In the West, we’ve been inundated with scandal after scandal of priest and youth pastor sex abuse in Christian contexts, which created an opening for a too-easy comparison in this case. Recently, both Tibetan men who are survivors of sexual misconduct in monastic settings and Tibetan Buddhist women have been bravely telling their own survivor stories. Sexual misconduct is a deeply human problem, tied to hegemonic masculinity and the perverse manipulation of asymmetric power imbalances. Some pieces did offer up paltry explanations of Tibetan cultural context, but these often had the effect of furthering the neo-Orientalist presumption that Tibetans are unthinking and uncritically religious while implying that the “secular” West is intellectually and morally superior.
Coverage followed a predictable format, with most stories outlining the incident in brief, salacious terms before elevating decontextualized voices of moral outrage. Western media regularly disregard Tibetans’ own views and interpretations of their community. In interpreting what happened, we need to take a slower approach that incorporates Tibetan voices, avoids reducing what happened to a familiar script without thinking holistically about who the Dalai Lama is in context, and elevates the stories of survivors of sexual misconduct in religious settings more broadly.
Dalai lama full#
However, after watching the video myself-the full 1:59 version, not the widely circulated edited one-I also believe that what transpired resists easy categorization and comparison to instances of sexual misconduct among Western religious leaders, which no doubt leaped to the minds of many readers. Simply hearing that “the Dalai Lama asked a boy to ‘suck his tongue’” was enough to make my stomach turn. He made a child uneasy, and the significant power differential between the two made this episode especially troubling. Since the news broke, I’ve been reflecting on what happened, and I’ve decided that it’s important to unpack its nuances for an Anglophone audience in a measured way.īefore doing so, I want to acknowledge that the Dalai Lama’s actions in the video were downright weird and deeply uncomfortable to watch. The idea that the Dalai Lama had harmed a child conflicted with everything I knew about him, but I also knew the incident required serious examination. Throughout my life, I’ve deeply valued the Dalai Lama’s impactful work for peace, nonviolence, religious tolerance, and environmental justice. I speak Tibetan and have lived, researched, and practiced in Dharamsala, where His Holiness the Dalai Lama lives. I’m a doctoral candidate in Buddhist studies and masculinity studies at Northwestern University and a practicing Buddhist. I thought about what the boy must’ve experienced, and I knew this would be devastating for the already vulnerable Tibetan community. At first, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video. When I first heard about the Dalai Lama’s recent encounter with a young boy, my heart dropped.
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