Sexual misconduct by teachers

What it is

Sexual contact between a spiritual teacher and a student, in a relationship where the power asymmetry makes meaningful consent doubtful and where the teaching itself is often used to obtain or justify the contact.

It is treated here as its own article rather than as a sub-heading of the guru problem because the pattern has specific features that recur with unusual consistency:

• Spiritual framing. The contact is presented as transmission, initiation, tantric practice, a teaching tailored to the student, or a test of surrender. This does two things: it obtains compliance, and it makes the student's later distress look like a failure of understanding.
• Selection. Frequently the student is new, isolated, recently arrived, or in personal crisis.
• Secrecy framed as sacredness. Silence is required not to conceal wrongdoing but because the relationship is special.
• Institutional protection. When reports surface, the organisation's first instinct is to protect the teacher and the mission, on the reasoning that the good work must be preserved.
• Community disbelief. Other students, who have benefited genuinely from the teacher, find the accusation unbearable and resolve the dissonance by discrediting the accuser.

The last two are what convert a private wrong into an institutional one, and they are the part that reform can actually address.

Where it came from

The recurrence across unconnected traditions is the central fact, and the documentation is substantial.

In American Zen, Eido Shimano's conduct was the subject of complaints across four decades before his 2010 resignation from the Zen Studies Society, and the board later published an account of its own failures. An independent witnessing council convened in 2013 documented allegations against Joshu Sasaki spanning decades.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the Lewis Silkin investigation commissioned by Rigpa concluded in 2018, on the balance of probabilities, that students of Sogyal Rinpoche had suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Shambhala International commissioned an independent investigation following the 2018 Buddhist Project Sunshine reports concerning Sakyong Mipham. In 1989 the Vajradhatu community faced the disclosure that its regent, Ösel Tendzin, had continued sexual relationships with students while knowing he was HIV-positive.

In modern yoga, Bikram Choudhury lost a 2016 civil jury verdict and faced multiple further suits; serious allegations concerning physical adjustments and conduct have also been raised about other prominent twentieth-century teachers.

And the largest documented case is not from a minority movement at all. The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–2017) examined religious and secular institutions and found a consistent pattern: reports minimised, offenders moved rather than removed, the institution's reputation prioritised over children's safety. Its findings are the most thorough evidence base in existence that this is an institutional failure mode rather than a series of aberrations.

How it is used

Understanding the pattern matters mainly for what it implies about prevention, and the implications are unromantic.

The protective factors are structural. A written policy on sexual contact between teachers and students. A complaints route that does not pass through the teacher or their appointees. An external body with the power to investigate and remove. Financial transparency, since dependence suppresses reporting. And a culture in which senior students can publicly disagree with the teacher on ordinary matters — because a community where that is unthinkable will not manage it when it matters.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the documentation is extensive, cross-traditional, and largely produced by independent investigations or courts rather than by hostile outsiders.

We can say the institutional response is the variable that determines how much damage is done. The initial wrong is one person's. The scale is decided by what the organisation does in the following weeks, and the Royal Commission's central finding — that institutions reliably protect themselves first unless external accountability exists — generalises well beyond its remit.

We can say reform works and has happened. A number of Buddhist and yoga organisations now operate ethics policies, grievance procedures and teacher accountability structures that did not exist twenty years ago, in most cases because students and former students stayed and fought for them.

We can say that those who report are usually disbelieved first, lose their community, and often lose the practice that sustained them along with it. The cost of speaking is treated in what leaving costs.

We cannot say this discredits the traditions involved. Every one of them also contains teachers who have conducted themselves honourably for decades, and the reforms came from inside. What it discredits is the specific belief that spiritual attainment is a substitute for accountability — which is the belief that made every case on this page possible.

Further reading

• Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017) — freely available; Volume 16 covers religious institutions.
• Ann Gleig and Amy Langenberg, Abuse, Sex and the Sangha (2024) — scholarly, written from within Buddhist studies.
• The Lewis Silkin report into Rigpa (2018) — publicly available.