stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

42 STRIPPING THE GURUS
No one was around when I left the sodo, but I thought I
heard the sound of female laughter from within the labyrinth
of thin-walled rooms, and I couldn’t help wondering what
other rules might be relaxed when the roshi was out of town.
I walked out through the terracotta courtyard, and as I
passed the doghouse I saw that [the dog’s] dish contained ordinary
mud-colored kibbles. This confirmed my suspicion
that the [prohibited in the Buddhist diet] meat on the stove
hadn’t been for the dog, at all (Boehm, 1996).
In accord with such wholly unpunished, contemporary rulebreaking,
Janwillem van de Wetering (1999) relates his own experiences
in Kyoto:
I noticed that the young monks had discovered ways to break
the rules of the monastery.... When they put on a suit and a
cap nobody would recognize them, and I saw them climb over
the wall at night.
“Whatever do you do when you are over the wall?” I
asked Han-san, the youngest monk, who had become my
friend.
“As long as you don’t tell anyone,” Han-san said. “We go
to the cinema, and sometimes to a pub to have a little saké,
but it’s difficult because at 3:30 in the morning we have to
visit the master and we can’t be smelling of alcohol. And
sometimes we go to the whores.”
Zen priests and monks, unlike those in other branches of Buddhism
(e.g., Theravada), are not actually sworn to celibacy. Nevertheless,
the above clandestine activities, even by non-enlightened
individuals who cannot claim to have “transcended rules of good
and evil,” certainly constituted a breaking of the rules of the Asian
community/society. They further again suffered no associated punishment
from the monastery leaders—who themselves would surely
have violated the same rules in their younger days.
The point here is obviously not that “rules are meant to be
obeyed”—as Socrates would evidently have it, in docilely accepting
the unfair death-sentence handed to him by the ancient tribunal
(Askenasy, 1978), or in “just following the orders” of that authority.
Rather, the relevant point to take from all of these examples is
simply that the claim that spiritual aspirants followed the rules in
the agrarian East or otherwise in no way matches the documented
information. That, in turn, is wholly relevant to the “guru game,”