White Plum Asanga Roundtables
These roundtables are for WPA members and their soon-to-be successors only. The videos are not for general distribution.
Building Ethics Codes:
What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
(Or How to Avoid Getting into Deep Doo Doo While Working as a Zen Teacher or Leader)
Led by Jan Chozen Bays
Presented October 29, 2021
Building and updating our own sangha codes. WPA Code and Sangha Sutra as templates, cases of misconduct, how WPA code affects us.
Topics we covered:
- Review of boundary work in general and in sanghas.
- Anger invading the sangha from diversity issues, anti-vaxxer activity and other current social influences.
- Abuse of teachers by students – how can we build awareness of this into our codes and procedures?
- Discussions about sangha growth patterns, misconduct by teachers and accusations against teachers.
- General areas of teacher misconduct: sexual, financial, general misuse of power, bullying and scapegoating of students.
- Problems to watch for in the sangha – anger, pornography, social media and how outrage fuels the “echo chamber.”
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People who have left abusive sanghas or teachers.
RESOURCES
Powerpoint below by Jan Chozen Bays
PDF FOR DOWNLOAD
The next-to-the-last slide in the powerpoint has links to the FaithTrust webpage for the Buddhist Boundaries course, to ZCLA’s Sangha Sutra (ethical code and grievance procedure, as well as teacher’s statement of ethics) and Zen Community of Oregon’s newly updated ethical guidelines and grievance process.
