Did the Buddha Teach Sexual Consent?: Emergent Ethics after Abuse Allegations in an American Insight Organization

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Registration is now open at https://metoo-in-american-buddhism.eventbrite.ca for third event in our Intersections Between Buddhism & Society Public Lecture Series

“Did the Buddha Teach Sexual Consent?: Emergent Ethics after Abuse Allegations in an American Insight Organization”

A lecture by Dr. Ann Gleig (Associate Professor of Religious and Cultural Studies, University of Central Florida)
and Dr. Amy Langenberg (Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Eckerd College)

With its focus on “spiritual friendship” and democratic organizational structures, the Insight network has often been promoted as an alternative to the guru-centered Buddhist communities that have found themselves most often at the center of abuse scandals.  There was much shock in American Buddhism, therefore, when sexual assault allegations were made public in 2018 against Noah Levine, the founder of Against the Stream (ATS), a second-generation Insight community. This talk discusses different community responses to the allegations, their significance for understanding contemporary Buddhist attitudes to sexual ethics, and some of the new community formations that have grown out of ATS’s demise. In particular, it analyzes the relationship between Insight responses and classical Buddhist approaches to sexual ethics. Using ATS as a case study, it highlights the ways in which the necessity to respond to abuse is prompting  new receptions, interpretations, and bypassings of canonical Buddhist teachings in American Buddhism.

Ann Gleig is associate professor of religious studies at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity and co-editor of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism. Amy Paris Langenberg is a specialist in South Asian Buddhism with a focus on gender, sexuality, the body, and monastic law. She also conducts research on contemporary Buddhist feminisms and contemporary female Buddhist monasticism. Her monograph, Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom was published by Routledge in 2017. In addition, she has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, History of Religions, Religions, Religion Compass, and the Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics. Her current project is a collaborative book on generative responses to sexual abuse in American Buddhism, to be co-written with Ann Gleig (University of Central Florida) and published with Yale University Press. She is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Eckerd College, where she also teaches in the Women’s and Gender Studies, Animal Studies, and Environmental Studies programs. Professors Gleig and Langenberg recently received a Henry H. Luce Foundation Award for this research project – read more about this project at https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhist-scholars-receive-grant-to-document-sexual-abuse-in-american-buddhism/.