Question

When a religious leader exhibits poor behavior up to, and including, committing suicide, followers of that religion may begin to doubt the methods taught by that religion. What advice might you give to those people regarding their doubts?

Answer

No matter how good a teaching is, no matter how wise, no matter how pure the teaching is, don't expect that everybody following the teaching knows how to do it. So if a leader, even a leader of a religious organization, commits suicide, it's our idealism if we think, "Huh? This religion must be terrible, this person committed suicide." That's idealism. It may or may not be true, we don't know, but if we state it as a fact that the religion must be terrible because a follower committed suicide, then we may be very wrong. We haven't investigated the teachings yet.

What we do know is that that person, in this case even a leader, does not know how to have a peaceful mind. Now whether the teachings made that as a condition for the leader, or whether the leader simply did not follow the right teachings, that we don't know yet. So this is how we don't throw away the religious teachings, just because somebody in the religion committed suicide.

Now let's go a little deeper here, because, this is concerning a religious leader. What about the leader, what about the person who started the religion? What if the person who started it then commits suicide? Then we have to think, "Well this person didn't really know what they were talking about. This person's religion also might be very bad". But as to any of the leaders inside, not the original leader, say, like with a monk who committed suicide here on the island, we can only assume that that person did not find peace of mind, and was probably practicing improperly. So we don't throw out the techniques until we ourselves have investigated them.

In regards to Buddhism, it's sad if someone does this. It's obvious, in my opinion, they weren't practicing properly; they didn't understand the techniques in a correct way.

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.