Spiritual teachers just don't seem to be able to keep their hands off their students. Sex scandals go back for as long as there have been spiritual teachers, and right into today (John Friend, Sasaki Roshi, Bikram Choudhury).

Let's cut through the bullshit, and talk about what's really going on.

This is a provocative excerpt from The Heart of Zen.

Like many teachers before him, Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi is in the unenviable position of speaking about something that he has inhabited deeply, but that we, as his students and audience, likely have not.

Using language, then, can be tricky, which is why generations of Zen masters have used koans, those seemingly enigmatic questions and riddles used to challenge students who seek to understand things within the level of their current understanding.

Question: Does anyone ever completely overcome the ego? The Buddha did, right?

Jun Po Roshi: I'll get to that in a minute. For now. let me say that the ego insists on its view. It does not want to change; it will not be successfully bullied, overpowered, or fought. Who, exactly, will overpower your ego, anyway?

Keith Martin-Smith: That’s what Zen masters are for.

Why is it that even after years of meditation practice and deep spiritual insight, people can still be reactive, petty, and driven by their emotional reactions, instead of able to choose compassionate responses? In short, why are so-called spiritual people by and large still as narcissistic as the rest of us?

Virtually every human being has had some kind of either spontaneous connection to a higher state, or one that happened as a result of spiritual practice. Yet those experiences inevitably fade. Just what is happening here, and what can we learn from it?