sogyal
Rinpoche had first started visiting Australia in the mid-1980s, nearly a decade
before his book was to become a spiritual classic. Regarded as a master of the
great Tibetan oral traditions, Rinpoche's book had managed to lay out in
simple, eloquent terms various Buddhist concepts on impermanence, karma,
rebirth, compassion for the dying, and the benefits of training the mind
through meditation. In so doing, he slaked a spiritual thirst and inspired
millions.
Comedian John Cleese described the
book as the most important he'd ever read, while the San Francisco
Chronicle called it a "magnificent achievement" and an
"inestimable gift". Around the world, hospitals, health institutions
and palliative care centres began adopting the book as an invaluable aid in
dealing with the sick and dying.
But on July 14 this year, Rinpoche's
world came crashing down, and soon thereafter the faith of thousands of his
devotees and admirers. That was the day he received a 12-page letter from the
eight former senior students accusing him of years of violent and abusive
behaviour.
"This letter is our request to
you to stop your unethical and immoral behaviour," they wrote. "Your
public face is one of wisdom, kindness, humour, warmth and compassion, but your
private behaviour, the way you conduct yourself behind the scenes, is deeply
disturbing and unsettling."
The letter then laid out in
spectacular and shocking detail the nature of the Tibetan master's alleged
abuse: "We have received directly from you, and witnessed others
receiving, many different forms of physical abuse. You have punched and kicked
us, pulled hair, torn ears, as well as hit us and others with various objects
such as your back-scratcher, wooden hangers, phones, cups and many other
objects that happened to be close at hand."
"Your physical abuse – which
constitutes a crime under the laws of the lands where you have done these acts
– have left monks, nuns and lay students of yours with bloody injuries and
permanent scars. This is not second-hand information; we have experienced and
witnessed your behaviour for years."
Among the letter's co-authors: his
Australian IT expert Ngawang Sangye, and his personal assistant, an Australian
artist turned Buddhist nun known as Drolma, who fled Rigpa – the organisation
Rinpoche founded – in 2010 after what she claims was nearly eight years of
abuse.
You use your role as a teacher to gain access to
young women, and to coerce, intimidate and manipulate them into giving you
sexual favours.
Excerpt from letter written to Rinpoche from eight
former students
"His behaviour was often wildly
unpredictable and irrational," Drolma tells Good Weekend in
a Skype interview from London, where she now lives. "If anything went
wrong and his anxiety got the better of him, he would take it out on me. One of
those times he grabbed me by the ear and it was torn all the way along the
back. There was blood pouring down my neck."
According
to his accusers, the mistreatment went far beyond the physical. "Your
emotional and psychological abuse has been perhaps more damaging than the
physical scars you have left on us," they wrote. "You have threatened
us and others, saying if we do not follow you absolutely, we will die 'spitting
up blood'. You have told us that our loved ones are at risk of ill-health, or
have died, because we displeased you in some way."
Then
came a range of alleged eye-popping sexual misdeeds. "You use your role as
a teacher to gain access to young women, and to coerce, intimidate and
manipulate them into giving you sexual favours."
"Some
of us have been subjected to sexual harassment in the form of being told to
strip, to show you our genitals (both men and women), to give you oral sex,
being groped, asked to give you photos of our genitals, to have sex in your bed
with our partners, and to describe to you our sexual relations with our
partners."
"You
have for decades, and continue to have, sexual relationships with a number of
your student attendants, some who are married. You have told us to lie on your
behalf, to hide your sexual relationships from your other girlfriends. Publicly
you claim that your relationships are ordinary, consensual and proper because
you are not a monk. You deny any wrongdoing and have claimed on occasion that
you were seduced."
The
letter was an incendiary device dropped in the heart of one of the world's
major religions. It was sent not just to Rinpoche, but also copied to the Dalai
Lama, a select group of Tibetan Buddhist teachers, and a number of Rinpoche's
senior students.
It
was leaked almost immediately, going viral on social media and creating the
kind of uproar we've become accustomed to seeing lately in Hollywood, or indeed
the Catholic Church, but seldom in the serene, do-no-harm world of Buddhism.
Here
was the spiritual director of a global organisation, Rigpa – the name is a
Tibetan word meaning an awareness of the innermost nature of mind – being
accused not just of physical, psychological and sexual misconduct, but also of
maintaining a "gluttonous" lifestyle that had been funded by – and
kept hidden from – his thousands of students for decades. And this from a man
who had taught so masterfully on how to find inner peace and contentment.
"I
have a complex PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] that comes from long-term
devaluation, neglect and assault," Ngawang Sangye tells Good Weekend.
"I
was a monk for 14 years and that's why I had very close access and saw things
like Sogyal punching women, men, slapping, hitting with objects. There is an
element of shame in how long it took me to break [away] because I thought it
wasn't as bad as it looked. "It was much worse than it looked. Harvey
Weinstein has nothing on this person."
Sogyal Rinpoche was six months old when he entered the monastery of his spiritual master
Jamyang Khyentse in the wild, mountainous Kham province of eastern Tibet known
as the "Land of Snows". For centuries monasteries had provided
Tibetan children with their main source of education, occasionally finding
among their young charges the reincarnations of great masters who had passed
away.
By
his own account, Rinpoche was one of these select children. Although born into
a family of traders known as the Lakars, he was given the name Sogyal by his
master, who recognised him as the incarnation of the great 19th-century
visionary saint, Tertön Sogyal, a teacher to the 13th Dalai Lama, predecessor
to the current Dalai Lama.
At
the time of Sogyal Lakar's birth in 1947, Tibet was under the nominal
protection of India, but soon to become one of the world's most troubled
countries following the Chinese invasion in 1950. In 1954, Sogyal escaped with
his family over the mountains to India, five years before the Dalai Lama fled
the country and more than a decade before the full horrors of the Chinese
genocide began to reveal themselves.
As
American author John Avedon describes in his celebrated book, In Exile from the Land of Snows: "The
obliteration of entire [Tibetan] villages was compounded by hundreds of public
executions, carried out to intimidate the surviving population. The methods
employed included crucifixion, dismemberment, vivisection, beheading, burying,
burning and scalding alive, dragging the victims to death behind galloping
horses and pushing them from airplanes; children were forced to shoot their
parents, disciples their religious teachers. Everywhere monasteries were prime
targets. Monks were compelled to publicly copulate with nuns and desecrate
sacred images before being sent to a growing string of labour
camps."
Like
all Tibetans of his generation, Sogyal Lakar almost certainly carried the
traumas of his ravaged country into exile. After being schooled in India and
attending university in Delhi, he arrived in London in the early 1970s to study
comparative religion at Cambridge University's Trinity College. He soon assumed
the honorific of Rinpoche (meaning "Precious One") and began
establishing himself as a teacher, finding a receptive audience among young
Westerners searching for the kind of spiritual enlightenment Buddhism seemed to
offer.
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Sogyal Rinpoche became a Buddhist superstar after the release of his book, which has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide. Photo: Mayu Kanamori MKZ
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Buddhism
had first come to Tibet in the seventh century as a complex philosophical and
ritual system known as Vajrayana Buddhism. This form of Buddhism emphasised
transforming the mind through "skilful methods"; and this was what
Sogyal studied from childhood.
Vajrayana
Buddhism was no easy path. In order to slip the shackles of the ego, a student
needed to give total obedience to the teacher, no matter how unreasonable or
irrational the teacher's behaviour might seem. "Crazy Wisdom" was the
name given to this form of instruction, where a guru could employ all sorts of
outlandish methods to challenge a student's ego.
Tibetan
Buddhism is filled with such stories and Sogyal Rinpoche cited a perfect
example of one in The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying. He described how a Tibetan master, Patrul
Rinpoche, was introduced to the nature of mind by being knocked unconscious by
his own master, Do Khyentse:
"As
Patrul Rinpoche approached, prostrating all the time, Do Khyentse hurled
pebbles and then larger rocks and stones at him. When he finally came within
reach, Do Khyentse started punching him and knocked him out altogether."
"When
Patrul Rinpoche came to, he was in an entirely different state of
consciousness. Each of Do Khyentse's curses and insults had destroyed the last
remnants of Patrul Rinpoche's ordinary conceptual mind, and each stone that hit
him opened up the energy centres and subtle channels in his body."
In Sogyal Rinpoche's case, the
"channels in his body" were less than subtle, according to British
journalist Mary Finnigan, who was to spend nearly two decades trying to expose
him. "I'm one of the people who launched Sogyal on his career as a teacher
in London in 1973, when he was very young and very inexperienced," she
told a Canadian documentary team in 2011. "There was just this continuous
stream of seductions. He didn't even hide it in those days. He was absolutely
flagrantly promiscuous. He would pick girls up – usually vulnerable, needy –
and entertain them for a short while and then dump them."
One
of those young women, American Victoria Barlow, first met Rinpoche in New York
in 1976 after grappling for years with her own childhood sexual abuse. Rinpoche
was visiting Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the pioneer of Tibetan Buddhism in the
US, and Barlow wanted Sogyal Rinpoche's advice on the dharma, or Buddhist teachings.
"He
opened the apartment door without a shirt, holding a bottle of beer,"
Barlow recalls now in a written response to Good Weekend. "I [had] just turned 22 and I
arrived in an almost floor-length dark brown tent dress that I had made a few
months before in Calcutta.
"I
thanked him for taking the time to see me and was in the process of asking him
my question when he reached over and touched my cheek. He said, 'I think we
have a special connection.'"
"My
face flushed. I had just been touched by a lama. This was such a blessing … but
as I spoke, he reached toward me and literally mashed my face with his face. He
was literally slobbering all over me.
"He
roughly put his hand up my long dress, groped my privates, unzipped himself and
lay on top of me, literally grunting for the minute or two until he released.
Immediately, he got up, said he had things to do, that he was getting ready to
travel across America."
Barlow
was mortified, but still willing to believe that – in the spirit of "Crazy
Wisdom" – Rinpoche had just transmitted a powerful "source of
enlightenment".
In
the following months, she received several calls from him, including one from
Trungpa's spiritual centre in Boulder, Colorado, where Rinpoche "spoke
with amazement about how Trungpa had girls lined up outside his door like a
rock star and that he wanted that, too. I thought he was joking and only later
realised that was his actual aspiration, to have a conveyor belt of
groupies."
Despite
growing doubts, Barlow allowed her spiritual mentor to convince her to fly to
Berkeley, California to receive teachings from another Buddhist master. She was
invited to stay with an American couple, both Tibetan Buddhist students who
showed her a room with two beds. "They said, 'That's Sogyal's bed next to
yours. He told [us] to put you in here.' I felt a combination of shock, shame,
humiliation, defeat and anger."
"Within
a minute of his arriving in the room, Sogyal said he'd had a fight with his
girlfriend in London. He made it apparent that he wanted sex with me, so that made
me just some lay he'd arranged to use in Berkeley." Barlow concluded then
that Rinpoche was a "charlatan"; that she needed to get away as soon
as possible. "Eight weeks later," she says, "I miscarried his
child."
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying became a spiritual cause célèbre almost from the moment it was
published, eventually selling more than three million copies worldwide and
being translated into 34 languages in 80 countries. In a world dominated by
greed, cynicism and personal grandstanding, the 1992 book presented a compelling
philosophy for modern life, drawing deeply from ancient Buddhist
teachings.
Rinpoche
was suddenly a Buddhist superstar, soon appearing in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1993
film Little Buddha, and travelling the world
establishing new centres for Rigpa, the organisation he'd set up under the
patronage of the Dalai Lama.
After
starting out in a London squat in the early 1970s, he was on his way to
building a global organisation with 130 centres in 41 countries, including
Australia, relying mainly on the generous donations of his growing legion of
students.
In
2007, the then Irish president Mary McAleese opened his spiritual care centre
in south-west Ireland. The following year the Dalai Lama, together with
France's first lady at the time, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, attended the inauguration
of his $12 million temple, named Lerab Ling, in Roqueredonde in southern
France.
Through his
efforts, millions of people were becoming exposed to the wise and gentle
teachings of Buddhism; hospitals, palliative care centres and healthcare
practitioners were beginning to adopt Buddhist methods in tending to the dying
and their families; international conferences were being held on ways of
creating more compassionate societies.
"Mindfulness"
was becoming the new buzzword, in no small thanks to this Tibetan son of
traders.
In
1989, Rigpa established itself in Australia, with hundreds of people flocking
to the first of its annual retreats on the shores of Myall Lakes, north of
Sydney. (Rigpa would later spend more than $1 million having a Glenn
Murcutt-designed home built for Rinpoche at nearby Blueys Beach.)
The
Tibetan lama's appeal was self-evident. Not only did he have a great command of
English and a mischievous sense of humour, his teachings were lucid and
accessible. "If you really know how to take the teachings to heart,
happiness is in ourselves," he told his rapt audience during one retreat.
"It's
the way we think. And there we can think of what Buddha said: 'We are what we
think, all that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the
world.' "
For the purposes of disclosure, I attended a few
of his retreats in the early 2000s. I wanted to learn how to meditate, but also
to understand better how Buddhism could be integrated into modern life. In
2001, I reported on a historic meeting at the Commonwealth Bank's Sydney
headquarters where 200 Australian business leaders – chief executives, bankers,
brokers, management consultants, investment advisers and fund managers – met
with Rinpoche to explore ways of bringing "wisdom" and
"compassion" into their businesses.
Two
days later, the Tibetan teacher spoke to leaders of the future at the
Australian Graduate School of Management about "values-based
leadership". Rinpoche had been urged to do so by Ian Buchanan, one of
Australia's leading management consultants, who, in turn, had been asked to
become involved by Sue Pieters-Hawke, the eldest child of former prime minister
Bob Hawke and his wife Hazel. Both Buchanan and Pieters-Hawke were students of
Tibetan Buddhism.
Buchanan
had been introduced to The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying nearly
a decade earlier after being told he was dying from an incurable illness. (He
underwent three years of treatment for what he describes as "a cross
between tuberculosis and leprosy".) Based in Singapore, Buchanan flew to
Sydney to attend a Myall Lakes retreat and then, after, relocating to Sydney in
2000, visited the retreat on a regular basis to receive more of Rinpoche's
teachings. The two men developed an instant rapport.
"I'd
been advising government and business for many years," he explains now,
"and so I started to talk to Rinpoche about what I thought was a desperate
need of business leaders to get into meditation, given that they had few ways
of letting go of their stress. Rinpoche said, 'I don't know anything about
business. Will you teach me?' And so we pulled together a small group and we
became his business coaches."
From
this initiative, the "Practical Wisdom" leaders' retreat was born in
2002. It was the business offshoot to Rigpa and, uniquely, it involved a select
group of Australian business figures meeting annually with the Tibetan teacher
to learn how to apply Buddhist principles to their personal and professional
lives.
Gordon
Cairns, currently the chairman of both Origin Energy and Woolworths, became one
of the organisers while serving as chief executive of Lion Nathan Breweries.
He'd just finished reading The Tibetan Book of
Living and Dying and
was attracted to its themes of interconnectedness and the requirements of
acting with compassion.
"I've
always believed we have to find the answers to the big questions: Why are we here?
and What's the meaning of life?" he tells Good Weekend. "It was more than running a beer
company or being the chairman of Woolies. To me it was the whole [Buddhist]
principle of bodhicitta – which is loving-kindness.
"I
think [these teachings] helped me change in ways for the better: from being a
tough perfectionist, internally competitive, nothing-is-ever-good-enough chief
executive, to one who is humanistic, encouraging, inspiring."
Over
the 15 years that Buchanan and Cairns helped convene the "Practical
Wisdom" retreats, there was nothing in Rinpoche's behaviour to suggest
scandal. Yes, there had often been questions about his inner circle of
beautiful young women, and how it was that a teacher of loving-kindness could
so often publicly humiliate his senior students. But never a hint of physical
or sexual abuse.
According
to Drolma, his former personal assistant, that was because the abuse only ever
happened behind closed doors. "Sometimes he would just lay into me in the
stomach and I'd be winded and he'd bring me to tears," she recalls now.
"Then he would sometimes follow up with a slap … but I had to help him put
on his ceremonial robes and get ready to put him on stage with all the other
Tibetan lamas and monks. Sogyal would then walk on and be part of the ceremony
and I would have to follow him, holding his ritual objects, with tears
streaming down my face. Nobody else had seen it.
"I'd
always thought it was due to my imperfections, that this was my fast-track to
enlightenment … but when the humiliation and abuse didn't stop, that's when I
started thinking, 'This is just an abusive man, it's not an enlightened person
working on my spiritual wellbeing.' "
Barbara
Lepani, a senior policy officer with the federal Department of Communications
and the Arts, poses a different view. As a senior student of Rinpoche for
nearly 35 years, she knows what it's like to be on the receiving end of his
"crazy wisdom".
She
remembers once being whacked over the head with a wooden umbrella after failing
to distil his teachings. "My first reaction was anger: 'How dare you?' But
then the story of Do Khyentse knocking Patrul Rinpoche unconscious came to
mind, and I thought, 'Hang on, is this what's going on here?' Because Rinpoche
didn't do such things with just anyone. He always checked to see whether you
were 'with him' and could take him on as a Vajrayana master."
This
was the point that another Buddhist master, the filmmaker and writer Dzongsar
Khyentse Rinpoche, tried to make recently after being asked to comment on the
scandal. "Frankly," he said, "for a student of Sogyal Rinpoche
who has consciously received abhisheka [initiation into any Vajrayana
teaching] – and therefore stepped onto the Vajrayana path – to think of
labelling Sogyal Rinpoche's actions as 'abusive', or to criticise a Vajrayana
master even privately, let alone publicly and in print, or simply to reveal
that such methods exist, is a breakage of samaya [the sacred spiritual bond between
student and teacher].
"[But]
if no proper warnings and no fundamental training were given prior to the
Vajrayana teachings, then Sogyal Rinpoche is even more in the wrong than his
critical students."
Dzongsar
Khyentse seemed to be having a bet each way. He also expressed puzzlement that
"intelligent" students hadn't better analysed their teacher before
signing up. "I really don't understand why they waited 10 or even 30 years
before saying anything. How come they didn't see all these problems in the
first or second year of their relationship with Sogyal?"
For those who wanted to look, the signs had been
on the public record for more than two decades. In 1994, an American student –
using the pseudonym Janice Doe – filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of
California seeking $US10 million in reparations from Rinpoche for sexually and
physically abusing her. The case was settled out of court and, in those
pre-internet days, the matter quietly faded, although not without a number of
outraged devotees deserting ship.
The
following year, the UK's Telegraph magazine published new
allegations of sexual abuse by two more women. In 2011, a Canadian documentary In the Name of Enlightenment aired, with Victoria Barlow going
public, as well as a young Frenchwoman, "Mimi", who described years
of Stockholm Syndrome-like abuse. "You are locked up in this tiny
environment," she said, "where someone is beating you up every day,
but he's also the person who's giving you [your] only emotional
attention."
The
dam finally burst last year at Lerab Ling in France, when Rinpoche punched Ani
Chökyi, a Danish nun, in the stomach in front of 1000 students.
Ani
Chökyi later issued a statement insisting that Rinpoche had been "loving
beyond any ordinary description" and that the blow was a "soft
punch". Not according to Gary Goldman, a former US army ranger and
long-term Buddhism student seated up the front. "I guess the footstool
wasn't in exactly the right position," he told the UK Telegraph. "He
had this flash of anger and he just punched her – a short gut punch."
That
was enough for Goldman to leave Rigpa and put his name to the letter accusing
Rinpoche of abuse. Four days after receiving their letter, Rinpoche replied,
expressing his sadness and distress, but claiming his conscience was clear.
"From
the bottom of my heart I humbly ask your forgiveness," he wrote.
"Since reading your letter I have been thrown into deep reflection and I'm
finally resolved that if this is the way that my actions are perceived, then I
do need to take real action. If I am the problem, that can be solved. There's
no need to bring everything down. I implore you to keep this bigger picture in
mind."
Less
than four weeks later – on August 11 – Rinpoche announced his decision to
retire as spiritual director of Rigpa, while also reaffirming his decision to
enter a three-year retreat. That same day, the international Rigpa board
announced the establishment of an independent investigation by a "neutral
third party" and a new "code of conduct and grievance process".
The
Dalai Lama himself made it clear he was in no mood for equivocation. At a
Buddhist seminar in northern India's Ladakh, he declared emphatically – and not
for the first time – that ethical misconduct was often caused by Tibet's
traditional feudal system and that students should never follow their guru
unquestioningly.
He
then said his "very good friend Sogyal Rinpoche" was
"disgraced" and he encouraged all such misconduct to be made public.
It was a devastating rebuke from Buddhism's most revered figure.
While
no charges had been laid at the time of writing, a number of complaints have
reportedly been filed with police in various countries, including France and
England, and the Charity Commission in the UK has begun a preliminary
investigation. Sogyal Rinpoche has also been diagnosed with colon cancer and
undergone surgery on two tumours.
On
that late September evening in the Sydney boardroom of Port Jackson and
Partners, 10 weeks after the abuse allegations were first made public, 22
business leaders convened to vent feelings ranging from "shock and anger
to dismay and confusion". Some were so visibly moved, they cried.
As
Ian Buchanan recalls now: "A number of them said, 'I will never be able to
watch the videos of him teaching again.' And I said, 'Well, I will.' It's not
that he might not have let us down very badly, but the teachings and the way he
teaches them are invaluable and precious, and for me have been of incalculable
value in having a relatively peaceful, stable life in the face of some
near-death experiences."
While
not defending the alleged abuses, Buchanan voices his sorrow at Rinpoche's
stunning fall from grace – a man who has given his life to
bringing Buddhism to the West after fleeing his country as a child
refugee. "He's done a wonderful job of sharing the teachings, but that
does not preclude him having that damage as a human being."
Jillian
Broadbent, a former member of the Reserve Bank board and currently chancellor
of the University of Wollongong, agrees with Buchanan. "I have found the
teachings of mindfulness most valuable, both in difficult times and in my daily
living," she tells Good Weekend.
"They
have similarly brought value and contentment to many others for more than two
millennia. I certainly see merit and increased effectiveness in a wider
adoption of Buddhist ethics across the Australian business community. I am
aware of the allegations against Sogyal Rinpoche [but] I remain appreciative of
my own learnings and benefit from the teachings, and respectful of their long
lineage. It would be really disappointing if these allegations damaged the
teachings and the benefits their adoption can bring."
Gordon
Cairns echoes these sentiments, acknowledging how deeply he has been influenced
by Buddhism and how important it is now not to conflate the teachings with the
teacher. At the same time, he urges his colleagues to separate from Rigpa and
find another Buddhist master (a position the group has since adopted).
"This
teaching has had a wonderfully profound effect on the West," he tells Good Weekend. "It's had a wonderfully
profound effect on business leaders here in Australia, and a wonderfully
profound effect on me."
The
chairman of Woolworths then offers a Buddhist parable to sum up his sympathy,
not just for Rinpoche's alleged victims but for Rinpoche himself: "When
you see a man beating a dog, you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the
dog."
In
a perfect world, that is a wonderful testament to forgiveness, but for Sogyal
Rinpoche's strongest critics, perhaps not in this lifetime.
SOURCE: http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/sogyal-rinpoche-and-the-abuse-accusations-rocking-the-buddhist-world-20171115-gzm7ra.html
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