New Book: The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side by Mark Oppenheimer

The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side - by Mark Oppenheimer

Publication Date: November 12, 2013 -http://amzn.com/B00GMVTPYI

This is really a long article - or a mini-book - minimal price - for Kindles only - but i think you can buy it anywhere in the world - not limited to just U.S. market. 

Nearly 50 years ago, a Zen Buddhist monk—fleeing a cloud of suspicion—arrived in Manhattan, penniless and alone. Eido Shimano would quickly build an unrivaled community of followers: Zen students he culled from the heights of New York society to form arguably the most prestigious Japanese Buddhist organization in the country. Authors, entertainers, and scions of vast fortunes, all questing for spiritual enlightenment, flocked to study and live in his spacious compound. But always there were whispers that things were not what they seemed.

With sexual-abuse allegations against Zen leaders in the U.S. now stunningly common, The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side examines a dangerously complicated corner of the tradition—and shows how aspects of Buddhist practice may actually facilitate abuse. Featuring exclusive reporting and interviews, the book is a powerful true story of secrets and sexual exploitation perpetrated under the guise of religion—and a cautionary tale of the dark side of Zen in America.

An essayist, reporter, and critic, Mark Oppenheimer is one of the country’s leading investigators of religion. He writes a religion column for The New York Times and also writes for The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Slate, The Forward, and Tablet, among other publications. Oppenheimer has a doctorate in American religious history and directs the Yale Journalism Initiative. The author of three previous books, he lives with his family in New Haven, Connecticut.

What a  title!
Josh can you let me know if it becomes available other than kindle please

Thanks

i don't think it will be printed - just the kindle version., but i can probably email a copy to you - but not for sharing.... do i have your email? it would be a pdf and you could read it on the computer or print it out.

I have emailed you my new email address
Thanks

You can download a free Kindle reader from the Amazon site - I did and it works. The book is a breezy read, even-handed, not much new.

Sexual Abuse in the Zen Sangha: Mark Oppenheimer’s Zen Predator of the Upper East Side

November 13, 2013 By James Ford




I only met the Reverend Eido Shimano once, in 2010, at a ceremony where he publicly pronounced his senior student, the Reverend Roko Sherry Chayat as a roshi, or senior Zen teacher in the Rinzai line. In his mid-eighties, I was struck at the quality of his presence. The old roshi simply oozed charisma.

And I was a bit wary. Okay, a bit more than a bit. His entire teaching career he had been shadowed by rumors of sexual improprieties. And when I met him he had recently publicly confessed to this and was through negotiations with his board, winding down his teaching career.

That more or less graceful exit collapsed not long after this ceremony when it was revealed he had secretly written a letter to supporters in Japan where he denied all that he had admitted to in America. With that the proverbial [banned term] hit the fan, and to throw in the other appropriate metaphor, any fig leafs for his departure were gone.

I had a small part at this moment writing the first of a series of letters from Zen teachers calling on his immediate removal from leadership. At this point there are lawsuits and attempts at arbitration over assets and financial commitments. But the end does seem to be on the horizon, if a somewhat hazy horizon.

Mark Oppenheimer’s essay The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side, was released on Amazon yesterday. I don’t think it will prove to be the last word, it’s really too early for that. And the essay/book is too brief. So brief he doesn’t even mention the efforts on the part of Reverend Shimano’s Dharma successor the Reverend Genjo Marinello to address the issue, which would be required in any comprehensive review of what had transpired.

But it shows enough, and it is devastating. The book feels to me a clear-eyed look at Reverend Shimano’s fall. I found it a solid bit of journalism, letting people have their say and with only a minimum of editorializing, and less, I felt, moralizing.

And he avoids some of the possible traps for the unwary. For instance much has been made in some corners of the fact Reverend Shimano, who received his formal authorization in a public ceremony witnessed by perhaps a hundred people, turned out not to have been registered at the home temple in Japan. This is significant. But people have gone on to suggest therefore he didn’t actually have Dharma transmission, the critical authorization for a Zen teacher. Oppenheimer simply cuts through this as “arcane controversies…” And, instead, keeps his focus on the confusions of the heart that allow such things to happen, both for victim and perpetrator.

Sadly, no one comes out of it unscathed. And that is adequately documented.

Also, if we’re willing there are lessons to be learned for all of us that I feel Mr Oppenheimer opens the doors for us to see.

Worth a read.

Christopher Hamacher wrote:

You can download a free Kindle reader from the Amazon site - I did and it works. The book is a breezy read, even-handed, not much new.

.
Chris, good to see you checking in here.  Reading your comment made me wonder how the Zen Studies Soc community is doing these days...?

The Shocking Scandal at the Heart of American Zen

Even Zen masters can be deviants. Inside the new book that unearths a disturbing pattern of affairs at the top of one of the largest Buddhist communities in the U.S.

by Jay Michaelson  | November 14, 2013 5:45 AM EST

A new ebook by New York Times religion columnist Mark Oppenheimer alleges what many in the American Buddhist community have known for years: that some of its most revered teachers were also serial sex offenders.

As with many religious sex scandals, this is old news to insiders. (Getty)

Case in point: Eido Shimano Roshi. The founder and leader of New York’s Zen Studies Society—among the largest Western Buddhist communities in America, with prominent CEOs and celebrities among its members—Shimano carried on clandestine affairs with over a dozen women in his community over the course of thirty years, according to Oppenheimer’s provocatively titled [url=http:// http://www.amazon.com/The-Predator-Upper-East-Side-ebook/dp/B00GMVTPYI]Zen Predator of the Upper East Side[/url]. The book is a devastating indictment of Shimano Roshi, filled with hard evidence of the affairs and the cover-ups, the testimony of several victims, and occasionally lurid details.  It even includes Shimano’s own confession to having sex with some students, though, he says, “far fewer” than his accusers allege.

As with many religious sex scandals, this is old news to insiders. Other Zen roshis with similar allegations against them include Richard Baker, Joshu Sasaki, Taizan Maezumi—the list goes on, really. The pattern is disturbingly familiar from Catholic, Ultra-Orthodox Jewish, and similar systematic abuse scandals: insiders made aware, positive values of spiritual teacher stressed, abuse hushed up, abuse repeated.

Yet in Shimano’s case, the facts are murkier. First, all of his “victims,” if that’s even the right word, were adults; this was not a case of predation of teenagers, as in the Catholic Church. Second, none were raped, in the narrowest (and legal) sense of the term. And while some sexual acts are alleged to have been coerced, most of Shimano’s reported liaisons were consensual—that is, if there can ever be consent within a power relationship such as that between guru and disciple, which perhaps there cannot. Finally, while Shimano was married, it’s not known what his wife made of the allegations, or when she knew of them. 

Then there’s the matter of culture. Shimano’s actions are inexcusable by Japanese, American, or any other cultural standard. Yet they did take place within a system of power and patriarchy that includes male sexual philandering within it. How different was Shimano’s behavior from that of a typical Japanese businessman? This is neither to excuse his conduct nor make generalizations about other cultures – but it is to recognize that Western terms such as “sex offender” may not completely fit.

But a Zen monk? Here, too, the situation is more complex than it may first appear. We may have an image of Zen abbots as peaceful, enlightened, and sexually abstinent, but this simultaneously parochial and Orientalist image is our problem, not theirs. Actually, enlightened Zen monks are often worldly, engaged, and sexually voracious. Likewise, most Westerners may believe that sex and spiritual teaching should be kept separate. But in what non-Judeo-Christian-Muslim book is that written?  Indeed, some of Shimano’s sexual partners regarded their physical intimacy with their teacher as part of their spiritual path. We should be wary before projecting our own Western sex negativity on non-Western spiritual teachers.

Quote :

Enlightened Zen monks are often worldly, engaged, and sexually voracious.

Of course, the Zen Studies Center didn’t advertise this in its brochures – and here, as Oppenheimer relates, the scandal is inescapable. Shimano wove a web of deceit around him, and his associates added layers of obfuscation and denial. Whatever the sex may have been like for some of the women involved, the hypocrisy, secrecy, and lies are indisputable. And Shimano’s alleged M.O. – of finding the “needy” woman, exploiting her vulnerability, and having sexual relations within the walls of the Zendo itself – is worse than creepy, no matter what robes the predator is wearing. 

Remarkably, Shimano’s charisma has not dimmed over the years. Indeed, one of the most fascinating passages in Zen Predator is when Oppenheimer himself meditates with Shimano, and feels proud that Shimano approves of him. Anyone who has been in the presence of a powerful boss, guru, or other father-figure knows how toxic this dynamic can be.

The book is at its weakest, perhaps unsurprisingly, when it hazards theoretical guesses as to why Zen teachers have this problem with their sexual appetites. For example, Oppenheimer misstates Zen teaching as holding that good and evil do not exist because everything is one. Well, not quite. On an absolute level, everything may be empty (not the same as “one”). But on the relative plane, Zen is this-worldly and does not deny ethics, or ontology for that matter. These scandals have more to do with power than philosophy. Zen centers may be no better than churches, corporations, and congresses, but they are surely no worse.

Oppenheimer also gets that philosophy quite wrong. “It can be especially hard to face demons in a tradition that promises that there are none,” he says early on in Zen Predator. This assessment would come as news to most Buddhists, since the Buddha’s own awakening came only after he defeated Mara, the arch-demon of Buddhism who – like Satan in The Last Temptation of Christ – sought to tempt him with an array of challenges and tricks. To be sure, most Western Buddhists regard Mara (and other demons) as personifications of psychological states. But surely that’s what Oppenheimer means as well.

What Oppenheimer clearly gets right, however, is the way in which power, charisma, and authority create an environment in which leaders (religious or otherwise) become “too big to fail.” Followers want the project – whether it’s Buddhism, Boeing, or the Boy Scouts – to succeed, and they hush up any accusation that might shine an unkind light. Loyalties are tested, whistleblowers punished. It’s almost mechanistic.

Until it isn’t. Zen Predator often reads like a soap opera, complete with lurid emails, shady financial dealings, and betrayals. But eventually, there are just too many cuckolded husbands and alienated female students, and Shimano’s associates finally had to admit the truth.  The Zen Society ushers him into retirement – though some allege that without a full airing of the truth, it can never fully recover.

Perversely, the whole sad tale, and the publication of Zen Predator itself, might be good for American Buddhism. The stereotypical notion many of us hold of a wise, Yoda-like Zen master dispensing pithy spiritual bromides is not just inaccurate and offensive – it’s deeply unhelpful to the contemplative path itself.  In the end, meditation is not about exotic sages, black robes, and following in the footsteps of someone else. It’s about finding your own footsteps, in your own Western clothes, and according to your own experiences and insights.  

Idolizing one’s teachers is an impediment to the spiritual path. This is one of the meanings of the famous Zen koan, “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Which is exactly what Oppenheimer has done.

Isan wrote:

Christopher Hamacher wrote:

You can download a free Kindle reader from the Amazon site - I did and it works. The book is a breezy read, even-handed, not much new.

.
Chris, good to see you checking in here.  Reading your comment made me wonder how the Zen Studies Soc community is doing these days...?

Hello Isan,

I've been to the ZSS temple in New York exactly once in my life, and that was around 10 years ago, so I'm probably not the best one to ask

Posted elsewhere on the web:

Re: Eido Shimano's lineage...

by Genjo on Wed Nov 13, 2013 4:46 pm

I finished the book The Zen Predator on the Upper East Side this morning. Overall a good review of Eido's narcissism and sexual addiction, but most importantly a good analysis of the lack of check and balances that are overall missing in American Zen, especial Rinzai Zen. Also a good look into the problems associated with the Zen Master as guru model of teaching and propagating our tradition.

The book also brought up my own sense of guilt and shame for prompting others (men and women from the Chobo-Ji sangha) to live in a place I where I never lived for more than 10 days. I now see this prompting as a grave error, where most if not all were harmed, dare I say brainwashed, by the dysfunctional guru worshiping organizational atmosphere. I hope the book that I'm writting on this subject will serve as part of my penance for my own culpability in long supporting of this form of practice. Looking back I see how gullible I was to believe that Eido Shimano had evolved and put his sordid past behind him; in hindsight, there was plenty of evidence that his narcissism continued unabated and the rubber stamp mentally of the ZSS board was systemically corrupt.
Abbot of Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji (Chobo-Ji) temple, Seattle, USA; psychotherapist and certificated spiritual director.

http://www.choboji.org

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115613/zen-buddhist-sex-controversies-america-excerpt

Thanks Josh for this information. I will read it (although it brings up the ptsd stuff again).
That was my motivation for going through the whole faith trust process - to be part of a collective effort to change obc policies so this kind of thing can be minimized. Can anyone tell me with knowledge if anything has changed in the order (ie rules, practices, effective oversight) as a result of all those
efforts?

I have just finished reading it.
The mind boggles, I could make so many comments,I spent a fair bit of time in China, one sign of success is to have mistresses,there is no messing about with it that is how it is,the wives as long as they are looked after know 'their place ' and remain the wife. the mistresses are given apartments. I say this as Shimano seems to have no feelings for right or wrong practice,no sense of really doing the right thing. I get the feeling this  type of behavior is hidden behind a strange view of living (when it suites you) a non dualistic life is not labelling action as good or bad .

The other aspect that comes across to me and ha done since 1976 is what exactly are people in Zen communities being taught,or how exactly are they benefiting. The word kensho is branded freely and its meaning can vary,I think sanctioning a kensho  can be done for very strange reasons as much as transmission can, certainly there is political transmissions,transmission for spreading a power base,you know I have 50 priests I am training and 45 have received transmission. I think also the need of the centers to keep people there for such long periods is suspect,maybe they have not learnt anything.If students have learnt anything real,the place for them is in normal society,for 2 reasons.
If it is true what is learnt it must be shared with all life , not at all in a heirachical system, but in a normal working life situation,and secondly a normal working life situation will test ones understand far more than a temple.From the moment I met Ikko Roshi he was kicking me out,and at the same time demanding I lived as best as I could,that suits me many times I have not done well but that is fine too,but many times I know what I should be doing.
Eido was another one lucky not to be banged up, 1 complaint and he would be away.
I think he will win the court case he has a clever brief, can you please let me know how the court scenario unfolds Josh.....Thanks

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/11/from-zen-buddhism-to-preying-on-vulnerable-women/281475/

From Zen Buddhism to Preying on Vulnerable Women -

The chilling story of Eido Shimano—a new ebook from The Atlantic

Mark Oppenheimer Nov 14 2013, 10:18 AM ET



Eido Shimano, the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk whose exploitative relationships with female followers over a fifty-year period were to tear apart the American Buddhist community, arrived in the United States in August 1960, at the age of 27, to study at the University of Hawaii. He moved in with Bob Aitken, a Zen teacher who had first been exposed to Zen as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp, afterwards studying with leading Japanese masters. Shimano stayed in Hawaii for four years, then left for New York City, promptly to organize one of the country’s great sanghas, or Zen communities. Until the women he serially abused finally began to speak out, in the last two years or so, Shimano was a pillar—the pillar—of the New York City community of Zen Buddhists.

Bob Aitken, Shimano’s first host in America, is now dead. But in a handwritten note dated May 4, 1964, apparently for his own records, he recorded the reason for Shimano’s departure from Hawaii. This note, haunting in retrospect, foreshadows all the abuse that was to come.

Aitken never went public with what he knew about Shimano.

Aitken and Shimano had jointly decided to volunteer at Queen’s Medical Center, hoping to learn a bit about mental illness. Two female Zen students from their sangha had recently been hospitalized there for “mental breakdowns.” That’s when a psychiatric social worker noticed something curious: a name from their case records—Shimano’s—was the same as one of the hospital’s volunteers. This coincidence was passed along to Dr. Linus Pauling Jr., a psychiatrist at the hospital, who investigated the matter, then reported back to Aitken that Shimano had played a role in the women’s breakdowns. Aitken claimed that he made his own inquiries; he was vague about what he found, but he became convinced that Shimano “had indeed played such a role” in the women’s breakdowns and was guilty of “ruthless ... exploitation” of the women.

“I felt,” Aitken wrote, “that if I confronted him with the evidence, he would deny everything, and the Sangha members generally would support him. Further, I was concerned about protecting the two women.” Aitken asked the advice of  senior members of the Buddhist community. He even flew to Japan to consult with his own teachers, the legendary Nakagawa and Yasutani—neither of whom, it turns out, doubted that Shimano was capable of sleeping around, but both of whom seemed unwilling to accept that this behavior was really a problem.

Aitken never went public with what he knew about Shimano, not in 1964, and not for the next half century until his death.

Tormented, Robert Aitken saved his correspondence with and about Shimano. He must have made it known that he was keeping the definitive dossier on Shimano, because over the years insiders leaked to him copies of private letters to the Zen Studies Society board, minutes of board deliberations, and other documents that helped complete the story of Shimano’s predations. In 2003, Aitken gave the papers to the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and in 2008, just after his 90th birthday, he agreed to allow public access to the papers he had been saving for 45 years.

What finally brought the wrath of Malone down on Shimano was not the revelation that Shimano had cuckolded him.

The papers might have just sat in boxes at the university archives in Manoa had not a former Shimano follower, a Zen priest named Kobutsu Malone, requested that photocopies of the entire archive be sent to his home in rural Maine. By 2008, when he was able to get the papers, Malone had developed an obsessive grudge against Shimano. An engineer by trade, Kevin Malone—he would take his dharma name, Kobutsu, as his legal name in 2010—had begun in 1977 to sit, or meditate, at Shimano’s New York Zendo, where he was soon volunteering his handyman skills, doing carpentry, electrical wiring, and other tasks. In 1979, he moved to Dai Bosatsu, Shimano’s country monastery, with his future wife. They took up residence in the gatehouse, from which Malone superintended the campus, “running the buildings, all the vehicles, logging, everything,” he told me last year. He got married there in July of 1979, and had a son, Sean, in 1980. The next year, the family left for California, where Malone had a job offer. He and his wife divorced in 1990, and many years later he learned that his ex-wife, who had slept with Shimano before marrying Malone, had continued a casual affair with their teacher during their marriage—as his ex-wife confirmed for me.

I heard this story in October 2012, when I visited Malone at his one-bedroom apartment in a forgettable development in coastal Maine. When I arrived, I was greeted at the door by Malone, a short, blunt, white-haired, heavy-lidded, chain-smoking, double-wide bruiser of a man—and by his enormous Newfoundland, Harley-Bear. Malone’s small living room was crowded with files and a large computer—tools in his daily fight to expose Shimano, a task to which he says he has dedicated tens of thousands of hours. “I’m on disability,” Malone said when I asked how he supported himself. He unbuttoned his shirt so that I could see his surgical scars. “I’ve had five heart attacks, two strokes, and a triple bypass,” he told me as he took a puff on a hand-rolled cigarette, which between drags rested in a large glass ashtray.

What finally brought the wrath of Malone down on Shimano was not the revelation that Shimano had cuckolded him, but rather a letter that Shimano wrote, or perhaps only signed off on, to one William Van Gordon, an English Buddhist whose mother was the subject of a 2007 story for the Daily Mail called “The Cult Guru Who Stole My Son.” Malone, who already had an avocation raking muck in Buddhist circles, began his own investigation into what he saw as the fraudulent practices of Van Gordon and his mentor, Edo Shonin. Wondering who this self-appointed American P.I. was, Van Gordon wrote to Shimano, asking whether it was true that Malone was a Zen priest, as he had claimed in correspondence. The e-mail Shimano sent back, likely written by his secretary, was painfully dismissive. “He came to Dai Bosatsu Zendo in the early eighties,”

Shimano wrote. “He then attended a few sesshins with me and expressed his interest to become our caretaker ... As a caretaker, he did not do any formal practice with the sangha. After a few years, he left [Dai Bosatsu] and I would see him sporadically, when he would offer to help with the maintenance of our city temple ... He was living in New Jersey, with his two boys, separated from his wife ... He begged me to ordain him, telling me that he needed some kind of credential to support his chaplaincy work in prisons. I finally agreed ...”

One can imagine Malone’s feelings on reading this e-mail, after a friend at a Buddhist publication, which had received a copy from Van Gordon, sent it on to him. In his own mind, he is a proud, if exiled, Buddhist. In 1993, the Buddhist chaplaincy he ran at Sing Sing was covered by The New York Times. He is the only Buddhist I have met—besides Shimano himself, that is—who legally adopted his dharma name, going from Kevin to Kobutsu. So it was Shimano’s insult that drove Malone to put Aitken’s files—which are, according to an archivist at the University of Hawaii, still “being processed”—on the Internet.

Malone bought the domain ShimanoArchive.com and spent two years transcribing handwritten letters, and imploring friends and acquaintances to translate any documents in Japanese. He added to Aitken’s files his own collection of just about anything pertaining to Shimano. The full archive comprises more than 6,000 pages so far, and it includes Aitken’s earliest notes on Shimano, accusing letters to the board of Zen Studies Society from the 1970s onward, anguished missives from disillusioned monks, private correspondence among board members—often confused, befuddled, or in denial—and painful testimonials from women whom Shimano had, they said, groped, made passes at, seduced, romanced, and in many cases dumped. This was the information that became available online in March 2010.

"They came in search of Zen and found sex."

It would take days to read the archive from beginning to end. For the casual inquisitor, the curious browser, the Peeping Tom, there is no need to read it that way: you can dip into it most anywhere and find something shocking, horrifying, or compellingly smutty. For the more serious student—of Buddhism, of sexual abuse, of Eido Shimano—the archive does reward a thorough examination, because it contains within it all the explanations for why Shimano lasted as long as he did. To begin, there is evidence of his modus operandi, which seems always to have involved finding the needy woman, the unstable one, the one who could not stand up for herself. Then, throughout the archive, you can find the excuses others gave for enabling him: the desire to protect Buddhism, the gratitude to Shimano, the confusion about what Buddhism permits or does not permit. It’s all there, a case study in a community’s inability to protect itself.

At the very beginning of the archive are Aitken’s anguished letters about the women in Hawaii. On August 24, 1964, Aitken wrote to Nakagawa, the Japanese teacher, “The whole thing hinges on the matter of mental health. If the girls had come to their priest in search of sex, and had found sex, then surely there would have been no mental breakdown afterward. But, the way Dr. Smith expresses it, they came in search of Zen and found sex, and therefore broke down.”

A year later, on August 5, 1965, Aitken was again writing to Nakagawa; Shimano had gone to New York, but Aitken was unable to get the two women off his mind: Shimano, he wrote, had seduced one of the two women “within a few days of her arrival, and they were lovers thereafter. She was surprised at this turn of affairs, but accepted it, thinking that it could be a means for her kensho”—her moment of enlightenment. “He had told her that he would locate permanently in Hawaii, so when he left for the extended trip with Yasutani Roshi, she was very upset. Upon his return early in 1964, he resumed their relationship, not mentioning his engagement [to be married] until a month or so later. This coincides with his affair with [the other woman], which also began after his engagement and after his return from his world tour.”

"There were stories. About the student who tried to commit ritual suicide at Dai Bosatsu."

Scroll through more of the archives, and more than a decade later you come to a letter of January 30, 1979, by anonymous authors who called themselves “Your Friends in the Dharma.” In their letter, to the whole sangha, they again point to Shimano’s preference for unstable women: “Eido Roshi has beyond doubt disgracefully abused his role as teacher and betrayed the trust of his students by continuing to commit acts with the females of our sangha ... Eido Roshi knowingly takes advantage of girls in [a] mentally unstable condition and with emotional vulnerability who come to him seeking spiritual help and guidance. In face of these deplorable actions and the concern of our sangha, Eido Roshi has continually denied his involvement, and maintained an attitude that he is beyond questioning. We feel it’s time to question.”

One particularly poignant letter in the archive, dated February 20, 1979, is from one former student, Merry Benezra, to another. I have interviewed both students in the past year; they stand by their stories. Benezra herself—who later wrote a roman à clef about Shimano—never had sex with Shimano, although, as she writes, she “experienced quite a bit of sexual ‘harassment’ from Eido Roshi (from innuendo to proposition)” during two stays at Dai Bosatsu. During the first stay, the harassment was “just a barrage.” For months she spoke of the incidents to no one. “I wanted to be thought of as a student, and not one of Roshi’s women,” she wrote. “I did not want to rock the boat. After I left I found out, in correspondence with [another woman], that Roshi had also propositioned her ... We had been very close friends and yet we had kept a silence on something that was disturbing us every day, in order to protect the sangha, the kessei”—a three-month training period—“and the Roshi.”

The letter continues in a key of gratitude: “When I left [after my first stay], I seriously thought of ‘blowing the whistle.’ But I was grateful for the opportunity I’d had to practice at Dai Bosatsu, and I thought that if I said anything it would be the end of everything at Dai Bosatsu. I really thought it would fold the place ... One of the problems of Dai Bosatsu is that to warn a new female student that she is likely to be propositioned by her teacher is to risk every new female student leaving in a very big hurry and telling the world.”

As far as we know, Shimano has never taken a sexual interest in men. But, as Kobutsu Malone could testify, Shimano’s activities harmed men, too. One of the most pained documents in the archive is titled “An Open Letter to My Teacher, Eido Tai Shimano,” and it was written March 29, 1979, by the student Adam Fisher. Infuriated by the same revelations of Shimano’s affairs that prompted the letters above, also from 1979, Fisher ultimately decided against sending his letter to Shimano; it seems that just getting his feelings down on paper was enough for him, at the time. In 2011, the letter finally became public, when Fisher sent it to Malone for the archive. The letter begins with Fisher’s fond memories of what drew him to Zen practice. “What a lot of silence,” Fisher wrote. “No preachments, convincings, argumentations—just the silence to which we all return. I loved it.” The idyll quickly ended, however.

Quote :

But then came 1975 and what later was humorously referred to as the “[banned term] Follies” ... The Teacher had taken a series of bed partners from the sangha and had made passes at others. For a while, I didn’t believe it. You were married, you were the teacher, you had submitted yourself to the precept of moral conduct ... But then I talked with some of your paramours ... Each had thought of herself as “the only one.” Each had been unceremoniously ditched. I heard about the confrontation between you, your teacher, your wife and one of the sangha members.

Yet Fisher remained at Dai Bosatsu. “I stayed,” he wrote, “because I was afraid to leave.” He decided not to concern himself with his teacher’s ethics. “Time came and went. There were stories. About the student who tried to commit ritual suicide at Dai Bosatsu. About other women you were involved with. But after the first upset, I shut the door on the [banned term] Follies. I was going to sit on [the] cushion and let the world take care of itself.”

But by 1979, Fisher had encountered new accusations that he was unwilling to ignore: “So now it has begun again. First Peter and Dave sent a letter to the board of trustees. They sent it together with the diary that included love letters addressed to you from a woman member. Do you know what Peter said to me? He said, æWe ... were naive. We thought Eido Roshi would be out in a week. We thought the board of directors would have to take action ... ’”

As for the board of directors, they are in some ways the second villain of the archives. Friendly with Shimano, loyal to him, unable to hear criticism of their beloved roshi, they were so uniformly committed to Shimano that in 1982, when the board president, George Zournas, finally decided to do something, he found that he had no support at all. He wrote to his fellow board members:

Quote :

I am sure you have been aware of the undercurrent of disease that has been running through the zendo over the past several months. Some of you have learned that this has been caused by the latest in a long series of accusations against Eido Roshi by young women who say they have been seduced by him in the dokusan room ... This is but the most recent of a long series of such seductions, dating back to Eido Roshi’s time in Hawaii in the 1960s. Over the past sixteen years as [a] member of the Board of Trustees of the Zen Studies Society and more recently as president of that Society, I have attempted to make excuses for Eido Roshi and to cover up the scandals as best I could. Now, however, sickened by this latest outrage ... I have resigned from the presidency of the Board of Trustees and from the Board itself.

The archive is thus a record of two contradictory impulses. On the one hand this is a Buddhist community of great vigor and activity: daily zazen, weeklong sesshins, large growth in membership, successful building projects, fawning attention from the media. Yet at the same time there is a peculiar timidity, a fear that to speak about Shimano’s sexual life would snip the spine of the whole sangha, would paralyze the life force that had come to animate it all. It was a fear that would continue to paralyze members of the community for several decades to come.

I am sorry I cant write a serious reply,I am trying to be funny and that does not work, tried being rude that does not work I think hoodwinked is a good word,and how silly we have been,and some people have wasted a lot of time,I bet his brief has a roof top apartment in Manhatten will make a lot of money

What a horrendous story......it makes our recent problems seem minor in comparison.  Interestingly though, it is the exact same greed, hatred and delusion -- no matter what the degree.  I recognize all of the symptoms......

RM Daizui mentioned in a talk once the three ways monks can go off the rails in a big way - sex, power and money.  Obviously Shimano chose all three.  It is interesting that much of the legal wrangling is about the money.  I have come to value the suggestion, "follow the money."  It will reveal a lot.

RM Eko was attempting before he left to reorganize Shasta to institute consensus based decision making, board oversight and limitations of authority.  There was nothing in the Bylaws to prevent the spiritual leader of the temple, who is the sole director, from moving all the assets or absconding with them for that matter.   Eko was unable to complete his reorganization before he left and I don't believe it has been considered since.

None of the information regarding how a 501c3 is set up or operates is confidential.  Because it is a public corp and receives tax exemption status, all the corporate documents, books and records are required to be stored at the corporate office and made available upon request.  I would recommend to anyone desiring to make a large donation to a nonprofit corp look into how that entity is organized.

Just common sense, but one must have the gumption to investigate.....

Hi Enida,

I think RM Daizui missed another  way that monks can go off the rails in a big way.

It`s Enlightenment Sickness....thinking that you`re enlightened.  The Ego co-opts
whatever insight is gained resulting in the monk thinking that he is the same person
but, enlightenment is his possession now. A super status.   One often reads about the
newly `enlightened` monks being sent into years of seclusion whilst the `stench of zen`
abates.  Not a bad idea for our times, too.

" one must have the gumption to investigate....."

I really like that !  I`d add that to the `eightfold path`.....make that nine....

http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=70,11683,0,0,1,0#.UotRZ-L3M6V

The Zen Buddhist Who Preyed on His Upper East Side Students

BY MARK OPPENHEIMER, The Buddhist Channel, Nov 18, 2013

New York, USA -- Right now, Manhattan’s Zen Studies Society, perhaps the most prestigious Zen Buddhist center in the United States, is being torn apart by lawsuits, backstabbing, and infighting. The finances are terrible, and the beautiful carriage house on East 67th Street may have to be sold to pay legal debts - or, if he wins the lawsuit, to pay damages to Eido Shimano, the 82-year-old Zen master who built the society up but also, in a way, has destroyed it.

<< Eido Shimano

According to revelations that have tumbled out over the past two years, and which I chronicle in-depth in a new e-book, Shimano has spent 50 years preying sexually on his students. He may have slept with dozens; I personally have identified over a dozen, and spoken to many of them. Shimano’s womanizing is of the sleaziest sort: He is married, and he has often picked for his mistresses much younger and disturbed women, the kind particularly susceptible to his twisted charisma.

But Shimano is hardly alone; his is not an isolated case. These days, when we think of predatory clergy, we think of Roman Catholic priests. Their sins are far worse than what goes on in Zen circles. But the percentage of the Zen clergy implicated in sexual misdeeds is many times greater than that of the Catholic clergy. In Zen Buddhism, the story of Eido Shimano’s abuse of power is so commonplace as to be banal, a cliché.

In the 1960s, four major Zen teachers came to the United States from Japan: Shunryu Suzuki, Taizan Maezumi, Joshu Sasaki, and Eido Shimano. Andy Afable, one of Shimano’s former head monks, called these four the “major missionaries” of Zen, as they had all received “transmission” from leading Japanese teachers: That is, they had been deemed worthy to be the heirs, to be responsible for the persistence of the teachings. And three of the four, Afable noted when we spoke, have caused major public sex scandals: first Maezumi, and more recently Shimano and Sasaki. Sasaki, of Rinzai-ji, a Zen center in Los Angeles, is now 106 years old and, as his board members finally admitted in 2013, was groping and fondling unwilling students well into his 11th decade (he also ran a leading Zen center in New Mexico, and his lewdness did not respect state lines). Maezumi, affiliated with another West Coast zendo, the Zen Center of Los Angeles, was a philanderer and an alcoholic, as the scholar Dale S. Wright has detailed at length. The only one of the four whose reputation was unblemished, Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center, gave his sangha over to a man named Richard Baker, who was later embroiled in a sex scandal of his own, resigned from his abbacy, and became the subject of a book with the appropriately suggestive title Shoes Outside the Door.

But there are many lesser-known yet just as randy Zen teachers. For example, Afable might have added that at Chobo-ji, a Zen temple in Seattle, Genki Takabayashi made passes at his female students. And after his death, several students of Dainin Katagiri, the founding abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, in Minneapolis, reported having affairs with their teacher, who had been married. Today, one could reasonably assert that of the 30 or 40 important Zen centers in the country, at least 10 have employed head teachers who have been accused of groping, propositioning, seducing, or otherwise exploiting students.

The question is: How do so many Zen Buddhist teachers get away with it, and for so long? We can begin to approach an answer by thinking about the nature of authority.

There are two kinds of authority. The first is grounded in something tangible, concrete, observable: the soldier with his gun, or the scientist with her laboratory results. You can quarrel with their authority, but if the gun works, or if the experiment was well designed and conclusive, you are likely to lose the argument. But there is another kind of authority, an opposite kind, grounded in the invisible, the faith-based, the fictional. Political authority can function in this second way. The social contract and national constitutions count because we believe them to count, because we will them into reality. Money, too, is worth something because we believe it is—we give the $20 bill the magical properties of being worth more than the $1 bill, even though the paper and ink are identical. Above all, we agree to the stories that prop up constitutions or money. We agree that the Constitutional Convention made law for all the people, and for all generations to come; we agree that the government will back up our money, if no longer with gold, then with its promises. Without our assent to those stories, the country would not work.

Spiritual authority is that second kind of authority. It depends not on miracles or mystical figures or discoveries of secret books, but merely on our willingness to believe, against evidence if need be, that those things were real. The virgin birth, the Buddha, Joseph Smith’s golden plates that became the Book of Mormon—to build spiritual tradition, it does not matter if the people were real or if the events happened. It matters that we keep assenting to the stories.

Despite extraordinary personal shortcomings, Eido Shimano continued to wield spiritual authority throughout his time at the Zen Studies Society. He convinced the American Zen community that he was, in effect, the Second Coming of Suzuki—but even better, because he was here to stay. He was convincing not just because of his own facility with a story, but because he found Americans who were very receptive to that story. He found willing assenters, willing children eager to listen to his fairy tales. And he found them quite easily, because Westerners practicing Zen have an almost infantile relationship to what they perceive to be the authentic, Oriental father. One of Shimano’s greatest advantages has been that he is Japanese.

There are some good, and unavoidable, reasons for Americans’ dependence on Japanese roshis (and, more recently, as Americans have become interested in Tibetan Buddhism, for their dependence on foreign teachers like the Dalai Lama). Americans needed somebody to teach them the rituals. Asia is filled with monks and priests who know how to sit, chant, eat, bow, walk, dress, and live as a Buddhist. Until recently, the United States had very few natives who possessed that knowledge. The situation is now reversing, as the Japanese, in particular, abandon Buddhism as an old relic, while it continues to find adherents in the West. But in the 1960s and 70s, American Buddhists needed the foreigners. And as complete neophytes in Buddhism, they were apt to believe most anything a teacher said: The Americans had no competing knowledge, no critical faculties, no grounds to challenge the teacher, no fixed point on which to stand.

A student was also liable to believe that her teacher was conveying the one true form of Zen Buddhism. Anybody who traveled to Japan, as many American Buddhists would, quickly learned that every monastery there had its own variations on the tradition—as with any other religious practice, there is no one true form. But the Americans didn’t know that. The teacher knew all; the American knew nothing. In this way the teacher was like a deity, a minor god.

“Look, there’s a certain type of person that is looking for something else in another culture,” said Ed Glassing, the former resident monk at both Zen Studies Society locations, whom Shimano maligned as a “homosexual.” “Sort of like, something they don’t have, so it’s mysterious, exotic, it’s like whoa. And that gets the juices flowing. Like whoa, and when you start the practice, the practice I feel is—it’s very profound. And the teachings in it. But for the [Zen Studies Society,] my gullibility, spiritual gullibility—I didn’t realize that it was a borderline cult. It was high. The focus itself is on the master. And all of us worshipped him to a certain extent.”

Nobody was as worshipful as a student named David Schnyer. According to a 1982 letter from George Zournas to Jack Clareman, the Zen Studies Society’s lawyer, a litany of charges was read against Shimano at a board meeting on September 14 of that year. The meeting, which Zournas had hoped would mark the end of Shimano’s tenure, turned out to be another show of support. In his letter, Zournas, who had resigned the presidency in July, details for the lawyer’s benefit how the various board members reacted to a motion that Shimano and his wife, then the organization’s treasurer, be fired. One member suggested that the Shimanos instead be given an extended sabbatical. The new president, Sylvan Busch, “did not open his mouth to show any disapproval of Mr. and Mrs. Shimano’s activities.” And then there was Schnyer, the youngest board member, who, according to Zournas, defended Shimano by reportedly saying, “He hasn’t raped anyone yet, has he?”
At the time, Schnyer was just 24 years old, yet he had been a Shimano student since he was a teenager. He is now a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, and in December 2012 I spoke with him by telephone.

“I finished high school early, and at 17 I went to college,” Schnyer said. “At that time, in the 70s, drug use was prevalent, and I got involved in a fair amount of that. I approached it with a searching spirituality aspect, reading Huxley and Timothy Leary, and that leads you down the road to the Beat generation and Zen. I took a course at Rochester, an overview of Eastern religion and Confucianism. [The teacher] had been in a Zen monastery for a year in Japan. When I heard about it, I was like, ‘That’s for me.’” Soon, Schnyer was practicing Buddhism. While traveling back to school after a vacation, he stopped with a friend at Dai Bosatsu—the Zen Studies Society's monastery in the Catskills—and was impressed immediately. “I said, ‘I have to come back here.’ So I did one more semester of school and then dropped out. And then I went back and basically never left. And stayed for 10 years.”

“How bad was Shimano’s womanizing?” I asked Schnyer.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Me and my friend always had suspicions he had ongoing relationships with Japanese women that were kept quiet, and were more or less continuous. And that every now and then something would flare up with a Westerner, often because the Westerner couldn’t keep her mouth shut ... If you counted the blow-ups, you’d say just a few [women,] but we think he ran his life like a Japanese businessman”—lots of affairs, but most of them discreet.

Shimano’s Japanese ways suited Schnyer. “He was perfect for me,” Schnyer said. “He was what I needed. He was not a sticky kind of emotional person. He was a very traditional Rinzai master: stern when he needed to be, very rarely encouraging. ‘If you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it on your own, but I’m not going to nurse you.’ For me he was perfect ... Somebody looking from the outside could say that’s why we stuck with him all the time. He worked for me, and if he didn’t work for other people, then I just wanted them to go, and often hoped they’d go more quietly than they did.”

Quietly or not, many people did leave. The Zen Studies Society was marked by frequent turnover. Students in their early 30s, even younger, could find themselves among the senior monks at Dai Bosatsu, in a tradition that is supposed to be ungraspable even after a whole lifetime of study. But for Schnyer this constantly refreshing membership was proof that the sangha did disapprove of Shimano’s treatment of women. “You won’t find anybody within the Zen Studies Society who has tolerated this stuff from start to finish,” Schnyer said.

“It’s waves of people who say, ‘I’m done with this, I got what I can out of it’ ... and then a new group comes in.”

I finally asked Schnyer if he had said what Zournas attributed to him: He hasn’t raped anyone yet, has he?

“I suspect I probably said something like that,” Schnyer said. “I don’t remember saying that.”
      
Schnyer maintains a tidy understanding of his personal Zen galaxy, in which Shimano is the sun, hot and dangerous but necessary. He was doing what Japanese roshis are supposed to do, what they have done for centuries. Shimano was not the bad guy; rather, those who made too much noise, who refused to go quietly, and thus disturbed Schnyer’s and others’ Zen practice, were the blameworthy ones. “I remember many heated arguments,” he told me, “and no doubt one of my many arguments was: this is personal behavior, not illegal behavior.”

Denis Kelly, a former Dai Bosatsu vice abbot, and himself no model of sexual continence—he too has had affairs, he told me, including one that “almost broke up” his current sangha—shared Schnyer’s understanding of the proper hierarchical relationship between the Zen master and his female students. When Kelly grew frustrated with Shimano’s womanizing, he made a proposition. “The deal I cut with him,” Kelly told me, “was that he stop sleeping with Western women and only sleep with Japanese women, because they don’t tell.”
Surely others felt the same way, but only Schnyer and Kelly have been so bold or articulate, have made clear the amorality, and the misogyny, that can infect Zen practice and enable its malefactors. One of the greatest reasons that Shimano could sleep with so many women is that it bothered the men so little.

---------------
This article was excerpted from the new e-book “The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side,” out now. Mark Oppenheimer is the author of three other books, including a memoir of high school debate and a travelogue about crashing bar mitzvahs. He writes a religion column for The New York Times and is on Twitter @markopp1.

Zen Sex-Abuse “Single” Kindles An E-Revolution
by Paul Bass | Nov 18, 2013 3:27 pm


Chion Wolf Photo - Oppenheimer, author of the new Zen Predator of the Upper East Side
Mark Oppenheimer had an old story to tell—and found a new way to tell it. Then he spoke about it. Kind of.

The story concerns wide-scale sexual abuse by a religious leader, abuse that had been covered up for decades. Oppenheimer followed the trail of victims of a leading Zen Buddhist monk named Eido Shimano, and wrote a book about it called The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side—“one man’s half century of sexual exploitation under the cover of religion.”

Oppenheimer (pictured), who lives in Westville, has written numerous books before, published by major publishing houses. (He also writes a biweekly religion column for The New York Times, runs Yale’s journalism initiative, finds time to write for half the legitimate publications on all American newsstands and on the Internet, all while, with his wife Cyd Oppenheimer, raising four young daughters). This time he took a risk:  reporting and writing the Zen predator book without an advance, then having it published as a “Kindle Single”—an electronic-only book—through Atlantic Books. It’s one of several new approaches established companies are taking to book and long-form journalism publishing in the modern era.

Oppenheimer still gets the benefit of a marketing and distribution from a commercial publisher. But he makes money per sale of the book, period. And you can’t hold the book in your hand. You have to turn it on, on a Kindle.

Oppenheimer found time in his unimaginably crowded schedule to chat with the Independent about the book as well as the new frontier of publishing of authoring he has entered.

Well, we “chatted” not in person, but via GChat.

It seemed only fitting for an interview about the brave new world of ebook authorship to dispense with old-fashioned interview tools like looking at each other face to face. Or talking on the phone and typing. Or turning on a tape recorder, or even a digital recorder.

A transcript of the “conversation” follows.  Decide for yourself if, like ebooks, GChat interviews represent an advancement of the form.



me:What got you interested in writing about Zen Buddhist sexual abuse?
Mark:  I initially found out about Eido Shimano and his misdeeds because (if I remember correctly) someone forwarded me a blog post from a Buddhist website. This would have been Summer 2010. Shimano had just been called out publicly, at a Buddhist dinner, for his abuse, and he was stepping down. I wrote a column about it, then thought I was done with it. But then I began getting emails from victims of his, and also from Kobutsu Malone, a former monk of Shimano’s who had been collecting a dossier on the guy’s screwing around. He’d been tracking him for over 10  years.
So as I began poking around, I realized there was so much more to the story. I drove up to Maine a year ago to meet Kobutsu and look at his archives, and was off to the races…
The original column was for the NY Times, where I write a biweekly column.
me:  So you decided to do a longer piece on this. Did you shop it around to magazine editors, or go straight for a book?
Sent at 1:48 PM on Thursday
Mark:  I shopped it around to every last magazine editor in New York, and a few in Idaho. Well, not Idaho. But yes, it would have been great if a magazine had given me a contract, because with a contract comes an expense account. But instead I did all the work on my own time, and spent my own money out of pocket. One problem, for magazine editors, was that the sex scandals at Horace Mann School had just broken, so there was a sense that the media had just covered a NYC-based, upper-crust, elite-world sexcapade.
me:  It also sounds like other religious sex scandals, where one victim ends up collecting information and leading a reporter to a treasure trove of information. Was that the case here?
Sent at 1:50 PM on Thursday
Mark:  Absolutely. But more important, the victims had found each other online. A lot of victims of sex abuse in tight-knit worlds like Zen sanghas (communities) just drop out, disappear, want nothing more to do with the community, ever. So they aren’t around to see that another woman goes through the same thing a year later, and another five years later. They are isolated. But in this case, the web helped them find each other. Of course, the guy I am writing about, Shimano, was alleged to often have many women at once — so this really was an open secret. But yes, a couple victims became the keepers of the knowledge. The main keeper, Kobutsu Malone, created an incredibly useful website, ShimanoArchive.com. Shimano had slept with his ex-wife while they were married.
me:  you still there?
Mark:  yup.
get that long reply?
me:  Got it now.
Did you get to interview Shimano?
Mark:  I did! I interviewed him twice, each time at a fancy restaurant of his choosing. He liked to live well. Then I meditated with him one time, at the very swank Greenwich Village townhouse of a follower who has stayed loyal to him.
me:  Did you feel your professional distance at risk when you guys approached the possibility of levitating together?
Mark:  Levitating?
me:  I thought if you meditate well enough, you get lifted off the ground. At least that’s what they told me at a pitch on Dayton Street back in the early 1980s….
Sent at 1:54 PM on Thursday
Mark:  I guess I didn’t do it well enough. Anyway, I don’t think the Zen promise that. Not to me, anyway. But to answer your question: No, I had never meditated before, and he offered, so how could I say no? I didn’t think I was at risk of falling for his famous charisma. But I had one victim of his tell me not even to bring a tape recorder near him, that he could de-magnetize it with his energy. They attribute magical powers.
me:  The release for your book said the story was spiked decades back. Why was it spiked?
Mark:  According to Robin Westen, who wrote a terrific, long piece back in 1982, it was spiked by two major magazines because they were afraid of lawsuits. The Village Voice told her they would run it only if she gave Shimano a pseudonym — which she was unwilling to do.
me:  Do we have a double standard about Buddhism and Catholicism or even now Orthodox Judaism?
Mark:  I don’t think I do. I point out in my piece (available for $2.99 as a Kindle ebook!) that all religions make big demands on their followers, and that Zen Buddhism is not the only tradition that can totally take over one’s life.
me:  I didn’t mean you. I meant society at large—I wondered if it would have been easier to sell another story about Catholic or Orthodox Jewish abuse…
Sent at 1:58 PM on Thursday
Mark:  Oh…so the double standard favors Buddhism? Absolutely. People like to think of Buddhists as more peaceful, kinder, better. But in fact, percentage-wise, they seem more likely to be sex abusers. And there is deep sexism in the community, too.
Sent at 2:00 PM on Thursday
me:  I wanted to switch now to asking you about the mechanics of becoming an “e-writer.” (Wonder if someone will write an update to the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer.” Since we lost our connection, want to try switching to  a Google Doc for this part of the interview? I sent you an invite.
Mark:  nah, this is okay.
me:  OK. What made you decide to write an e-book rather than get a conventional contract, as you have for your previous books?
Mark:  Being an e-writer is exhilarating but tough. You get paid per sale. From the first sale, you are making money. It’s priced at $2.99, and I get something like 60% of that. So if I sell 100,000 copies, I have enough money to open my planned indie bookstore in Westville Center here in New Haven. If I sell 10 copies, I go to a movie at Criterion ... by myself.
That said, this was “published” in a series curated by the Atlantic Magazine, so they lent me the services of a great editor, a guy named Geoff Gagnon, who improved the piece a ton. And they are helping with marketing, too.
me:  But you had to spend all the time writing a book with no advance, correct?
Sent at 2:05 PM on Thursday
Mark:  Absolutely. I probably put in a couple hundred hours, with no guarantee of payment. I didn’t have to. I could have turned it into a short column for the Times or one of the other places I write for. I am very fortunate that way. But the piece kept calling out to me.
me:  Do you think the advent of ebooks will enable more Mark Oppenheimers to become published authors than in the past? Or fewer? Or will it work differently—with more people getting some support to write a book, but not enough to quit a day job?
Sent at 2:07 PM on Thursday
Mark:  It has been a huge boon for a few writers who have had big careers just in ebooks. Look up Joseph Bottum if you want to know what I mean. And established writers can make a quick kill this way: if you are Ann Patchett, or Dara Horn, and you have a fan base of 10,000 or 20,000 readers who want whatever you put out there, then it’s a much /better/ deal to write an ebook than to write a magazine article, perhaps even a book. But look: the talent pool is still finite. Most people who want to write aren’t very good. (Same with most people who want to be rock stars, or painters, or basketball players.) The fact that they can self-publish on the web doesn’t mean much.
me:  Do you feel any differently having an ebook come out from having your previous books come out? More like, perhaps, a musician releasing a single?
Sent at 2:10 PM on Thursday
Mark:  Well, I did this once before, with my ebook Dan Savage: The First Gay Celebrity. That was really wild-west, because I didn’t even have an editor to help me (although my wife is a superb editor). Having the Atlantic to sponsor this ebook made it seem a lot like my magazine work.
Ten years ago, I thought work had to be on paper for it to be real. I got over that.
me:  How did that Savage book do?
And who published it?
Mark:  I self-published it. I used a platform called PressBooks.com, which was very elegant. I think maybe I sold 1,000 copies?
Which is good—but again, I had spent many months on it. Bad hourly rate.
me:  Can people like me who don’t have Kindles and prefer to read Dara Horn books (and your NYT columns on people like Joseph Bottum) in print get a copy of your new ebook?
Mark:  Yes, there is a site called read.amazon.com where you can read it at your desktop or laptop.
As for print…maybe we can work out a deal for me to run off a copy.
me:  So no real book-book options? That’s bad news for people like me. Electronics take all the fun and relaxation and soul out of book-reading for me.
Mark:  I agree. And I am with you: I printed out the Ann Patchett ebook (Getaway Car) to read it. I like getting coffee stains on my reading.
me:  Will the advent of ebooks change the way we read and write books, in your opinion? (I don’t mean the technical process. I mean the purpose of reading and writing long form.)  If so, how?
Mark:  There is also a Kindle app for Droid and iPhone and all tablets…but that doesn’t solve your problem, does it?
Sent at 2:15 PM on Thursday
Mark:  I do think the big upside is that people can write at any length. The past 20 years have been bad for writers who work in the 4,000–40,000-word length (to use my friend Fred Strebeigh’s formulation). Writers like John McPhee, Lawrence Weschler, Connie Bruck. And novella writers, as far as fiction goes. Magazines want something shorter, books have to be longer. The new technology solves that problem. My new ebook, which we’re discussing, “The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side,” is about 50 pp., in that in-between length.
me:  Last question (thanks for hanging in!): How did you find doing an author interview via Gchat rather than over the phone or in person?
Mark:  I have high confidence that I’ll be quoted correctly. With a reporter I trust, like you, I’d rather talk in person or by phone. But with somebody I don’t know, this feels safer. I feel like we’re in a safe space. You know who wasn’t in a safe space? The students of Eido Shimano.

Enida said: wrote:

RM Daizui mentioned in a talk once the three ways monks can go off the rails in a big way - sex, power and money

 The only three ways I know are ME, ME, ME; the rest are just examples. In Peer Gynt, Ibsen has the Troll King say: 'Down there in the world of men you say: Man to yourself be true. Up here in the kingdom of the trolls we say: Trolls to your SELVES be true.' Forgive me if I have misquoted slightly it's over 55 years since we played it at school! Whatever, it's the old ego getting in the sway of things again. We all have one which with luck we learn to tame and live with, and even sometimes transcend. Repression, which sounds like some of the behavior complained of at Shasta, is never a good thing except as a last resort, with yourself or others. Better to learn how to make friends with ourselves and others. Of course our little ego has a temptation then to pipe up: 'Oh, repression bad my preciousness....! I'll be good and make friends with myself, ooh! and that nice girl over there,  ooh! and that nice cream cake, and that nice title of Great Master, and... and... and 'Hey Presto!.... Shimano!'

Good to make friends with yourself but not to turn a blind eye on your 'self', or to repress consciousness of it. We don't need to beat up ourselves (and others too, its easier) over our selves, but we do need to face up and look things squarely in the face. It's why we have sange. Then we are free, free to be friends with ourselves, and others, and free of the self's' domination, but not free of self, which is always round the next corner waiting to dominate again.

from a npr radio show:The Dark Side of Zen

By Colin McEnroe, Betsy Kaplan and Chion Wolf



Golden Palace Kinkaku-ji, Zen Buddhist Temple, Kyoto, Japan

Here in the West, Zen Buddhism is often where you go when you've concluded the religion you grew up with is marred by venality, hypocrisy, misogyny, patriarchal structure, and an insufficient commitment to peace and love.

Buddhism seems to have less hierarchy and more commitment to pure enlightenment and oneness. So, what do Buddhists do when Buddhism falls down on the job?

Today's show delves into some instances of good teachings being used to do bad things, ranging from a sex scandal that tainted one of America's most influential Zen communities, to the role Zen played in the militarism of Japan in World War II.

We're not here to roast Buddhism on a spit. We also talk about the ways Buddhism has evolved to make some of these stumbles less likely in the future.

You can leave your comments below, email us at  wnpr.org, or tweet us @wnprcolin.


GUESTS:

• Mark Oppenheimer is the religion reporter for The New York Times, directs the Yale Journalism Lab, and is the author of several books, including his new e-book, Predator on the Upper East Side.
  
• Dr. Jay Michaelson is Associate Editor of Religion Dispatches and the author of five books, most recently Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment.  He holds a J.D. from Yale and a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a practicing Buddhist.
  
• Dr. Brian Daizen Victoria is a visiting Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan, where he's writing a book on Zen Terrorism in 1930's Japan. He is an ordained Soto Priest and is the author of Zen at War and Zen War Stories. 
  

• The Colin McEnroe Show
  

Eido Shimano names new dharma successor with fallout at AZTA

Posted by: Adam Kō Shin Tebbe December 13, 2013- from Sweepingzen.com


Zenrin R. Lewis

Eido Tai Shimano, the former Abbot of Zen Studies Society who retired amid sexual scandal, is continuing to teach in the United States and overseas. This past November, at a location referred to as “hidden” Zendo, Shimano held sesshin and gave dharma transmission to Zenrin R. Lewis of The Jacksonville Zen Sangha in Florida (also performing one jukai ceremony during the retreat).

The move caused a ruckus of sorts over at the American Zen Teachers Association (AZTA) after, resulting in Genjo Marinello removing Zenrin’s temple from their list of centers. On the removal, Genjo Osho stated (in a leaked email from the AZTA):

Quote :

Eido Shimano agrees that a Zen teacher should not be sexual with students; however, this has never stopped him from being a pathological liar and sexual predator of his own sangha. Zenrin accepts that Eido Shimano has done the best he can and supports his continued teaching and actively continues to train with him.
I don’t care if Zenrin is a member of AZTA or not, we have no way to say if a member is in good standing or not. Nevertheless, I am in charge making additions and changes to the AZTA database, and I will not tolerate any longer the use of our database to refer people to a teacher and organization that continues to train with Eido Shimano. So hearing no objection I have deleted his listing from our public database.
If there is a vote to return him to our database, I will not implement it; however, I will resign from this organization and someone else may then restore it.

Genjo’s announcement prompted the following response by Rev. Nonin Chowaney of the Nebraska Zen Center:

Quote :

This is unacceptable conduct. Genjo was not given the power to delete members from our list, so he has self-righteously overstepped his bounds. Can someone agree to take over our database, and if Genjo resigns from AZTA, that would be fine with me.

One could sympathize with the position held by both men in this exchange, one worried about sending people to a center so closely affiliated with Shimano (who the late Robert Aitken once referred to as “a crook”) and the other concerned about standing AZTA members having their listing removed without a formal process.

The case raises an interesting dilemma for the AZTA. The association presents itself on its website as a peer group, providing “an opportunity for expanded peer contacts and exchanges.” There is a membership committee in place for admitting individuals in to its membership, but there appears to be no mechanism in place for one’s removal — this due to the nature of the association itself (considering applicants based on their credentials alone). This results in what appears to be a lifetime membership. In all fairness, that process is under consideration (a process for grounds for removal).

At best, in this respect, when one sees that a Zen teacher is a member of the AZTA on their respective websites, it means that they have been recognized by their peers as another Zen teacher based on their credentials. Nothing more, nothing less. The membership appears unconcerned with matters of ethical breaches (as a body), with questions for prospective applicants revolving around matters of authorizations, length of time teaching, and length of time training. There are no questions regarding ethical issues, as there is no ethical statement on behalf of the AZTA itself.

As always, I’m afraid, it is “buyer beware” when entering the practice in a North American Zen center. Based on comments that have come in here at the website and elsewhere on the web, there are some individuals out there wholly willing to continue their practice with someone lax in their ethical judgment (Shimano being a more pronounced example of this).

As of today, there are no standardized ethical guidelines for American Zen teachers. Some centers have their own guidelines, with some being stronger than others. Burden therefore rests on the backs of those entering the practice to gauge the conduct of a prospective teacher. While taking responsibility for ourselves in this fashion is a good thing, and while we should be doing this with or without ethical guidelines or oversight in place, it is disconcerting that we ask those entering the practice, often at very difficult points in their own life, to be in a place where they are even interested in asking these very important questions.

We also have a situation here where individuals who might find more appropriate help in a mental health setting come knocking at the door of a center, instead. In some of these ethical breaches like that involving Shimano, it is alleged, these same people were those most vulnerable to his advances.

There are folks from both camps in this conversation regarding more standardized ethics for Zen teachers — those in favor, and those opposed, concerned that oversight would be heavy-handed. In my opinion, since there is this divide, the question for all of these practitioners might be, “Which option would result in the least harm?”

It is a little like a bad relationship,when one talks about it with ones friends it is passed the sell by date

From sweepingzen.com -
The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side (Grace Schireson on Mark Oppenheimer’s book)
Posted by: Myoan Grace Schireson December 18, 2013   

There are a lot of comments on this piece - worth reading - but it's easier to go on line to read them then posting them all here -
http://sweepingzen.com/zen-predator-upper-east-side/

Recently Mark Oppenheimer published an e-book: The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side about the Zen teacher Eido Shimano and his participation through the Zen Studies Society (ZSS) in establishing Zen in New York—a spiritual practice that included his justifying sexual relations with his female students. Mr. Oppenheimer has spent considerable time researching this book: time interviewing and meditating with Eido Shimano, interviewing members and leadership of the Zen Studies Society and interviewing women who had participated in sex with Shimano.  The net result of his research resulted in the title naming Shimano as “Zen Predator.” This subject is alive and vital since Shimano continues to teach and just named a Dharma heir who presumably supports his own teacher Eido Shimano.

Oppenheimer editorialized on his interviews with all concerned, and the e-book is well worth reading for Zen students and social scientists on the effects of rigorous spiritual discipline, residential living, idealization of a leader and the resulting effects of group or cult dynamics. Following up on this e-book, Jay Michelson reviewed Oppenheimer’s book and posited an explanation of some of Shimano’s harms based on “cultural differences,” between Japan and the West.  Michaelson suggested “cultural differences” as one of the factors to which Oppenheimer may have given insufficient attention.  I liked Michaelson’s review, particularly where he supported Oppenheimer’s finding that Shimano and his sangha covered up what had happened including the women’s complaints and the sangha protests for the sake of the continuation of ZSS. This is the painful and disturbing core at the heart of the cover up— the ZSS community (both the Board of Directors and the leadership) and other Zen teachers believed that the cover-up was necessary to support ZSS and the unfolding of Zen in the West. For the past 2500 years, Buddhaharma has continued on its inherent integrity and its development of mature teachers. It has not survived because of corruption and cover-ups, but it has survived despite them.

Having practiced Zen in Japan both in Rinzai and Soto traditions, I do agree that there are some cultural differences between how Zen is practiced in the two settings. I do not agree that the cultural differences would apply to a teacher’s sexual exploitation of male or female students in situations where students and sangha exhort leadership to acknowledge the harm caused and remedy the situation.  I cannot support the idea that the community or the ZSS misperceived Shimano’s sexually predatory behavior due to “cultural differences” for several reasons: the amount of time Shimano lived in the West, the amount of information he received from the women who were harmed, and the male culture of sexual privilege that does not differ between Japan and the West.

Shimano from the beginning of his involvement with Aitken Roshi’s sangha (1960’s) was told that his sexual behavior was harmful to women practitioners. After being told about the results of his sexual predation early on, and then repeatedly engaging in the same sexually predatory behaviors, and after living in the United States for decades, we cannot say that Shimano was living by some imagined Japanese standard that approved of him harming students in this way.

Having been a first-hand listener to adult women describing their protests and their weeping through Shimano’s sexual coercion during this so-called consensual sex, I believe that cultural differences cannot account for his sexual coercion, his alleged predation on the vulnerable, and his seemingly voracious sexual appetite. Sexual coercion, date rape and rape are on a continuum. This is an expression of pathology, and so is sexual addiction.

When this behavior is repeated many times with women in a more vulnerable position within the sangha, and when Shimano was told repeatedly of the harm he had caused, I believe it more realistic to consider this behavior as predatory and disturbed rather than culturally inappropriate.

Furthermore, both Japanese men in power and Western men in power tend to indulge in sexual encounters with subordinates as part of their privileged position. Whether they are US President, congressman, or business man, or spiritual teacher or minister, sexual liaisons seem to be included in male privilege all over the world. Sadly, repeatedly acting out sexual affairs with subordinates is not seen as sexual addiction, but as a preference or privilege. Recognizing and admitting a sexual addiction could allow treatment for the addict.

My experience in conversations with Japanese people is that sexual behavior is not seen as shameful and is not as secret as it is to Westerners. Sexual mores for Zen priests, even so-called celibate monks, varies from temple to temple. Historically, the geisha district of the Gion was built to provide womanly pleasures to the Kyoto monks. The secret about Shimano’s sexual predation and harm to his students, in the opinion of Mark Oppenheimer, Jay Michelson and myself, was not hidden due to Japanese behavioral norms of privacy, but were alleged to be part of a need to protect and continue an organization (ZSS) that allowed Shimano to continue harming people rather than fulfill its Bodhisattva vow to work to free all beings from suffering.

I feel slightly nuts at the moment we have done a 9 day stretch of 14 hours a day we are delivering our (fantastic) tables to Scotland, England west coast and east coast and the Isle of White today, and we are still making them. Amongst my troubles I wonder what Shimano was ever supposed to teach..or was that some mystery that would keep people guessing for years? Answers on a Christmas card please I will read it later

Free podcast / on-line discussion from Buddhist Geeks with Mark Oppenheimer.  Far ranging discussion not just on Shimano, but on spiritual authority, etc.

http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2013/12/bg-304-zen-predator/

Do people with spiritual authority wear different coloured robes?

Just bumped into this, so adding this to the discussion.

This is an in-depth open dialogue about dealing with Shimano, but more than that - how to handle complexities, abuse teachers in general, and so on.....

http://robertaitken.blogspot.com/2010/05/eido-tai-shimano-roshi.html

There is way too much to repost here, but this is one posting of interest:

Ted Biringer
May 22, 2010 at 3:43 AM

Dear Aitken Roshi,

In considering how to help those the sick abusers, I also wonder how to help their victims.

The classic literature is not shy about condemning deluded, or harmful teachers. Zen texts are full of laments about students "misled" or "exploited" by false teachers. Obvious to those paying attention, students are still being misled and exploited.

Many Buddhis leaders have failed (or waited too long) to speak up, though there have been positive moves in recent years.

While deluded and exploitive "teachers" deserve compassion and help, we also need to be more aggressive in helping students avoid being victimized in the first place. Buddhist leaders could help reduce the problem by:

1. When leaders become aware of deluded or harmful teachers--stand up and speak out.

2. Assertively encourage students to become familiar with the classic literature (sutras, shastras, Zen records etc.). When a teacher's words/deeds diverge widely from the classic texts they can move along. The knowledge of too many students based almost entirely on contemporary writings.

3. Talk and write about the meaning and nature of "enlightenment." Because of its "overstated" position in the early decades of transmission to the west, the term has largely dropped out of the conversation. "Enlightenment" is often substituted with "practice" (even when it is not accurate), avoided, or denigrated. I often hear it refered to as "The 'E' word...", as if the mere mention of it will cause the "Stink of Zen" to permeate one's being. Consequently, the condition the term denotes is obscure to students, mysterious, even supersitious. Unfamiliar with its meaning, students do not know how it applies to the reliability of teachers.

"Teachers" that lead students astray from the path due to their own delusion may be as harmful as "teachers" that sexually and financially exploit students. Both have potential to cause genuine students to turn away from the path-- and thus liberation.

Finally, from the classics:

When I was journeying, I didn’t choose communities on the basis of whether or not they had material provisions; I was only concerned with seeing whether their perception indicated some capacity. If so, then I might stay for a summer or a winter; but if they were low-minded, I’d leave in two or three days. Although I called on more than sixty prominent teachers, barely one or two had great perception. The rest hardly had real true knowledge—they just want your donations.
Teachings of Zen, Thomas Cleary

[students who were] genuinely seeking to study the Way ...were unfortunately being led astray by some false teacher so that the correct understanding of the Truth was needlessly being kept from them.
Shobogenzo, Bendowa, Rev. Hubert Nearman

There are people who teach living beings for the sake of fame and profit, without comprehending the characteristics of the ultimate Dharma. They do not recognize relative degrees of depth and shallowness in [their pupils’] capacities and causal affinities. They give their seal of approval to everyone, to people who seem enlightened but are otherwise. This is most painful! It is a great disaster! Whenever someone seems illuminated and pure in their perception of mind, they immediately give their approval. These people are gravely damaging the teaching of enlightenment: they are deceiving themselves and deceiving others. People who use mind with such divergences [from the Correct Path] and present this appearance have not found Mind.
Teachings of Zen, Thomas Cleary

Peace,
Ted

Sesshin in Switzerland with Eido Shimano shut down

by Adam Fisher, http://genkaku-again.blogspot.com, Sept

Edlibach, Switzerland -- A Zen sesshin/retreat in progress at a Jesuit center in Switzerland has been halted after the Jesuits found out it would be hosted by Eido Tai Shimano.
Below is an excerpt of a letter from the director of the LaSalle-Haus describing what happened.

Quote :

The retreat of Eido Shimano was not part of our program. The European Rinzai Sangha had rented our guest house and our staff was not informed about the coming of Eido Shimano.

Being a catholic retreat centre we have very strict rules regarding misconduct.

After having been informed of Eido Shimanos coming to our center and being aware of the fact that he is a controversial figure regarding issues of misconduct, I informed him personally, that he had to leave our center which he did a day after the sesshin had started.

Yours

Tobias Karcher

A more detailed look at the misconduct to which Karcher referred can be found on the Shimano Archive (http://shimanoarchive.com/)

Source: http://genkaku-again.blogspot.com/2014/09/sesshin-with-eido-shimano-shut-down.html