Buddhism, Religion
by tenpel

Reading Note: “Symposium: Buddhism and Sexual Abuse”

The Journal of Global Buddhism has published a special focus section that grew out of the Heartwood/Northwestern Symposium (Northwestern University, Chicago, USA, October 2024), described by the editors as the first ever academic conference on Buddhism and sexual abuse. I was invited to this conference and attended in person, which has kept these contributions vivid for me firsthand.

Dusk after the last day of the conference

Edited by Ann Gleig, Sarah Jacoby, and Amy Paris Langenberg, the section gathers seven pieces that deliberately bring scholarship and survivor perspectives together. All texts are freely available (open access, CC BY 4.0):

  • Editors’ Introduction (Gleig, Jacoby, Langenberg): framing of the symposium and a case for a survivor-centered Buddhist Studies.
  • Sacred Spaces, Silent Suffering (Karma Tashi Choedron, Tenzin Dadon): two Vajrayāna monastics examine from within how “pure perception” and steep hierarchies can enable abuse.
  • Sexual Abuse in the Buddhist Monastery (Namal Rathnayake): on the sexual abuse of children in Sri Lankan monasteries (see the fuller note below).
  • Survivors’ Roundtable (Bernstein, Pilfrey, DeVane, Modaro, Montgomery, Floy): five survivors speak in the first person about harm and about pathways to repair.
  • Deconstructing Demoness (Somtsobum Khyung): a Tibetan literary reading of the Tsepongza narrative and its misogynist patterns of disbelieving women.
  • The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (Carol Merchasin): a lawyer on the possibilities and limits of civil law for survivors.
  • What Can Buddhist Studies Offer Survivors? (Cape, Finnegan, Gleig, Jacoby, Langenberg): a roundtable on the responsibility of the field.

The issue: https://www.globalbuddhism.org/issue/view/845

Child Abuse in Sri Lankan Monasteries (Namal Rathnayake)

This contribution deserves particular attention, in my view, because it addresses a largely unexamined subject. Rathnayake lived as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka for twenty years and now works as a psychotherapist. He combines his own experience with the findings of his doctoral research (Canterbury Christ Church University) to examine the practice of child ordination.

By way of background: according to the figures he cites, there are more than 12,000 monasteries in Sri Lanka, 753 of them so-called Pirivenas, boarding-school-style training monasteries housing between 15 and 150 novices each. Child ordination is the main form of recruitment, and children from low-income rural families are, he reports, often the ones selected. Unlike in other Theravada countries, the Sri Lankan tradition holds that the child is ordained for life, so that leaving is experienced as a betrayal, a moral failure, and an inauspicious act. Those who do leave, he writes, tend to carry a burden of shame and to hide their monastic past.

For his case study he interviewed four survivors, three senior monks, and three child protection officers. Even gaining access proved difficult: the National Child Protection Authority and the relevant department took nearly a year to respond, some regional officials declined to cooperate citing religious sensitivities, and many monks refused to be interviewed.

The four former monks described repeated sexual abuse by more senior monks, including the tutor (āchariya). They felt, in his account, that such abuse was “ubiquitous and had become normalized.” Three senior monks he interviewed acknowledged that the reflex, when incidents arise, is to cover them up in order to protect the reputation of the lineage. Rathnayake places this within a pattern of “denial, deflection, dismissal, and minimization” that mirrors the findings of the major inquiries into institutional abuse in the United Kingdom (IICSA) and Australia.

Especially disturbing is his observation of a “pervasive sexual undercurrent” in how children are selected, in part by physical features. He notes sayings that tacitly acknowledge a monastic sexual culture, such as the proverb that ships leave no tracks on the water. Even the lay community, he suggests, is not wholly unaware that children can become “sexual servants to abbots.” He describes two abbots who acted with impunity, one of whom groomed novices and expelled those who did not comply.

On long-term effects, he reports on two survivors, now in their early forties, abused in their early teens: both single, both with a troubled relationship to alcohol, their connection to spirituality seemingly broken for good. From his own student cohort he gives a telling figure: of 63 monks who began, only about 15 remained in robes by the end of the degree. His conclusion is unambiguous. Children should not be ordained, because the way monasticism is practiced in Sri Lanka has become, in his words, “a burden on the nation’s most vulnerable children.”

A further finding concerns the failure of state safeguarding: Rathnayake notes that “social deference and power associated with monastic leadership deter external safeguarding oversight,” and speaks of policy gaps in child protection. Notably, the child protection officers he interviewed did not call for any new rules specific to monasteries; they simply asked that “the existing safeguarding laws and regulations should be implemented without differential treatments towards monasteries based on cultural deference.” In other words, the laws exist – they are just not applied to monasteries. At the conference, as I recall, he made this concrete: anyone working with children in Sri Lanka in an educational or childcare setting must demonstrate their suitability to work with children, yet such checks are not applied to abbots and the monks responsible for novices, because subjecting them to scrutiny is considered inappropriate.

One detail has stayed with me as a participant at the conference, and it does not appear in the written piece: at the end of his talk, Rathnayake summed up his research aloud with the sentence that “a whole generation of monks has been spoiled.” It stayed with me because it condenses the statistical findings into a single, bitter image.

Further Links: Abuse in Buddhist Monasteries

On Carol Merchasin’s Contribution

Merchasin describes her work as a lawyer who, over roughly six years, investigated allegations of sexual misconduct in American Buddhist (and yoga) communities. Her starting point: she came from investigating misconduct in corporate settings and assumed Buddhist organizations would act immediately once the findings were clear. The opposite, she writes, turned out to be true. Her most-quoted line:

“corporate America is doing better dealing with sexual misconduct in its midst than Buddhist America.”

She sorts her experiences into three categories, “the Ugly, the Bad and the Good.” On structural bias she points out that nearly sixty percent of state court judges are older white men, though they make up only about thirty percent of the population. Her example of institutional resistance is especially striking: in one settlement, all that was asked of the board was to attend a two-hour “Healthy Boundaries” class costing fifty dollars. They refused, and there was no way to compel them.

Even so, she ends on a hopeful note: the legal process can be healing, for instance through the experience of being heard and believed.

Source for all contributions: Journal of Global Buddhism, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2026), open access under CC BY 4.0.