Aurin Squire wrote later on yesterday a very appreciative post about Geshe Michael Roach and what to most people must appear a highly peculiar relationship with “Lama” Christie McNally (it’s not clear whether she’s officially a Lama).

He points out that Geshe Roach is an extraordinary man, capable of extraordinary things — such as building up a multi-million dollar business and then giving it all up.

He also points out the good work that Geshe Roach has done, such as making translations available an, of course, making the Dharma itself available by being a teacher.

All of this appreciation is well put, and well taken. In expressing my reservations about the Geshe’s teachings (or at least “The Diamond Cutter” which is the only part of this teaching with which I’m familiar) I meant in now way to suggest that he hasn’t also done amazing and very skillful things.

But this is all very familiar to me, this pattern of a teacher doing amazing and highly beneficial things and also doing highly questionable things. I owe my own teacher, Sangharakshita, an enormous debt of gratitude. His sangha, the Western Buddhist Order, represented my first contact with Buddhism outside of the books I’d read when I was a teenager. I owe him a debt of gratitude for having made the Dharma available, and in fact I wonder if I would even be here without him — no fewer than three of my friends at university ended up killing themselves.

At the same time, Sangharakshita has at times said things and done things that I regard as unskillful. Some of those were in the sexual realm, where he had a number of sexual relationships with his students. Those relationships were consensual, and yet because some people were intimidated by his spiritual acumen there was an inevitable sense of “wanting to please the teacher” and a fear of not complying. Some people got hurt. I understand that at the time of the late 1960’s and early 70’s when Sangharakshita started these relationships, there was an assumption in the Buddhist world (not just in the WBO) that morality could be completely reinvented. There was a spirit of sexual revolution in the air. But I still think he should have known better.

I can’t and won’t disown Sangharakshita because I recognize the good he has done and the benefits he has brought to my own life. At the same time I can’t overlook his shortcomings.

So I sympathize with Squires’ wish to defend a teacher who has given him much (and given others much) but think he goes too far in saying:

I can only laugh at the criticism. Here is someone who is peerless and fearless in trying to help others

It’s possible, I know, for someone to do great good and also to act unskillfully. And sexuality is an areas of life where it’s especially easy for us to delude ourselves. I can’t but think of Geshe Roach’s implication that he has laid his hand on his spiritual partner’s breast without any carnal desire and his implication that this was a “life or death” matter. I think it’s quite right that people (including the Dalai Lama) ask hard questions about this sort of thing.

Now I’m not saying that Geshe Roach has acted unskillfully (I’m not a mind reader and have never even met the man) but what he’s doing seems very questionable when you consider the monastic vows he’s taken. And in case this needs to be stated — there’s no question of this being about sex per se. Sex is a normal and healthy part of life (or can be if approached in the right spirit). But Tibetan monks aren’t even supposed to let a woman shave them, never mind sleep with them.

Ultimately, however, this is a question for the Gelug order and for Geshe Roach, his partner, and their respective karmas.