e-Sangha and religious discrimination

[Updates: on July 19^th, e-Sangha added the Aro Ter to their explicit “banned” list. They have also banned the Tibetan Bön tradition and the Soto branch of Zen. We are in the best of company. A Soto Zen group is preparing a legal suit against e-Sangha for religious discrimination. I will revise these pages to reflect these developments when I finish my current retreat.]

You may have read about the Aro gTer lineage on the e-Sangha web forum.

If so, you will have found many intensely negative opinions expressed. “It’s a cult.” “It’s a fake.”

Perhaps you wondered why there are no responses to these charges. Supposing Aro was a cult—wouldn’t it at least try to answer the critics?

If you look around “Approaching Aro,” you will find answers. Maybe they are all untrue—but at least they show that a reply is possible.

There is a reason nothing positive about Aro appears on e-Sangha—and in fact almost nothing even neutral or factual. The reason is that e-Sangha’s management has a policy of deleting anything about Aro that is not hostile.

This policy is not public. It actually goes against e-Sangha’s publicly stated rules.

Maybe that sounds unlikely. Paranoid, even. But you can easily test it for yourself.

I think this policy of secret discrimination is obviously unfair. Also devious. If you agree, you can help change it with a couple of minutes work.

There are other Buddhist teachers and groups who are targets of this same type of discrimination. By bringing the Aro case out into the open, we can help make e-Sangha a genuinely non-sectarian forum. Then Buddhists of any persuasion can discuss Buddhism openly, as long as we follow the sensible public policies of the forum.