Zen Masters and Flying Monkeys
Perhaps I opened a can of worms with my previous post. But how can a Zen Buddhist writing on issues of Power, Practice, andPeace not at least touch on the sordid mess that Joshu Sasaki created and
which so many of his students enabled for so many years. Would the Zen monk of
my previous post, the one who told of Sasaki’s “otherworldly” power, have
spoken of him so glowingly if he thought we’d already caught wind of his serial
sexual abuse? We had not. But he almost certainly had.
Allegations of Sasaki’s sexual abuse of his female
students didn’t reach the wider Zen community until November 16, 2012. It was
then that Eshu Martin, another of Sasaki’s ordained students, had a letter published
on Sweeping Zen, a now defunct website. Publication of that letter, entitled Everybody
Knows, was well after the Zen talk spoken of in my previous post. However,
if Martin is accurate in his characterization of the sexual abuse scandal
enabled by Sasaki’s monastic community, then that monk who spoke so glowingly
of his sexually abusive teacher certainly DID know. In Eshu Martin’s own words:
Based
on my own experience as a student and monk in Rinzai-ji from 1995-2008 and many
conversations during that time and since, it seems to me that virtually every
person who has done significant training with him, the Rinzai-ji board of
Directors, and most senior members of the Western Zen community at large know
about his [Sasaki’s] misconduct. Yet no one to my knowledge has ever publicly
spoken out. Certainly, as an organization, Rinzai-ji has never accepted the
responsibility of putting a stop to this abuse, and has never taken any kind of
remedial action.*
Thus, we are left with another interesting power dynamic to untangle and explore: Part of a community is well aware of the harm caused by the abusive, narcissistic actions of its leader and wants to acknowledge it, stop it, and perhaps atone for it, but another part of that community seeks to minimize, ignore, or explain it away. Many in this latter group are what I’ll refer to as “flying monkeys”—so named for those that did the Wicked Witch of the West’s bidding in The Wizard of Oz. Flying monkeys serve the narcissist by enabling their bad behavior. But why would someone choose to be a flying monkey?
 |
| The Wicked Witch of the West and one of her Flying Monkeys |
It's not difficult to understand. The flying
monkey is rewarded for enabling the narcissist. A Zen student who speaks out risks
scuttling his or her formal training, whereas one who pretends that all is well is potentially rewarded with good favor and perhaps even ordination.
One who pretends that all is well gets to tell entertaining stories of being in
proximity to great power. And one who pretends that all is well need not do the
hard work of saying what must be said or doing what must be done in order to keep
further harm from being done.
I was some chapters into the humorous memoir of another of Sasaki’s students when I finally connected the dots and realized what he must have known. Suddenly, the ostensibly self-effacing and bare-all humor began to make me cringe. I noted that the book (which had been given to me) was published in May of 2013, just six months after the Everybody Knows letter became public. I continued reading, hoping that the author might come clean at last and speak truthfully of his teacher’s abuse. It never happened. By the time I’d finished reading it, that so-called “tell-all” memoir seemed to be little more than a book-length lie of omission. I found myself unable to avoid the conclusion that the author had rushed to finish it before the proverbial shit hit the fan. Ah, but he seems to have reaped subsequent rewards for having kept his mouth shut.
Thankfully, the board of the monastic community
in question finally did acknowledge the harm that had taken place, and which
they helped perpetuate. They responded, in part, as follows:
Our
hearts were not firm enough, our minds were not clear enough, and our practices
were not strong enough so that we might persist until the problem was resolved.
We fully acknowledge now, without any reservation, and with the heaviest of
hearts, that because of our failure to address our teacher’s sexual misconduct,
women and also men have been hurt.
Joshu Sasaki is now deceased. Keep your bullshit detectors at the ready, though. His flying monkeys are still in our midst!
* Everybody Knows—Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi and Rinzai-ji was posted to Sweeping Zen on November 16, 2012 and retrieved via the Internet Archive WayBack Machine on January 21, 2025.
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The Wizard of Oz film still copyright 1939 by Warner Brothers / Turner Entertainment Co.
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