I've been listening to a podcast about cults, the primary sin of which (as well as many so-called mainstream congregations, including some that claim to teach Zen), is clerical abuse. Regular readers will recognise this as one of my hot buttons.
The hosts of the show (Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation) are both cult survivors – one of a Mormon offshoot, the other of a radical Protestant church. Their personal experience lends valuable insight into the journey their guests have made to end up in front of their microphones.
The manner in which larger society receives cult survivors also comes up. I find this particularly interesting, since it's clear to me that if you drill deep and with unflinching honesty, a whole schedule of self-destructive behaviours – cult membership, suicide, abusive relationships, depression, personality disorders, addiction, most crime – usually originate in social violence.
And former cult members, like spousal abuse survivors, are prime targets for lazy critics. You were weak, stupid, cowardly, you gave tacit consent, and therefore you remain entirely responsible for any misdeeds you committed, or enabled others to commit.
The reflexive question survivors typically face is, "Why didn't you leave?" Moral equivalent of Groucho's "answer yes or no, do you or do you not still beat your wife?"; this challenge is impossible to answer without incriminating yourself. The question itself reads unfinished; it wants "…you idiot" at the end.
But as the hosts of Trust Me point out, it's much more productive to flip it:
"Why did you stay?"
Implied judgement is still there, but whereas the first query rings with fault and blame, this one accepts the equal possibility of decency: Why were you loyal? Why did you commit to this? What did you invest? Who were you afraid to hurt or disappoint? What dissuaded you from acting in your own interest?
Like all penetrating insights, this one is applicable to a lot more than just cults. In Zen we're taught that our true motivation for any act, casual or momentous, is almost always occult; layer upon layer of mind functions work in the dark, so that by the time thought hardens into action, we may be entirely ignorant of its origins.
Nowhere is this more evident than when I confront others in judgement.
Worst of all: when I stand in judgement of myself.
Therefore, henceforward, when interrogating others on past decisions, instead of asking "Why didn't you leave?", I will undertake to ask, "Why did you stay?".
Even when the accused and Crown Counsel are the same person.
(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
Since many readers of this blog are engaged in creative endeavours, on this day of American Thanksgiving, I'd like to share a Canadian thing for which I'm grateful.
I've listened to Terry O'Reilly, a Canadian adman who's made several excellent CBC Radio One series on the art and history of marketing, for just short of 20 years. When his current project debuted simultaneously as a podcast, it proved so successful that he and his family (in a classic Canadian turn, Terry's production team contains more O'Reillys than the Dublin phone book) launched their own podcast production company to produce other worthy projects as well.
One of which Terry flacked (admen are born, not made) on his own podcast. So I gave it a spin.
It was great.
It was fresh.
It was life-changing.
We Regret To Inform You: The Rejection Podcast is required listening for anyone involved in a creative venture. In each episode, Sidney O'Reilly (daughter) unspools the tale of an iconic creator – writer, painter, filmmaker, athlete, actor, musician, anyone shopping his or her heart – and reveals how conventional wisdom treated them before they were famous.
Like Jesus Christ Superstar's 40 years in the desert, searching for a producer, any producer, to take on this massive cultural epiphany of the 70s.
Or the Temple of Doom that the guys who finally gave us Bat Out of Hell – Meatloaf's epic genre-busting rock-opera of an album – had to negotiate, and renegotiate, and abandon, and reconfront, and assault again, to get one of pop music's most thunderous masterworks into listeners' hands.
Or the 15-year odyssey, complete with Cyclops and sea monsters, that the gods sent Mad Men on before they'd (grudgingly) allow it to become a landmark of modern television.
All beloved household names, all gold standards in their domains now. Every last one sneered down, dismissed as sophomoric, laughable, unsaleable, boring, tragically lame.
Over and over and over.
Till the day they redefined art.
As a writer, Regret populates my solitude and refuels my soul. The main movement of each episode, in which Sidney recounts in full numbing splendour all the obstacles these people had to overcome to reach the summit, is skeletal support for those of us in the foothills. When we've relived this ordeal, and are basking vicariously in the subject's earned glory, Terry steps in to deliver a pithy, potent epilogue, summing up what we've learned, and ending on the show's simple – but in that moment, roaring – catch phrase:
"Never – ever – give up."
I've teared up more than once.
Finally, as the theme music rises, we get an envoi: a synthesised voice lists the winding litany of triumphs, awards, firsts, and fortunes amassed by this pathetic geek whom no-one is ever going to take seriously.
The whole experience leaves me restored, replenished, and ready to horse up again. If you too are an artist – or just a fan – I suspect it'll do the same for you.
You can hear We Regret To Inform You: The Rejection Podcast on its own website, or download it to your favourite device from iTunes/Apple Podcast or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.
Best of luck to everyone who's building today, in this dictatorship of yesterday.
(Photo of Australian painter Tom Roberts' Rejected, in which the artist contemplates a rejected work, courtesy of the ABC and Wikimedia Commons.)
Three years ago almost to the day, I wrote here about the Winston Churchill Effect – that odd mass hysteria that causes whole nations to believe they remember events that never happened. In the post I related as how, as a child, I read a newspaper article about a boy my age who'd been poisoned by Hallowe'en candy laced with heroin, ostensibly given him by a psychopathic neighbour.
I'd invented that memory, sceptics assured me, on the grounds that no such crime has ever been committed, and newspapers would never report such an unsubstantiated rumour.
Well, this week I learned from the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast (Episode #62: "The Strange Origins [and Stranger Persistence] of the 'Razor Blades in Candy' Myth", presented by Alex Schmidt and guest Jason Pargin), that I did in fact read such a story.
In 1970, Detroit five-year-old Kevin Toston died after eating candy that was later found to be contaminated with heroin. This was first reported in national media as a stranger-danger poisoning, before further investigation revealed that Kevin had most probably died from ingesting heroin left in his reach during a visit to his uncle. His parents, according to police, had likely sprinkled more of the stash on Kevin's Hallowe'en candy to camouflage the uncle's guilt.
I couldn't verify whether this theory came out true in court, but what's certain is that as the less-sensationalistic story dropped, so did coverage, at least beyond greater Detroit.
So I did read a real article, though several supporting facts I either added freestyle or conflated with other stories. Kevin's name, for example, was obviously not Richard. And my distinct memory of a tiny hole found in a candy bar wrapper, with the unvoiced implication that it had been injected with heroin, is similarly invented, though I'm getting a dim recollection of a schoolmate including that detail in a drugged-candy tale (either this one or another).
And though I remember that both of us were about 12 at the time, I was significantly younger, and Kevin younger still. A press photo depicts him as a laughing kindergartner in glasses, wearing a sport coat. And most significantly: he was African-American. So my memory of the two of us being similar in appearance was wildly inaccurate.
But hold the phone: on that last count, an intriguing alternative arises. In 1974 – the year I was twelve – Timothy O'Bryan really did die from eating doctored Hallowe'en candy, which was also initially reported as a stranger poisoning. And the photo run with this article shows a smiling, Cold War-coiffed Caucasian kid in a checkered collared shirt very like I used to wear.
(Note that once again, the culprit was family – statistically, far and away the most common perpetrator of child abuse. Turns out Timothy's father poured cyanide into his candy to collect on a life insurance policy.)
So one more time, no evil neighbour, and no rational excuse to deprive kids of the wonderful Hallowe'ens we cherished. But two such articles were published, and I almost certainly read them both. Over the years the two melded in my mind, and as the media seems to have done that thing where it reports accusations on Page 1 and ignores or buries vindications, I never learned that both were completely bogus.
(By the way, seeing as we're on the topic: in the podcast, Alex makes the cogent point that heroin is enormously expensive. As is cocaine, another narcotic frequently rumoured to be slipped to trick-or-treaters. One does not waste these things pranking random kids, any more than one bakes diamonds into cookies to break their teeth. And while we're up, drug addicts never give their fix away, regardless of what they're strung out on. They obsessively hoard it until every last grain is gone, then desperately scramble for more. Thus it's highly unlikely that anyone possessing these substances scatters them about for the dubious thrill of getting unseen children high.)
So the personal experience I shared in my January 2020 post is not in fact an example of the Churchill Effect. Though I've experienced others as well, the candy thing was just a pedestrian matter of scrambled memory – an extremely common cognitive glitch.
But in the cases of Kevin Tosten and Timothy O'Bryan, notwithstanding a little drift, I remembered something that actually happened.
Or to be precise, I remember actual newspaper coverage of something that never happened.
First I believed I'd read it
then I believed I didn't
and now I believe again.
(Photo courtesy of Evan Amos and Wikimedia Commons.)
Recently heard on Bhante Sujato's Dhammanet podcast (available from the website and the usual aggregators):
"A man found a piece of truth on the ground and picked it up. Seeing this, Mara smiled.
"'Why are you smiling?' asked the Buddha.
"'Just give him five minutes,' Mara answered. 'He'll make a doctrine out of it."
(Nepali painting of Mara's retinue courtesy of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art and Wikimedia Commons.)
I recently happened upon an interesting moment in Season 6, Episode 4, of Gimlet Media's Startup podcast. (Transcript here; download podcast from iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.)
At issue is Jia Ruhan, a Chinese opera singer groomed to become her country's Céline Dion, with hopes she would put it on the international pop music map. Things didn't work out – such outcomes are hard to plan – and now she lives in self-imposed seclusion, having heeded a spiritual call.
At one point the interviewer asks:
"So as a kid, at first you wanted to be a dancer and then a musical star. Then the government has this goal to make you like a global star. What do you want to be now?"
To which Jia replies:
"I want to be a hermit. Truly, exactly, I really want to be a hermit."
A statement of which the young American reporter appears entirely to miss the import. Her voice takes a quizzical tone, as if Jia were joking. The interviewer then exposits:
"After Ruhan left the [pop music] project, she went through some big life changes. She made another album on her own, but after that, she realized she was burnt out and needed a break. She got really into Buddhism and silent meditation. Our two-hour phone call was the longest conversation she’d had in six months. So the state-backed pop star who was supposed to help China become cool… for now, she wants to be a hermit."
That last line is delivered with an ironic inflection, as if Jia had silently added "... or whatever."
I like this podcast. And nobody can know everything. But in this case, the production team dropped the ball. Jia Ruhan comes from a nation with a millennia-old continuing tradition of literal hermits: individuals who retreat to the Zhongnan Mountains to practice eremitical monasticism.
So she wasn't being cute when she referred to herself as a hermit. In point of fact, she aspires, or at least wishes, to be a hermit nun: a monastic practicing alone, under her own rule, almost certainly in the Zhongnans.
I had to smile at the reporter's reaction. It's a true cross-cultural miscue, turning on the fact that Anglophones currently use the word "hermit" pejoratively. ("Don't be such a hermit! Come out and talk to our guests!") In fact, we've used the term sardonically for so long that many of us can no longer define it; for most, it's become a synonym for recluse.
Which doesn't actually bother me. But I do get a little frosted when the Western Zen establishment calls hermits fraudulent and heretical – when not flat-out calling us extinct. Zenners should know better. Or hey, maybe just practice their religion.
Interested parties may wish to consult Assignment Asia: A modern-day hermit in China. It may be a bit precious, but that's to be expected from a government production.
It does seem that if a Communist dictatorship can accept, and even boast, the ur-monks in its midst, it's not too much to ask the rakusu set to back down a peg.
Anyway, I nodded while listening to Jia Ruhan talk about her ambitions. To say I totally get it would be an understatement.
Peaceful path, sister.
(Panel from Fan Kuan's Travellers Among Mountains and Streams courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taibei, and Wikimedia Commons.)
(For an overview of solitary sesshin, see Part I. For meal planning tips, see Part III.)
Planning is the difference between a sustaining sesshin and wasted time. Plan well, and you'll "touch the mind". Don't plan, and you'll touch frustration.
It's a good idea to start a week in advance. Though slapping a sesshin together the night before becomes doable after you've got a few under your belt, in all cases a longer runway makes for better practice.
Take that lead week to:
• Plan your menu (specific tips here).
• Procure supplies.
• Prepare time-consuming dishes in advance.
• Print out Net-sourced study materials; multiple copies of your sesshin schedule; and your meal plan. This allows you to avoid computers and other soma-screens on show day, which is a major prop to concentration and mindfulness.
On Sesshin Eve:
• Prep your tea pot so all you have to do next morning is heat and pour water.
• Ready zafu and zabuton, and any other paraphernalia such as timer, bell, tuque, etc, in the zendo (meditation room or spot).
• Post your schedule around the house. (Zendo, bathroom, kitchen, garden, hall, work room…)
• Set up incense or scented candles*, if used.
• Straighten up and vacuum.
• Turn off your phone. (Completely. No vibrating. Lock it in a drawer.)
*Incense is useful to set up mindful, contemplative space, even if you rarely use it other times. Scented candles are a Roman Catholic approach some may prefer. As ever, spend money on the good stuff.
Preliminary thoughts:
• Prioritise sitting. There's a tendency to fudge on the meditation; to cut it down with too many work or study periods. But meditation is what sesshin is all about, and if you stiff yourself, you may not realise the benefits you seek. A half-hearted sesshin can even exacerbate unhappy states. When in doubt, err on the side of sitting.
• Morning meditation always sucks. You're sleepy, grumpy, lonely; the place is dark and cold; you have no clue why you thought this was a good idea. (This is just as true in the monastery. Aloneness is not the dependence of this co-arising.) But those morning blocks lay the foundation for the whole day. Sit them faithfully, regardless of mood.
• Work and study are also important. Have a minimum of one hour-long period for each. (Hygiene breaks and after-meal clean-ups don't count.)
• Recordkeeping is an ancient part of Zen practice, and it's important to log your own sesshins: what worked, what didn't work, any noteworthy divergences from the printed schedule, stuff to do or not to do next time. Don't forget to note significant moments, even if they're not relevant to future efforts. "Brilliant sunrise." "Fabulous sit after dinner." "Eggs have hatched in the nest by the garage."
• During sesshin, write notes on paper. If your sesshin log is on computer, transfer the comments to it next day.
• Keep old schedules and menus on file, whether hard or digital. (Ideally both.) This makes planning future sesshins a lot easier and serves as additional historical documentation.
• I find a formal nap productive. Always schedule the nap immediately after a sit. Sometime before lunch generally works best for me. You'll need a 10-minute passing period afterward to get dressed and wake up. Don't schedule a sit immediately after a nap; do something else between, even for 20 minutes.
• Work is generally best when it's simple and physical. (Cleaning up your actual desk: good. Cleaning up the desktop on your computer: bad.) Avoid work that requires communication, such as correspondence.
• Though it may appear physically undemanding, sesshin is hard on the body; by bedtime you'll be racked. You'll have better luck (and better meditation) if you schedule shorter sits than normal. My daily sits are forty to sixty minutes, but I limit them to thirty during sesshin.
• Back-to-back sits should be separated by ten minutes of mindful, low-effort movement, such as kinhin (walking meditation), yoga, tai chi, or stretching exercises. The point is to loosen up those joints without scattering your mind or stirring up your endocrine system.
• Be comfortable. Have a good cushion or chair, regulate light and temperature, deal effectively with hunger, fatigue, and thirst, so they don't disrupt the task at hand. Machismo and indiscipline are manifestations of the same delusion.
• The best study texts for sesshin are formal and classical. Commentary on the sutras or koans is perfect. Avoid stuff about Zen politics ("The Zen response to teacher misconduct") or worldly application ("Practice with pets"), unless they address challenges that prompted the sesshin. "Meditations" – lists of unanswered questions on a given theme, such as forgiveness or acceptance – are also good.
• A major difference between solitary and group sesshin is the need for sound. When you sit with others, there's a conversation going on, whether you hear it or not. Alone, the silence can become oppressive. To remedy this I listen to a podcasted teisho during work period (same rules as written study), and supportive music – chanting, singing bowls, shakuhachi, whatever works – while preparing a meal. Figure out what works best for you.
• End the sesshin on a sit, after evening hygiene and bedtime tasks. Go straight to bed afterward; if you futz around between, you may experience bad sleep or depression next day.
• Finally, don't give up. A difficult day often leads to a good evening. And a hard sesshin may lead to a good next day. You've lit a trash fire inside your skull; whatever happens next is not going to be uncomplicated.
But I've consistently found that a good sesshin, well-planned and carried off, is a rebirth. Even if you're a few days in labour.
This is the mouthpiece of the Insight Meditation lineage maintained by Gil Fronsdal. (I have no idea what titles are in play or how the hierarchy over there works, but Gil delivers most of the teishos, so I'm assigning him authority.)
Insight in general, and Gil in particular, offer a refreshing perspective on Buddhist practice. Gil's gentle, self-effacing delivery inspire trust, and his perspective that existence is more or less an elaborate practical joke suggests to me that he's as near enlightened as anyone in this life. (Also, as a Zenner who jumped ship for Theravada, he's an invaluable resource for Zenners; his subtle criticisms of our approach to the Great Matter are both respectful and incisive.)
About half of the teishos here are his; the other half are delivered by a host of other teachers speaking on a range of mostly life and practice topics. (You can always count on Insight to get to the point.) Treatises on sutric or koanic literature are occasionally uploaded as well.
Individual podcasts can be downloaded from the Audio Dharma website, or listeners can subscribe via iTunes or XML. Like the SFZC podcast it's an exhaustive library of teachers and topics, offered entirely free of charge, that could serve as your sole source of spoken-word teaching if you were so inclined.
San Francisco is the capital of Western Zen. The sangha there – the Western one; Asian residents were already practicing for over a century – is one of the oldest in the world, founded by Shunryu Suzuki in 1961. Today, most Zen teachers in this hemisphere have some connection with it, whether formal or incidental. (That's Soto teachers; Western Rinzai is less centralised, Korean Zen is bipolar – it has two power centres – and Thich Nhat Hanh's Vietnamese lineage is anchored in France.)
Today's SFZC is a freakin' 900-pound gorilla among spider monkeys, with three houses, an expansive endowment, and a giant sangha consisting largely of priests and priests-in-training. We hermits like to sneer about "enlightenment factories", but this-here really is.
On the other hand, it's nice to have a secure, established hub you know will be there tomorrow: reassuringly conservative, largely unchanging, eschewing relevance and doctrinal debate, and grinding out priests like a latter-day Ireland, who in turn produce reams of teachings for world consumption. In sum, SFZC – its history, its current role, the nature and limits of its authority – is a big topic among Zenners. Few of us exercise don't-know-mind in its regard.
But I'm not going to weigh in. Instead I'm going to direct you to their Dharma Talks podcast; for my money, one of Rome on the Bay's most valuable products. (To begin with, I don't have any money, and all of the teishos in SZFC's bottomless digital databank are free.)
The talks cover every Zen topic under the sun, in every style, as SFZC's diverse clerical corps take turns at the mic. A few of these lectures have about saved my life, when it needed saving. Others leave me more or less unchanged, but they're all useful and productive.
Anyway, dig it, brothers and sisters: there are a lot of them.
SFZC's podcast homepage includes links to such automatic delivery options as iTunes and RSS, as well an archive of the podcasts themselves – one per week right back to 2007 – for individual download.
So if you're up for 300-odd ordained-types throwing down some serious Zen, swing on by San Francisco's perpetual Teisho Slam. Whatever you need, you'll find it there.
Update, 2023 16 November:
Unfortunately this source has gone pay-to-play, and all shared podcasts I've been able to uncover are of non-Zen origin. Public libraries sometimes have audio collections of Alan teaching; you really do want to hear him, rather than just reading him. So for the time being, YouTube is the best bet. I could even see myself buying an audio repository outright; it's the sort of thing you might listen and re-listen to throughout the years.
Alan Watts was one of the first Zen teachers I encountered, full forty years ago, and today he remains among my favourites. One-time rock star of Western Zen, he's lost a lot of glitter in the intervening decades; from Boomer gadfly to unfashionable hermit. But his lectures are still as magnetic, his wit as wicked. And his insights? Right on, man!
Indeed, rarely has so qualified a scholar stepped into those waraji. Once a Zen student working toward transmission, he chose instead in the last stages to be ordained as an Anglican priest. As a result his references are about equal parts Christian and Buddhist -- ideal for Western audiences.
If it's true that Watts was typical of his generation in some respects (there's a lot of self–obsession and fad-envy in his background, along with the requisite flirtation with drugs), it's also true that he maintained a sardonic distance from both the youth culture of the 60s and the Zen hierarchy in Asia; his blunt Saxon axe cleaves to the heart of what was often a very vapid conversation.
Fortunately for us – his descendants – most of Watts' talks were assiduously recorded. Now some of them are available free of charge online, in fifteen-minute bites, from The Alan Watts Podcast. You can hear them on the website's Flash player, or download them from the iTunes Store directly to your own computer or mp3 player.
Speaking as a guy with a hard-bitten Generation X distaste for all things hippy, I think we Zenners could use a lot more Alan these days. Load up one of these podcasts, and see if you don't agree.
(Alan Watts mural by Levi Ponce, design by Peter Moriarty, conceived by Perry Rod. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)
You gotta love Ajahn Brahmavamso Mahathera. He's a forest monk, albeit not of the hermit lineage. In a West dominated by Zen, Vipassana, and Vajrayana, his dharma is Theravada. He's a working class Englishman with a Cambridge degree in theoretical physics, trained as a monk in Thailand, and teaching in outback Australia. He runs a monastery he built himself. (Seriously. With his own hands.) And he's been excommunicated by his lineage. So he must be doing something right. (Ordaining women, as it happens.)
But the best thing about Ajahn Brahm is his teaching. There's precious little piety about this guru. He'll call out hypocrisy so fast it'll make your incense burner spin. And he starts with his own.
I particularly esteem Brahm's (in)famous Five Types of Religion. (True fact: the original teaching was Five Types of Buddhism, which is how I first heard it. Only when it was pointed out that all religions suffer from these delusions did he rework it for everyone.)
So here they are. Readers who practice a religion, any religion, should copy and paste this list. Then edit out my commentary, and meditate on the rest. Often.
Everybody strapped in?
AJAHN BRAHM'S FIVE TYPES OF RELIGION
1. Conceited Religion: Our religion is better than yours. (And therefore we are better than you.)
This is a Christian stereotype here in the West, but that's only because they're the majority; I run into identical Buddhists all the time. Despite what some would have you believe, triumphalism (the belief that you have a monopoly on truth) is a sin in every religion. In fact, I learned both the term and the condemnation as part of my Christian training.
2. Ritual Religion: Venerating the container above the contents.
Did someone say "guru worship"? Let's face it, Zenners: we do the hell out of this one. Obsession with rank and form, bowing, chanting, posture, oryoki, lighting this, ringing that, bop-she-bop, rama-lama-ding-dong. None of it's worth a crock of warm spit, and if you forget that, it's a giant waste of time.
3. Business Religion: We're best because we're biggest. Biggest church, largest sangha, highest priest, trendiest teacher-author.
This is the "success" model, whereby we declare the biggest seller the best product. Uh, no. Read your scripture, people. God doesn't like "success". Not least because it instantly becomes an altar to Mara. Worldly religion is no religion.
4. Negative Religion: We gotta GET those [insert group here] !!!
As Brahm points out, this is yin to Type 1's yang: where Conceited Religion says "we're the best," Negative Religion says "they're the worst." I call it Varsity Religion: lots of cheerleaders shaking their pompons and urging us to spend our meagre days on earth beating State. Good thing it has nothing to do with enlightenment; State can't be beat.
5. Real Religion: Doing what your prophet told you to do.
Note that the first four types are not this. Try it. Grab any religion. I like Zoroastrianism. And not just because it has the awesomest name of any religion. (It would be worth it to convert just so you could tell people you're Zoroastrian.)
Thus:
1. Did Zoroaster teach his followers that they were a superior race, and all others inferior?
No.
2. Did he teach that temporal gestures were the main point of faith?
No.
3. Did he teach that the biggest temples or most acclaimed priests were the most godly?
No.
4. Did he teach that life is all about opposing some other group?
Almost. He did say that Earth is a battleground between the godly and ungodly, and that salvation is a matter of enlisting in the correct army. But he didn't identify any earthly group as Angra Mainyu's army, nor did he say that just being a Zoroastrian automatically puts you in Ahura Mazda's. So…
No.
So there you have it. Grand Master Z agrees: "Walk the line, chump."
If you'd like to see Ajahn Brahm teach this truth himself (and I heartily recommend it, he's very engaging), you'll find it on YouTube. For links to many more Brahm talks, check out r/thaiforest's Ajahn Brahm Wiki via Reddit.
And yes, they're all that good.
(Photograph of seeker panning out Oz gold courtesy of WikiMedia and the State Library of Victoria.)
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I've been listening to a podcast about cults, the primary sin of which (as well as many so-called mainstream congregations, including some that claim to teach Zen), is clerical abuse. Regular readers will recognise this as one of my hot buttons.
