What’s Needed Is Integrity

The Head Teacher of the Monastic Academy, Soryu Forall, often brings up that the Buddha said that you know a person's character through connection, not distance – and over a long time, not a short time. Soryu teaches that our culture is emotionally immature. Our culture lacks the capacity for the connection that is the basis of spiritual friendship. It lacks the integrity that would allow us to examine situations long enough and carefully enough to discern skillfully.

This came up in the case of a guest named Hannah who stayed at the California center for a few weeks in 2020. She chose not to follow the training schedule. She failed to fulfill the training protocol to not take drugs or engage in sexual relations with other trainees that we informed her of prior to her arrival. She started a relationship with a man in the training. He eventually left the training to be in a relationship with her. Several months later she cheated on him, so he broke up with her and returned to the training. At that point, more than a year after she left, she published many false claims about him and our community online.

The Monastic Academy leadership team and Forall took her claims seriously and spent thousands of hours investigating them. They found no evidence for her claims, and in fact found evidence to the contrary. We record most of our gatherings, and they reviewed the recordings of the events she attended. They indicate that she was happy and well cared for.

Soryu and Hannah have never met or spoken with each other, so he tried to speak with her to discuss the issues. She refused, so he offered to engage in mediation with her through a mediator of her choice. She chose a mediator. The mediator told all parties that we could not use anything shared in the mediation to attack the other party online during the process. While we agreed to this, she would not agree, so the process could not continue. She then claimed that it was Soryu and the Monastic Academy who would not engage with her.

Some community members were confused about how to regard Hannah’s claims that she was hurt. Soryu asked if there was any evidence that we had hurt her. We could think of many ways she had hurt us, but no ways we had hurt her.

Soryu said, “I know you want to feel that you did something wrong. Then you could do something to fix this pain. That’s normal for mature people. But now is the time to mature even more than that. Her choices are out of your control. She caused this pain, so she needs to resolve it.”

“While she was with us, she was fulfilled, she was healing, and we cared for her each day. She fell in love with a man she met among us, and he cared for her for almost a year. We have investigated this, trying to find ways in which we made mistakes, for many months now. We hoped to find errors on our end, since that would give us control over fixing things. We are making continuous improvements, but we need to face that this isn’t our problem.”

“Of course she is sad that she lost her happiness due to her own behavior, but that doesn’t mean we hurt her. On the contrary, to hold her accountable to her choices is how we help her. What’s needed is integrity to seek the truth, and deep connection to understand who is causing harm and how.”