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Link:\xa0https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/

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Last year I reviewed\xa0The Mind Illuminated, a meditation guide by Buddhist teacher Upasaka Culadasa. Last month, Culudasa\u2019s Buddhist community accused him of cheating on his wife with prostitutes for many years. Culadasa doesn\u2019t seem to agree with the exact details of the accusations, but he also doesn\u2019t seem to deny that there was something in that general category of thing. What can this teach us about enlightenment?

Culadasa has been meditating and studying Buddhism for over forty years and trained under some of the greatest teachers of his generation. I don\u2019t know if he\u2019s claimed to \u201cbe enlightened\u201d in so many words, but he\u2019s written books that describe how to reach enlightenment and that assert you can do it in a few years if you follow his advice, which sounds a lot like claiming enlightenment by implication. Other self-proclaimed enlightened Buddhist teachers seem to respect him and treat him as being at around their level.

And if Culudasa wasn\u2019t enlightened, there\u2019s a long list of other Buddhist masters with similar misdeeds.\xa0The Atlantic\xa0points out that three of the four great founders of American Zen \u201ccaused major public sex scandals\u201d; the fourth, Shunryu Suzuki, was spotless, but his successor\xa0Richard Baker\xa0caused a major public sex scandal. The two most famous US teachers of Tibetan Buddhism,\xa0Chongyam Trungpa\xa0and\xa0Sogyal Rinpoche, both caused major public sex scandals. Trungpa\u2019s immediate successor\xa0\xd6sel Tendzin\xa0caused a particularly horrifying major public sex scandal, and the current head of Shambhala Buddhism,\xa0Sakyong Rinpoche, also caused a major public sex scandal.

These teachers were among the most accomplished of our time. Many were officially certified as enlightened by