ROSHI PAT ENKYO O’HARA • GINA SHARPE • PILAR JENNINGS
GINA SHARPE: We may not want to talk about authority or power, but it’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it? If we’re not talking about it, we’re abusing it, because we’re not being conscious. The silence is toxic and harmful. Students begin to lose confidence in their own intuition; they see something happening with the teacher and they think there’s something wrong with their perception rather than something awry with the teacher. We’re dancing on that edge all the time.
I’ve seen abuses of power—not so much the sexual misconduct of teachers, but other misuses of power. I prefer not to talk about it just in terms of sexual abuse, because then we miss a larger issue of how power is wielded and the systemic negligence in not educating people about power and training them how to use it properly.
I practice in the Theravada tradition, which is primarily a monastic tradition, and many of the kinds of abuses we’re talking about now were probably happening but behind the scenes, so I didn’t know about them. But what I’ve noticed in terms of power—both its use and abuse—is that because the Theravada tradition was brought here by laypeople, the use of power is not something that’s been really conscious in our training.
I’m a teacher in a training program, and power is one of the topics I feel is incredibly important, because it’s implicit and invisible. Historically, we have systemic negligence in educating ourselves about the use of power, seeing the power that is invested in us when we have authority as teachers, and learning how to actually use it benevolently rather than toxically.
ENKYO O’HARA: Zen Buddhism has always been touched with difficult power issues. The main way that Zen approaches that is through koans and stories, which are really dialogic in nature. If you read them, they’re always about this confrontation and power work that the teacher and student are doing together. Rather than the teacher just giving the teachings, there’s always this kind of feisty back-and-forth. However, the teacher almost always wins. We treasure the koans where they don’t!
Zen in the United States in the seventies and eighties was influenced by the sexual revolution and countercultural ethos. So it wasn’t some kind of ancient tradition, but rather reflected what was happening in the culture at the time. I chose to go to a monastery in upstate New York because I wanted to find a method, a way to practice.
My teacher was an American. I knew he had authority—he was a sensei—and yet I could see that he
