dharmafootsteps wrote: ↑Mon Dec 07, 2020 9:49 pm
heart wrote: ↑Mon Dec 07, 2020 7:26 pm
treehuggingoctopus wrote: ↑Mon Dec 07, 2020 5:46 pm
Point taken. Truth be told, nothing of what I know about the response has been made public by the DC. And it is also fairly possible that the response, or the lack of it, was also due to our failure to communicate properly. It could explain, for instance, why there were (as far as I know ) no official representatives of Tibetan institutions at the "funeral" ceremony.
Feel free to tell us. I can't imagine a "funeral" ceremony for someone who been embalmed, anyway I find it very strange that DC communicate by gossip only. If you don't know someone that knows then you are not in the loop.
/magnus
I always find these statements about the DCs lack of transparency a little strange. I certainly agree it could do with being more so, but very few organisations are particularly good at transparency, and Tibetan Buddhist sanghas some of the least of all. I actually find the DC to be more transparent than most. It feels like they are held to a different standard as I've never seen complaints about other sanghas transparency here.
The DC is hardly a "Tibetan Buddhist" sangha in the sense of carrying on Tibetan cultural mores in a religious setting, and the majority of it's members are not culturally Tibetan, and it's structure is radically different from typical Tibetan religious settings... so I don't see the link.
As far as transparency, particular wrt to communication, almost every other Dharma group I have ever been involved in has better communication than the DC. That includes a lineage I am involved in where one of the heads passed on a few years prior to Rinpoche. Some of that I acknowledge might just be relative size.
The DC has amazing teachers, some things going for it, but IMO communication and transparency
really is not one of them. It's anarchic and in that sense egalitarian to a degree...kind of, almost based on the notion of affinity groups. That's cool in some ways, but that doesn't make it transparent, just different. In fact in some ways the lack of central organization and messages makes transparency in communication difficult to achieve.
Relatedly, It also means that sometimes people put themselves into positions that are pretty inappropriate in an ostensibly egalitarian institution which tries to avoid coercion....and because there is no real organization, there is nothing to check their behavior. This is the same problem that exists with organizations based mainly on informal consensus rather than other processes. The loudest people in the center (regardless of what their message is in comparison to the quieter ones) determine what things look like to the people on the outer edges rings of the mandala, and because of this it is impossible for anyone but the group closer to the center of the mandala to have any idea what is going on.
Personally, that is my issue, I hold them to the same standard as the other handful of Dharma organizations I've experienced, and transparency and communication appears to not even be an item on the agenda really. That's fine, there's advantages to not putting resources into organization, and to being so non-hierarchical...or trying to. It also means that a number of people (especially those farthest from the "inner circle" such as it is) have no real reason to continue.
I have some experience in my life with this kind of organization. Unfortunately, once the cohesive and brilliant voice in the center (in this case Rinpoche) is gone, the echo of what is going on is so faint that no one but a few central people can really hear it anymore.
