What Do We Do About “Bad” Teachers?

I stumbled on a teaching from Sogyal Rinpoche, and I want to share it, talk about it. I don’t know him, so I google him, looking to learn something about him so that, in introducing his teaching, I can put it in context. I discover that he’s a contemporary of mine, a Tibetan teacher who retired in disgrace amid accusations of sexual and physical abuse and financial improprieties.

I am stopped by such revelations. I still haven’t gone back to reading Alice Munro. She was my favorite writer for years. I bought her books faster than I read them for fear that I would run out of her stories. Could I ever write like Alice? And then I stumbled on the report, sometime after she’d passed, that Alice had failed to protect her daughter from sexual abuse. I haven’t read a Munro story since. I keep thinking that I should go back to her stories, but I haven’t. Who am I punishing? What am I afraid of?

Sogyal Rinpoche is only one of many flawed Buddhist teachers, some much closer to me, Zen teachers, teachers in my lineage. Many of my peers parse our world of sinners. There are the Forgiven and the Unforgiven. To be classified as Forgiven seems to require penance, making amends in some way, or completing treatment of some sort. My first career was in mental health. I spent some years working in the family court where violent offenders were offered “anger management” as an alternative to incarceration. Everyone chose anger management. I didn’t see much evidence that it helped.

Sogyal Rinpoche  wrote The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It’s on my shelf. I read it years ago. I don’t remember it, but I think I got something out of it at the time. At least, the book is still there. Do I need to get rid of his book now that I’ve learned of his sins?

There’s a modern koan here which keeps coming up. I will call it, “The Flawed Teacher.” I haven’t written the “case” story yet, but I have some of the commentary by later teachers which, in the ancient koan collections, follows the case.

Roshi Jishu Holmes said, “There is no perfect teacher outside. I have a perfect teacher inside.”

Roshi Peter Muryo Matthiessen said, “The human being is a wonderful animal, and the human being is a terrible animal.”

Trungpa Rinpoche said, “Judge the teaching, not the teacher.”

You see the conundrum? If I share Sogyal Rinpoche’s teaching, am I condoning his behavior? If I don’t share his teaching, am I denying that we are all wonderful and terrible, that we are all human beings? Should I go back to reading Alice Munro? Should I share a teaching from Sogyal Rinpoche?  We can’t avoid the challenge by banning all the terrible people. We still have to live with ourselves.