stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

118 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Certain journalists, quoting teachers from other Buddhist
sects, have implied that Trungpa did not teach real Buddhism
but a watered-down version for American consumption,
or that his teaching was corrupted by his libertine outlook.
After doing Vajrayana practices, reading texts on them
by Tibetan authorities, and visiting Buddhist centers in the
United States and Europe, I was satisfied that this allegation
is untrue. The practices taught in Vajradhatu are as
genuinely Buddhist as anything in the Buddhist world....
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, after the Tendzin scandal, insisted
to Vajradhatu students that Trungpa had given them
authentic dharma, and they should continue in it exactly as
he had prescribed (Butterfield, 1994; italics added).
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche—“Rinpoche” being a title meaning
“Precious One”—was head of the oldest Nyingma or “Ancient
Ones” School of Tibetan Buddhism from 1987 until his death in
1991.
Even with all that, Peter Marin (1995)—a non-Buddhist writer
who taught for several months at Naropa in 1977—still validly
observed that the activities at Naropa were relatively tame, compared
to the oppression which could be found in other sects.
In the end, though, Andrew Harvey (2000) put it well:
In general, I think that nearly all of what passes for “crazy
wisdom” and is justified as “crazy wisdom” by both master
and enraptured disciple is really cruelty and exploitation,
not enlightened wisdom at all. In the name of “crazy wisdom”
appalling crimes have been rationalized by master and disciple
alike, and many lives have been partly or completely devastated.
One is of course still free, even after all that, to respect Trungpa
for being up-front about his “drinking and wenching” (in Downing,
2001), rather than hypocritically hiding those indulgences, as
many other guru-figures have allegedly done. That meager remainder,
however, obviously pales drastically in comparison with
what one might have reasonably expected the legacy of any selfproclaimed
“incarnation of Maitreya Bodhisattva” to be. Indeed, by
that very criterion of non-hypocrisy, one could admire the average
pornographer just as much. Sadly, by the end of this book, that
point will only have been reinforced, not in the least diminished, by
the many individuals whose questionable influence on other peo-