What the hell happened between the Dalai Lama and that Indian boy? The internet served up a raft of painfully inflammatory takes, so I took a month to talk with Tibetologists and review the literature on sexual abuse in Tibetan Buddhist contexts.
This is a deep, tangled dive. Content warnings apply.
Chapters:
Why cover this, and why now?
Summary
The Clip
Virality
Two Orientalisms
Outrages and Pilled Mindset
What do Tibetans and their allies say?
Kazi Adi Shakti, Thi Nguyen, Becca Williams
Full Show Notes on Patreon
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Chapter 1.
Why cover this and why now?
So just a word to regular and new listeners.
I want to be very clear, and I think this should be abundantly obvious from our record, that in no way do I or the podcast condone, tolerate, minimize, or deflect attention from sexual abuse, whether it directly or indirectly impacts men, women, non-binary people, or children, or whole communities.
So I won't be doing that here.
Quite the opposite.
Through good sourcing and historical context, my aim is to see the landscape of this strange incident clearly.
And that process is central to our beat, because sex abuse, as both a reality and a spectral presence, is often at the heart of conspiracy theory discourse.
The spectral presence part stems from an increasingly global institutional distrust rooted in a knowledge that powerful people almost always get away with abject crimes.
When survivors of child sexual abuse must struggle to be heard over years and decades, and when there is no accountability for documented abuse, as there almost never is, It makes sense that exaggerated stories amplified by the algorithms are a natural response.
The result is that our shared understanding of child sexual abuse, its perpetrators and incidence rate, is less rather than more understood.
Two months ago, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, was accused of child sexual abuse by a bafflingly diverse range of stakeholders.
From Chinese Communist Party propagandists and shitposters, to white Marxist-Leninist TikTok tankies who think that Mao liberated Tibet, to QAnon grifters photoshopping Jeffrey Epstein's head onto the Dalai Lama's maroon-robed body.
That was confusing enough, but when those same accusations came from American social justice activists and trauma therapists, that provided a window into the heart of our podcast thesis.
That otherwise left-leaning and progressive altruists, letting their instincts loom larger than the evidence, can add fuel to the fire of conspiracism.
When the Dalai Lama sticks out his tongue at a public event streamed online and asks an Indian boy to suck it, whatever he meant by that, and we'll get to that, we are presented with an uncanny moment that points down many roads towards an older and unfamiliar intimacy, a hidden but suspected ugliness, or the land of a thousand fever dreams.
Figuring out where these roads converge has to involve accurate and nuanced reporting.
And on that note, I've written for years on the incidents, contexts, and cover-ups and outcomes of physical and sexual abuse in spiritual communities, including an investigation of intergenerational abuse in the Shambhala Buddhist group, and a book on the criminal acts of the founder of Ashtanga Yoga.
And one of the reasons that I've never had to issue corrections is that I've corroborated all primary source interviews and I've waited until the story is solid before taking a strong position.
Now, is this story solid yet?
I dug in for long enough and talked to enough sources to feel that it's unlikely it will ever be stamped and sealed, so I won't be taking a strong position.
What I'm doing here is reviewing both the incident and the media response, with the benefit of multiple sources and a review of the recent history that set the stage for this demoralizing spectacle.
I've taken many weeks to put this together, in part because it's so complicated, and in part because any attempt to provide context or nuance to the story in the immediate aftermath was instantly and understandably tagged as suspicious or insensitive.
