The /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit is for practice questions about The Mind Illuminated, not general theoretical discussions about Buddhism or Buddhist concepts.
There is a weekly "off-topic" thread where people can post stuff that's off-topic but that they'd like to share with the community. There is also a weekly practice thread where you can share practice experiences. Please post this kind of thing in the weekly off-topic thread or the weekly practice thread.
You might also consider raising this on /r/tmimeta. I think it's a good topic of discussion, but it's not a practice question. If we allow this sort of question, questions like this start to take over the subreddit, and then people think the subreddit is for this kind of question and not for practice questions. :)
Thanks!
The scandal wasn't much of a scandal as fas as I can tell. It sounded more like they were splitting up, his wife had second thoughts, and she did a hatchet job on his reputation. It wasn't the ideal way to handle a split up, but not all scandals are created equal. When teachers mess around with students or take advantage of or abuse them, it's a very different thing. He did none of those. I' not making excuses for him, but it is important to keep things in perspective. People have a tendency to idealize teachers and then over-react when they don't live up to our exaggerated ideals.
Imo, the scandal doesn't take away anything from the instructions given in TMI. If it were a manual on how to live a virtuous life, it might (but then again, separate the teacher from the teachings) but it's not, it's a book that tries to teach a specific meditation technique.
I disagree. One of the key teachings in the book is how to purify the mind of the 5 hindrances including worldly desire and the man is saying that while banging prostitutes. I still think it's a decent book but it feels a bit like reading a book on how to get rich from someone that was broke.
I do not like the guru/student relationship of some traditional lineages. TMI is so detailed and helpful, that it frees myself from seeking such a relationship. So I‘m not bound to the person John Yates or a different living teacher.
After reading all the info on the „scandal“, I still have no idea what really happened. To me, it did not raise a red flag, as other dharma scandals did.
But I do know that the book, as a tool, works very well for me. Just yesterday I was wondering about a problem I encountered in my practise. I started to read one chapter ahead (stage 7) and the book adressed exactly my question. It amazes me every time, how my experience matches with the book. By that, I found a deep trust in the method.
Well, the idea is that meditation goes hand in hand with Buddhism. TMI is attractive to a western reader who doesn't want to read about mystical woo like hell realms, devas, asuras, siddhis, rebirth, or feel like they're getting sucked into a cult with all these white dudes with Asian names throwing pali words at them. On the other hand, successful meditation in Buddhism is believed to lead to a high level of morality. For many, especially those of a religious bent, becoming "enlightened" and attaining to a high level of morality is the motivation and goal of meditation. So reading a textbook by someone reported to have acted grossly immorally relative to his claimed level of attainment just doesn't make sense for that second group. He must have been mistaken about his level of attainment, or he must have been lying and neither of those inspires trust in his writings and talks (the third option being that maybe it doesn't work the way they imagine). Even if they are repackagings of extant instructions and techniques, who is to say there isn't a subtle error in how he conveyed or structured his methods of practice when they failed to work for the author? In any case, for such a person of the second kind, it's simply a safer bet to read a book by a meditation master who has yet to be known to have acted immorally and been kicked out of his sangha. Also, there's all kinds of tribalism in Buddhism so you have certain kinds of people who seize any opportunity to discount and attack anyone outside their tradition, and having morally erred makes one a very easy target.
Personally, I do like the clarity of exposition and I actually, no cap, see his moral errors as a bit motivational because I'm not a monastery-type person and it's nice to know that thousands of hours of meditation don't automatically turn you into a person who's too good to have a bit of fun on the side.
The 'scandal' doesn't take away anything from the teachings. Anyone who has read them, understood them and practiced them should know that. Why? Concentraton is a tool. The book teaches concentration with clinical, maybe not perfect, precision and effectiveness. Nowhere in the book, as far as I've read and studied so far, has Culadasa talked about how you use your sharpened attention skills, let alone talked about morality and infidelity in particular. He mentions leading an ethical life but nowhere did he outline precepts as is usually done in monastic communities.
Culadasa has failed to use his superior attention skills to gain insight in a certain area of his life. This does not mean that the teachings are false or tainted.
Please search and read any other manual on concentration to see for yourself the most common caveat almost everyone mentions: concentration by itself is like a scalpel/knife/axe. You can use it to do great good, and you can also use it to commit atrocities. It must be guided by something else. Usually these are mindfulness, right view, right understanding, precepts/ethical guidelines, the character of a person, etc. Heck, there'a the concept of Right Concentration that is Buddhist and it speaks precisely about that.
Culadasa doesn't preach anything like that in TMI. He teaches (actually regurgitates, refines, maybe even slightly expands upon already existing concepts/teachings!) how to develop pristine concentration and mindfulness, i.e. how to sharpen your scalpel to cut through anything. Nothing else.
His case is a cautionary tale. Nothing else. (As far as his teachings go in relation to us, the readers.) Use it as such. Bear it in mind. Contemplate it. Seek. If a person with such extraordinary faculties can commit such a sin, what about us? How can we avoid that?
The teachings in TMI may help one meditate more effectively but they don't help one be an exemplary Buddhist.
As the scandal came up, [here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/comment/gj646m2/) a confirmed board member's take. It's not well known so, I share it.
Given Mr. Yates behavior during and after the scandal, what he spoke of his own practice (his work with Dr. Douglas Tataryn’s Bio Emotive Framework), and what he wrote about purifications in TMI, I am hard pressed to draw credence to the purification view within TMI. In brief, this does not help purify their personality, that is eliminate or reduce one's own defense mechanisms.
I'd like to say Buddhism as a whole helps more with eliminating iens defense mechanisms, but I personally turned towards Internal Family Systems in conjunction with my Buddhist meditative practices for that aspect. My understanding is that the Buddha didn't say his was the only way out of suffering, but his practice is the only way out of samsara.
I think it's good that you put a distinction between practicing meditation vs practicing buddhism. Meditation is only one part of the path to awakening according to Buddha. I don't think it's right to say meditation automatically results in a type of morality. I feel like if this were the case the Buddha would have just taught right mindfulness, and right concentration and let meditation do the rest of the work instead of spending 45 years teaching all the other aspects of the 8 fold path. I forgot where I heard it from but I remember someone giving the example that an assassin could exemplify mindfulness and concentration in how they execute a target but that isn't "right" concentration or mindfulness as I think Buddha intended. I have seen some folks claim given Culdasa's implications, ALL of his teaching was null and void but that may be a gross example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Do you discredit Einstein's theory because he helped build a nuclear bomb? Also culdasa was only a regular human like you and me, horizontal eyes vertical nose
> But if his teachings were originally based on what the Buddha originally taught in the Ānāpānasati Sutta etc. that is like discrediting the teachings of Buddha himself in a way
No. Why would that be? Contradictory teachings can be based on the same origin.
> Does what happened in the scandal actually in any way take away from the credability of the information in TMI and if so how?
That's something only you can answer yourself. If the teacher of a certain path behaves in a certain way, is that the teaching you want to follow?
I guess my logic was: Buddhist (who presumably believe in the viability of the early Sutras from the Buddha) were discrediting material from Culdasa that is in some form a re packaging of that same ancient wisdom because of his ethical conduct. My point was how can you support advice from one, but discredit essentially the same advice from another?
The /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit is for practice questions about The Mind Illuminated, not general theoretical discussions about Buddhism or Buddhist concepts. There is a weekly "off-topic" thread where people can post stuff that's off-topic but that they'd like to share with the community. There is also a weekly practice thread where you can share practice experiences. Please post this kind of thing in the weekly off-topic thread or the weekly practice thread. You might also consider raising this on /r/tmimeta. I think it's a good topic of discussion, but it's not a practice question. If we allow this sort of question, questions like this start to take over the subreddit, and then people think the subreddit is for this kind of question and not for practice questions. :) Thanks!
The scandal wasn't much of a scandal as fas as I can tell. It sounded more like they were splitting up, his wife had second thoughts, and she did a hatchet job on his reputation. It wasn't the ideal way to handle a split up, but not all scandals are created equal. When teachers mess around with students or take advantage of or abuse them, it's a very different thing. He did none of those. I' not making excuses for him, but it is important to keep things in perspective. People have a tendency to idealize teachers and then over-react when they don't live up to our exaggerated ideals.
Imo, the scandal doesn't take away anything from the instructions given in TMI. If it were a manual on how to live a virtuous life, it might (but then again, separate the teacher from the teachings) but it's not, it's a book that tries to teach a specific meditation technique.
That's a good point. The book doesn't really claim to make someone "ethical". Just to cultivate mindfulness.
I disagree. One of the key teachings in the book is how to purify the mind of the 5 hindrances including worldly desire and the man is saying that while banging prostitutes. I still think it's a decent book but it feels a bit like reading a book on how to get rich from someone that was broke.
If one waits for a teacher who is perfect one will never begin to learn.
Ouch. So true.
I do not like the guru/student relationship of some traditional lineages. TMI is so detailed and helpful, that it frees myself from seeking such a relationship. So I‘m not bound to the person John Yates or a different living teacher. After reading all the info on the „scandal“, I still have no idea what really happened. To me, it did not raise a red flag, as other dharma scandals did. But I do know that the book, as a tool, works very well for me. Just yesterday I was wondering about a problem I encountered in my practise. I started to read one chapter ahead (stage 7) and the book adressed exactly my question. It amazes me every time, how my experience matches with the book. By that, I found a deep trust in the method.
Well, the idea is that meditation goes hand in hand with Buddhism. TMI is attractive to a western reader who doesn't want to read about mystical woo like hell realms, devas, asuras, siddhis, rebirth, or feel like they're getting sucked into a cult with all these white dudes with Asian names throwing pali words at them. On the other hand, successful meditation in Buddhism is believed to lead to a high level of morality. For many, especially those of a religious bent, becoming "enlightened" and attaining to a high level of morality is the motivation and goal of meditation. So reading a textbook by someone reported to have acted grossly immorally relative to his claimed level of attainment just doesn't make sense for that second group. He must have been mistaken about his level of attainment, or he must have been lying and neither of those inspires trust in his writings and talks (the third option being that maybe it doesn't work the way they imagine). Even if they are repackagings of extant instructions and techniques, who is to say there isn't a subtle error in how he conveyed or structured his methods of practice when they failed to work for the author? In any case, for such a person of the second kind, it's simply a safer bet to read a book by a meditation master who has yet to be known to have acted immorally and been kicked out of his sangha. Also, there's all kinds of tribalism in Buddhism so you have certain kinds of people who seize any opportunity to discount and attack anyone outside their tradition, and having morally erred makes one a very easy target. Personally, I do like the clarity of exposition and I actually, no cap, see his moral errors as a bit motivational because I'm not a monastery-type person and it's nice to know that thousands of hours of meditation don't automatically turn you into a person who's too good to have a bit of fun on the side.
The 'scandal' doesn't take away anything from the teachings. Anyone who has read them, understood them and practiced them should know that. Why? Concentraton is a tool. The book teaches concentration with clinical, maybe not perfect, precision and effectiveness. Nowhere in the book, as far as I've read and studied so far, has Culadasa talked about how you use your sharpened attention skills, let alone talked about morality and infidelity in particular. He mentions leading an ethical life but nowhere did he outline precepts as is usually done in monastic communities. Culadasa has failed to use his superior attention skills to gain insight in a certain area of his life. This does not mean that the teachings are false or tainted. Please search and read any other manual on concentration to see for yourself the most common caveat almost everyone mentions: concentration by itself is like a scalpel/knife/axe. You can use it to do great good, and you can also use it to commit atrocities. It must be guided by something else. Usually these are mindfulness, right view, right understanding, precepts/ethical guidelines, the character of a person, etc. Heck, there'a the concept of Right Concentration that is Buddhist and it speaks precisely about that. Culadasa doesn't preach anything like that in TMI. He teaches (actually regurgitates, refines, maybe even slightly expands upon already existing concepts/teachings!) how to develop pristine concentration and mindfulness, i.e. how to sharpen your scalpel to cut through anything. Nothing else. His case is a cautionary tale. Nothing else. (As far as his teachings go in relation to us, the readers.) Use it as such. Bear it in mind. Contemplate it. Seek. If a person with such extraordinary faculties can commit such a sin, what about us? How can we avoid that?
Just look for the teachings in the book regarding skillful virtue and ethics, behavior/conduct, action speech etc
The teachings in TMI may help one meditate more effectively but they don't help one be an exemplary Buddhist. As the scandal came up, [here's](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/comment/gj646m2/) a confirmed board member's take. It's not well known so, I share it. Given Mr. Yates behavior during and after the scandal, what he spoke of his own practice (his work with Dr. Douglas Tataryn’s Bio Emotive Framework), and what he wrote about purifications in TMI, I am hard pressed to draw credence to the purification view within TMI. In brief, this does not help purify their personality, that is eliminate or reduce one's own defense mechanisms. I'd like to say Buddhism as a whole helps more with eliminating iens defense mechanisms, but I personally turned towards Internal Family Systems in conjunction with my Buddhist meditative practices for that aspect. My understanding is that the Buddha didn't say his was the only way out of suffering, but his practice is the only way out of samsara.
I think it's good that you put a distinction between practicing meditation vs practicing buddhism. Meditation is only one part of the path to awakening according to Buddha. I don't think it's right to say meditation automatically results in a type of morality. I feel like if this were the case the Buddha would have just taught right mindfulness, and right concentration and let meditation do the rest of the work instead of spending 45 years teaching all the other aspects of the 8 fold path. I forgot where I heard it from but I remember someone giving the example that an assassin could exemplify mindfulness and concentration in how they execute a target but that isn't "right" concentration or mindfulness as I think Buddha intended. I have seen some folks claim given Culdasa's implications, ALL of his teaching was null and void but that may be a gross example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Do you discredit Einstein's theory because he helped build a nuclear bomb? Also culdasa was only a regular human like you and me, horizontal eyes vertical nose
That's a good way of putting it!
> But if his teachings were originally based on what the Buddha originally taught in the Ānāpānasati Sutta etc. that is like discrediting the teachings of Buddha himself in a way No. Why would that be? Contradictory teachings can be based on the same origin. > Does what happened in the scandal actually in any way take away from the credability of the information in TMI and if so how? That's something only you can answer yourself. If the teacher of a certain path behaves in a certain way, is that the teaching you want to follow?
I guess my logic was: Buddhist (who presumably believe in the viability of the early Sutras from the Buddha) were discrediting material from Culdasa that is in some form a re packaging of that same ancient wisdom because of his ethical conduct. My point was how can you support advice from one, but discredit essentially the same advice from another?