Turnstiles and urban legends

Turnstile image courtesy Matthew Maaskant

Inventing Aro

Unstable people often accuse others of the unethical thing they do themselves. The classic example is the conservative politician who rants about “family values” and writes anti-gay laws, and then is discovered to have hired underage male prostitutes. That’s extreme, but you see similar things often enough in everyday life.

This page is about the invention of the Aro gTer—by its critics.

Creative scholarship

A university academic, Daniel Gustav Anderson, recently posted a piece about Aro on his blog “For the Turnstiles.” It contains several basic factual errors. (Some you can easily check for yourself—see my letter to him.) Getting checkable facts right is the minimum required to maintain an academic reputation, so I was fairly surprised by this.

Anderson’s main point is that different discourses have different standards of truth and verifiability. He contrasts the standard of folklore with that of Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhism). In folklore, a story is valid as long as it makes emotional sense. It works as long as the archetypes play out in a satisfying way. Vajrayana has a different standard of validity. (He says he “does not care to” explain it; I have written a little on the subject here and here and here).

Anderson says Aro operates according to a folkloric standard: it is emotionally satisfying “make believe” that has nothing to do with authentic Vajrayana.

I was delighted by his claim that

Aro gTer attracts folks with more experience in the "archetypal studies and metaphysics" aisle at B&N than those who know from experience what to look for in a Buddhist community.

What is so cool about this is that—as far as I can tell—he made it up himself. The rest of his “facts” are a confused mish-mash of e-Sangha gossip, sloppily reported—but this is a new, out-of-the-blue fabrication. It’s an emotionally satisfying piece of make-believe that contributes to the on-going elaboration of the “Aro students must be clueless” theme.

Urban legends

This situation is elegantly ironic. In reality, it is gossip about Aro that operates according to the rules of folklore. The gossip is a collection of modern fairy stories and morality fables—what are called “urban legends.” Scholars are fascinated with those, because they are created and propagated in the same way as traditional mythology.

The Wikipedia article on urban legends gives much insight into Aro-bashing tales:

The teller of an urban legend may claim it happened to a friend, which serves to personalize and enhance the power of the narrative. The friend is identified by first name only or not identified at all. A hallmark of false urban legends . . . is a lack of specific information about the incident (names, dates, locations, when or where it was published, or similar information).

Since people, unconsciously or otherwise, often exaggerate, conflate or edit stories when telling them, urban legends can evolve over time.

Many urban legends depict horrific crimes, contaminated foods or other situations which would affect many people. Anyone believing such stories might feel compelled to warn loved ones.

Groups within which a given narrative circulates tend to react very negatively to claims or demonstrations of non-factuality.

The myth of Aro—the dangerous cult—is an on-going collaborative fiction, to which Anderson has made the latest contribution. Since this myth operates according to the rules of folklore, there is no need to check facts, trace claims to reliable sources, or feel bad about simply inventing new episodes.

Fairy stories, as Anderson points out, are based on archetypes. The Aro-is-a-fake myth draws heavily on the classic story of the con man.

This archetype seems to be emotionally critical for many Vajrayana practitioners. I don’t completely understand why. (Maybe you can help me think this through? Leave a comment at the bottom of this page.)

It must be a defense against uncertainty. It is hard to know whether Vajrayana in general, or any particular lineage, is valid. Everyone has doubts and mixed feelings about this at times. Having a version of Vajrayana that everyone agrees is bogus would be useful, because it means that one’s own lineage looks more convincing by comparison. “My lama doesn’t make stuff up, he just reads stuff out of old books—so he must be safe.”

They know what they want to hear

“Approaching Aro”—this web site—has a tool that lets me track how people find it, and how many pages they read. People searching Google for things like “aroter fake” or “bogus aro lineage” often come here—and they very rarely look at more than one page. People searching Google for things like “ngakchang rinpoche” or “aro buddhism” often come here—and on average they look at five to ten pages.

I guess people looking for “aroter fake” know what they want to hear: delicious gossip about the outrageous misdeeds of the con man; self-satisfied proclamations of how clever we are to see through his lies; self-righteous anger at his leading students to hell. Those people definitely don’t want their beliefs challenged.

People looking for “ngakchang rinpoche” actually want to learn something.

The persistence of myths

I wrote Daniel Gustav Anderson a polite letter, pointing out the factual errors in his blog piece. With an academic reputation at stake, I expected that he would at minimum fix the objectively verifiable facts. Beyond that, I hoped he would recognize that he had gotten sucked into propagating (and adding to) an urban legend, and would take the blog posting down entirely.

Instead, he left the posting intact, and added another one. A summary might be “I still think Ngakpa Chögyam is a con man, and you are deluded.” Fair enough. But wouldn’t your attack on him be more convincing if you got your facts straight?