My Faith, My Vows, and Why I Advocate for Child Safety

Remaining a Tibetan Buddhist While Speaking About Child Protection

(00:02): I just wanted to clarify a few things about my personal karma and my connection with my faith, which to this day, I am still devoutly a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. At the same time, the impetus to start this nonprofit, ChildSurvivors.com, came from me becoming aware that we have within our tradition, very similar to the Catholics, a coverup of children being physically and sexually assaulted in the monasteries- worldwide, not just Tibetan. Mostly we are getting a lot of reports in from Sri Lanka and other nations have had reports over the years that it is not the exception, it is the norm. So being trained in Buddhism, where we have ethics of non-harming and compassion and protection and ethics, I can't be purporting all this kind of compassion-y stuff knowing that we have child abuse worldwide. I would think that's like an emergency problem right now that we all have to take responsibility for and deal with.

Taking Responsibility Beyond Borders

(01:37): And it's not just, "Oh, it's in a different country and it's not my responsibility." Well, yeah, it is. So we have to take responsibility for this. The Catholics thought that they would be harming the faith by covering up the pedophile priests and they kind of would turn a blind eye and sort of relocate them to a different district. Some people got discharged quietly, but it didn't go well for them once that got exposed that children, choir boys, were harmed worldwide. They think they took a hit in terms of their reputation. But just because you would find out that you've got these pedophile priests and children were harmed is not equivalent to say a woman who was a very devout Catholic. Just because there's child abuse doesn't mean that her personal faith or her personal religion, her connection with God, her prayer has been completely besmirched and she's got to leave the faith altogether and jump ship just because you have this happening.

Purification Through Awareness and Accountability

(02:52): It also doesn't make anyone that found out a pariah or a Hellian or an evil person by finding out that you do have abuse and that the way to deal with that, finding out that an organization has got corruption, is to purify it. I talked very frankly with one of my very close teachers and he said, "Yeah, it's good to bring light to the stuff that harms children or adults." And he said, "You keep on shedding light on things and you prune out what's not helpful, what's impure, and then what will remain is the pure." "The pure one." And all through my life, ever since I started this kind of campaign to bring awareness to child safety in the monasteries, I would never dream of staying in the tradition and being like a pariah or an outcast or a Hellian or a samaya breaker because I'm a child advocate.

Child Advocacy and Buddhist Vows

(03:55): I mean, that doesn't make sense. So I talked to him as I was beginning this whole process and I said, "We have to keep the kids safe." He actually said, "I agree with you. And I'm telling some of my other Tibetan teacher friends that we've got to clean this up. We have to create child safety. There has been some strides toward that in the Bhutanese culture, but we need to do a whole lot more and we're not allowed to talk about it. So that's step number one." And so this teacher said to me, "Well, I run nunneries primarily and we actually do implement very strict child safety protocols within the nunneries." So he said, "I guarantee you that there's not this physical and sexual abuse happening there." So I said, "Okay, but what are we going to do about all the other ones?" And I think it's been discussed at some of the annual conferences.

Confronting the Shadow of Abuse

(04:57): And then it just kind of gets pushed to the side because it's such an unseemly, uncomfortable, horrible shadow issue that nobody wants to talk about it. So I get that. It's really horrible. It triggers stuff. It's driven underground. It's been in a lot of different facets of society. I heard that the Boy Scouts, the Catholics, that anywhere there's children, there's this propensity for child abuse. So families, incest. It's way more ubiquitous than any of us ever knew. And I don't want to burn anything down. I don't want to burn a family down that has incest. I don't want to burn- round up people by droves and throw them all in jail and shut down monasteries and break our vows and never meditate again.

Compassion Requires Action

(05:51): It's just very straightforward. Kids are hurting and they are hurting in a covered up way worldwide in these same sex monasteries. And that's my religion.

"So when you take vows of non-harming and social justice and trying to help the world, it's more natural that we would be wanting to do something about it."

It doesn't mean these people are breaking their vows and we're bad and we need to be shunned and kicked out and called demons. That's not at all who we are, we are compassionate people that want to protect kids. Why? Because I'm a mom. And then of course I've worked in social justice in a number of capacities all my life, but it doesn't mean we're evil because we want to help kids. If you didn't even think that like, "Oh, we need to cover up child abuse in our tradition. And we're the righteous ones and the people that are speaking out are the demons." And they're the ones that are going to vajra hell. That doesn't make any sense.

Silence, Responsibility, and the Protection of Children

(06:52): So you need to step back and think, am I complicit with the harm or am I part of the solution? And if you are covering, complicit for harm that you know about, that's the problem. That's a breach of your vows. That's breaking every single one of our three vows by not helping.

• So it's time to help.
• So we're going to take responsibility.
• Silence is consent. Silence is complicity. Silence perpetuates harm.
• That endangers the tradition, don't you see?

It didn't help the Catholics. It doesn't help to hurt kids behind the scenes. So that's the driving force. And it has been authorized and permitted by my teacher. I am still a samaya keeper. I am still concurrent with my vows. They are intact 100%. I have no intention of leaving.

Remaining in the Tradition

(07:54): The corruption is not going to scare me. It's not going to drive me out. I don't care who says what behind my  back. I know in my heart who I am. I'm a mom that cares about kids. And we have child abuse in our monasteries worldwide in all different traditions. And we're going to put a stop to it. It's my life calling and it should be everyone's life calling who's ever called themselves a Buddhist or in any facet of society where kids are hurt. We need to, as adults, take personal responsibility for the voices of those vulnerable that cannot speak for themselves, that are being hurt in silence every night. It is our responsibility. We have vows of compassionate activity, non-harming and protecting the vulnerable. So there are steps to be able to help these children. The first step is to have conversations about it and deconstruct, de-indoctrinate ourselves so that we're not so afraid to talk about it.

Faith, Hope, and the Future of the Tradition

(08:56): I love you all. I love the tradition. I have faith in human beings. I believe that the darkest within us, like Jim Crow, apartheid, we could have these dark, dark, dark things, wars, World War III. But with education, solidarity and ethics and open conversations, Truth and Reconciliation Committees, we can change the darkest within us. I have so much faith in our Buddha nature, our basic goodness, our ethics and our conscience that's stronger than these dark patterns, even if they've been going on for thousands of years. If they've been going on for thousands of years then it's time for them to stop. It doesn't mean that we have to shut down the whole tradition. It means that we have to clean up, as my teacher said, what is impure.  

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