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From Zen Buddhism to Preying on Vulnerable Women

posted on November 15, 2013

In a new e-book from The Atlantic, Mark Oppenheimer discusses the impact of Eido Shimano, a former pillar of New York City’s Japanese Zen Buddhists, whose exploitations of vulnerable female followers left the community in tatters. “On the one hand this is a Buddhist community of great vigor and activity,” Oppenheimer writes, “Yet at the same time there is a peculiar timidity, a fear that to speak about Shimano’s sexual life would snip the spine of the whole sangha, would paralyze the life force that had come to animate it all. It was a fear that would continue to paralyze members of the community for several decades to come.”

Read at The Atlantic