“Buddhists Behaving Badly?” – This Week’s Post is Up at Shambhala Sun Space!
My latest “On the Buddhism Beat” post is now online over at Shambhala Sun Space. The biggest news developments this week revolved around what I referred to as “Buddhists behaving badly”: among other things, a prominent Singaporean Buddhist monk was convicted of fraud and sentenced to ten months in prison, and a Burmese monk caused a scare on an airplane by opening the emergency exit. Another story, though, deserves special highlighting here this week:
This via H-Buddhism (The Buddhist Scholars Information Network): Zen teacher Stuart Lachs and colleague “Vladamir K.” have co-authored a summary of a collection of letters held at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Library Archives. In their introduction, the authors write, “The letters cover the period of 1964 through to 1984 and are devoted to the interactions, directly and indirectly, between [Diamond Sangha founder Robert Aitken Roshi] and Eido Shimano Roshi of the New York-based Zen Studies Society. Although there are some letters between Shimano and Aitken, and between Aitken and his Japanese teachers Soen Roshi, Yasutani Roshi, and Yamada Roshi, many are to others in the wider American Zen movement. The letters are concerned primarily with the…alleged sexual misbehaviour of Eido Shimano Roshi that first arose in 1964 in Hawai’i, where Aitken Roshi is based.” Until now, the letters have been part of a sealed holding of Aitken Roshi’s personal papers in the archives.
Read the rest here.
