A few months ago, I wrote a post briefly mentioning Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I put it down soon after writing it, but I picked it up again recently.
I was reading it on the bus home last night. Sogyal Rinpoche writes:
When I am with my masters, I ask them again and again the questions I need answers to. Sometimes I don’t get clear answers, but I do not doubt them or the truth of the teachings. Sometimes I may doubt my own spiritual maturity or my ability to really hear the truth in a way that I could fully understand, and more often I press on asking and asking, until I do get a clear answer. 1
He criticizes what he sees as a Western glorification of doubt, “in which to be seen to be intelligent we have to be seen to doubt everything.”2 There’s some truth to that. Post-Enlightenment there’s been a misapplication of empiricism to the realm of religion, causing it to be treated more as a set of factual propositions than mythic truths.3
I have no problem admitting that there is indeed an over-glorification of doubt. But that doesn’t stop me from being one of those glorifiers! It used to bother me that there was probably no amount of information that could bring me to belief simply because I couldn’t not believe that one could never be sure of anything!4 For better or worse, I’ve since acquiesced.
In 2017, students of Sogyal Rinpoche published a letter detailing his pattern of abuse. He left students with bloody injuries, verbally humiliated them, coerced them into giving him sexual favors, groped them, and ordered them to strip. The authors of the letter had been his students for decades. They wrote:
We trusted for many years that this physical and emotional treatment of students – what you assert to be your “skillful means” of “wrathful compassion” in the tradition of “crazy wisdom”– was done with our best interest at heart in order to free us from our “habitual patterns”. We no longer believe this to be so.
Its an unsettling reflection of Sogyal Rinpoche’s assertion that he never doubted his masters. Maybe he should have.
I read the letter this morning. The whole thing made me feel sick. When I was in high school, I found out a teacher had been sleeping with a friend of mine since the friend was fourteen. The teacher was a friend too I guess. We had each other’s number, we’d text - even call, even go home in her car. And something really changed in me when I found out what she’d done. I can’t explain it except to say: a sick feeling that’s never quite gone away. A sick feeling and a permanent doubt.
I took my bookmark out of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying after reading the allegations. Then, I packed the book in my backpack so I could abandon it at a bookstore near work tomorrow. Someone else can read it, but I don’t have the stomach to finish it anymore.
Later in the day, I came across some old “A gift for you” slips that come with Amazon gift packages. I taped them to my bedroom door alongside the ones already there. The older slips curled at the edges, the ink was faded, the paper sun-bleached. The new ones were pristine: white paper, crisp ink, perfectly flat. And I had this awful worry that eventually the ink on all those notes would fade completely and the words would be lost to me forever. It’s an ironic truth that mirrors life: those papers will fade because I put them on my door to see them daily - to remember the people who gave them to me, and to remember that I am loved. And I will also fade if I’m lucky enough to live a long, healthy life.
Anyway, that’s all to say, the fears of impermanence that spurred my interest in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying to begin with are still around and kicking! No resolution, not one bit - thank you and goodnight!
Footnotes
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 128.↩︎
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 127.↩︎
A paraphrasing of an argument David Bentley Hart makes all throughout The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss but especially on pages 24-27.↩︎
To any similarly minded folks, Herbert McCabe has a burn and a half in store for you: “It is a romantic myth that there is some kind of moral superiority about people who refuse to make up their minds because the evidence is not 100 percent compelling.” (Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason, 13.)↩︎