FWIW there’s a large number of lay Buddhist teachers in the West, many of them formerly ordained, without lineage transmission. The thing that’s weird in Soryu’s case is that he’s teaching outside of his lineage, without having disrobed. My understanding is that his permission to teach was through Shinzen Young, and I’m not aware of that having been revoked. I expect rats don’t really care about lineage, but eg. Shinzen also gave permission to teach to Michael Taft, who teaches meditation in the Bay, and no one seems to be bothered by.
This is very in the weeds but I think the transmission thing mostly hardly matters, if you’re not already pilled on the tradition in its own (again, mythologized) framework here, then mostly each teacher has to independently demonstrate their reliability and authority, etc.
Speaking only for myself, I consider it a minor red flag, in the sense of “not only is this guy in my outgroup, but even the outgroup thinks that he is weird”.
I am aware that this kinda goes against the conservation of expected evidence, in that if my outgroup said “this guy is perfectly legit”, it probably wouldn’t make a good impression on me. So why should it make a bad impression if they question whether he is legit?
I guess the answer is that even if I deeply disagree with the outgroup, there is still some positive correlation in our values; after all, we are all humans, we care about generally human things. I don’t care about the spiritual consequences of “teaching outside a lineage”, but I care about a more generalized version of “this guy draws his authority from being associated with X, but X say that from their perspective he is associated incorrectly”. I don’t care about X per se, but I care about using some kinds of status moves.
FWIW there’s a large number of lay Buddhist teachers in the West, many of them formerly ordained, without lineage transmission. The thing that’s weird in Soryu’s case is that he’s teaching outside of his lineage, without having disrobed. My understanding is that his permission to teach was through Shinzen Young, and I’m not aware of that having been revoked. I expect rats don’t really care about lineage, but eg. Shinzen also gave permission to teach to Michael Taft, who teaches meditation in the Bay, and no one seems to be bothered by.
This is very in the weeds but I think the transmission thing mostly hardly matters, if you’re not already pilled on the tradition in its own (again, mythologized) framework here, then mostly each teacher has to independently demonstrate their reliability and authority, etc.
Speaking only for myself, I consider it a minor red flag, in the sense of “not only is this guy in my outgroup, but even the outgroup thinks that he is weird”.
I am aware that this kinda goes against the conservation of expected evidence, in that if my outgroup said “this guy is perfectly legit”, it probably wouldn’t make a good impression on me. So why should it make a bad impression if they question whether he is legit?
I guess the answer is that even if I deeply disagree with the outgroup, there is still some positive correlation in our values; after all, we are all humans, we care about generally human things. I don’t care about the spiritual consequences of “teaching outside a lineage”, but I care about a more generalized version of “this guy draws his authority from being associated with X, but X say that from their perspective he is associated incorrectly”. I don’t care about X per se, but I care about using some kinds of status moves.
(Sorry, this is mostly off topic.)