This is a common refrain in some Dharma circles:
“Sure, there were flaws, heavy drinking, drugs, sex, deaths, exploitation, and/or abuses of power, but look at what they built! Look at the profound texts translated, the meditation techniques popularized, the bridge built between East and West. They undeniably reshaped the landscape of Western Buddhism. Nobody is perfect!”
There is of course value in recognizing a teacher's historical or intellectual contributions. But contribution and accountability are not competing scales on which one can be weighed against the other. A person may have translated profound texts, introduced valuable practices, or contributed meaningfully to the development of Buddhism—and still have caused serious harm. One truth does not cancel the other.
Moral accountability does not work on an averaging curve. Consider an otherwise polite, dedicated, and competent person who does their job well 95% of the time. If that same person occasionally commits fraud, sexually harasses someone, or abuses a position of trust, we would not say, “Yes, but they are a good employee 95% of the time.” Their competence does not cancel out the violation. We recognize that some actions carry their own ethical weight, regardless of how much good surrounds them. The same principle applies to spiritual teachers. Profound insight into emptiness does not offset emotional immaturity, psychological terror, sexual coercion, exploitation, or abuse of power. A teacher's accomplishments may be real and worth acknowledging, but they do not provide any moral credit against serious harm.
Profound Dharma cannot sanitize abuse of power.
The difficulty becomes particularly acute when a teacher has been placed at the center of a community's spiritual identity. To seriously question that person may mean confronting not only the teacher's conduct, but one's own history, relationships, beliefs, and understanding of the path. For some practitioners, acknowledging serious misconduct can therefore produce a profound sense of disorientation:
"If the person I trusted was capable of causing this harm,
what does that mean for my practice, my community,
and the years of devotion I gave to it?"
These conditions can make it difficult for communities to respond honestly when concerns arise. Harm may be minimized, survivors may be doubted, criticism may be reframed as a failure of realization, and destructive behavior may be given spiritual explanations such as “crazy wisdom.” Sometimes loyalty to a teacher becomes confused with loyalty to the Dharma itself. In such circumstances, protecting the image of the teacher can gradually take precedence over examining what actually happened.
This does not mean that every person who defends a teacher is consciously protecting abuse, nor that every difficult or unconventional teacher is abusive. Communities deserve room for complexity, context, and careful discernment. But complexity should not become a mechanism for making ethical accountability disappear.
The willingness to examine a teacher beyond charisma, reputation, lineage, scholarship, or historical contribution is not a rejection of the Dharma. It can be an expression of the very discernment that Buddhist practice asks us to cultivate. We can acknowledge what a teacher contributed while remaining honest about the harm they caused. We can preserve valuable teachings without preserving systems that enabled misconduct.
No amount of profound philosophy, spiritual attainment, institutional influence, or historical contribution can excuse the deliberate destruction of another human being—least of all when that harm occurs within a relationship of spiritual trust.
Profundity does not equate ethics.
Profundity does not erase abusive behavior.