Thank you Matthew,

I-m neither a Buddhist scholar, nor historian. My perspective is that of a life long practitioner.

In the 70s my wife went on a travelling retreat with our Swami to India. It was an amazing experience. All was quite perfect, the Ganges in all its glory, the majestic foothills of the Himalayas, the food, towns, spiritual centers and temples.

The Swami crossed a line when he asked her to come to his bed. Though we continued our practices, mantra meditation, we could not continue to hold the teacher in that 'high place' any more.

Key question: did our teacher have any thing to teach us? Either before, or after? This becomes a heavy truth after finding out the guy was a horney robed fellow human. We agreed that his teachings on how to sit and meditate had great validity.

Something broke. Thankfully we were not so invested in our swami as so many in the 60s were of their spiritual teachers. We had read and studied enough on our own that we weathered the emotional and intellectual upheaval we experienced after my wifes, India experience.

We both became practitioners of the Buddhist tradition. My wife in the Tibetan teachings and I followed Vipassana.

I am sorry to read from your post of Chodrons apparent defense of Chogyam. Oddly though, I understand it.

Posts such as yours serve an invaluable service to all of us who have invested in spiritual practice from whatever corner. It is critical that teachers who are abusers are uncovered, outed, disgraced so they have to stop, so that people can get on with their

lives.

It saddens me to think that part of Chodrons realized wisdom came from the pounding she took on that wicked anvil of finding out your teacher is no good.

We are just human. I get that. Teachers will fail, terribly, and hurt countless along the way. Until that time where there's an active system for rooting these bad apples out of the monasteries and centers we must remain on watchful and alert. We must read messages such as yours so that we can protect ourselves.

Most importantly, we should find enough inner strength and confirmation as to the teachings validity so that we as practitioners can fly without the teachers hands all over us.

After all, it really does come down to following some rather simple teachings, all available in the written form. Take with a healthy grain of salt this thing about the need for a teachers 'transmissions' and blessings and the danger of assigning the teachers as the holders and keepers of the truth.

Tom