306 CHAPTER TWELVEtradition and devote oneself fully to a life of wisdom. In saying this, he breaks
from the traditional Theravada assertion that nirval).a is unlike the goals of
other religions, and that the Noble Eightfold Path is the only way there.
Suzuki-roshi died in 1971, and Chogyam Trungpa in 1987. Both had ap-
pointed American Dharma heirs shortly before their deaths; both of their heirs
quickly became involved in sex scandals and were eventually removed from
their appointments by their organizations. Soon similar scandals in other Zen,
Son, and Tibetan centers, involving Asian as well as American teachers,
brought home that these were not isolated instances but part of a general pat-
tern: the unsettled questions of whether a person officially recognized as
Awakened is subject to ethical norms; whether "officially recognized" Awak-
ening is a valid institution; and whether the power of a practice group is to be
invested in the teacher or in the group as a whole. The role that cultural rela-
tivism had played in bringing these groups into existence made the issue of
ethical norms particularly slippery in resolving these questions. Some mem-
bers of these groups maintained that such norms are part of the puritanical
tradition that American Buddhists will have to abandon, whereas others
pointed out the central role that ethics has played in Buddhism from its earli-
est days. Thus, the crisis of cultural relativism that brought many to the prac-
tice of Buddhist meditation in the first place has now become a crisis within
Western Buddhism itself.
12.2.4 Calls for ReformLike their Enlightenment forebears, Western Buddhists have combined their
cultural relativism with a fairly absolutist program for institutional reform.
The Enlightenment's belief that absolute truths could be found through the
social sciences has long given westerners a strong sense that not only their
own culture, but also the cultures of other people, should bend to the findings
and hypotheses of these disciplines. As westerners began entering the Bud-
dhist fold, this attitude led them quickly to begin calling for reforms, subject-
ing what they viewed as the relative truths of Buddhism to the absolute truths
ohheir vision of comparative religion, history, psychology, and other social
sciences.
This Western tendency has been present since the nineteenth century.
Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky, the American and Russian founders
of the Theosophical Society, sailed to Sri Lanka in 1880 and amid much pub-
licity became the first westerners to take refuge in the Triple Gem (see Sec-
tion 7.4.1). They quickly assumed the role ofBuddhist leaders, recommending
such extensive reforms to remove what they viewed as superstitious elements
in Sri Lankan Buddhism that most of their newfound following eventually left
them. Other Western reformers took the anticlericism they had inherited
from the Enlightenment and focused it on Buddhist monks. In the 1920s,
Caroline A. E Rhys Davids, president of the Pali Text Society, argued that all
great religions must be life affirming; the life-negating ideas recorded in the
early Buddhist texts thus were monkish inventions that could not possibly
have come from the mouth of such a great religious figure as the Buddha. As