CRUEL MONKS III: Buddhist #metoo, monastic mis-use of tantra to extract the “life-essence” from women’s subtle mind-bodies, patriarchal monastic power and privilege and child abusive Dob Dob culture, a Jekyll and Hyde “porn and F-Boy” culture and the question whether women should be participating in such cultures/institutions

From Yogic Vajrayāna Bliss and Equality to Monastic Miosgyny and Secrecy

One question I have researched, written and spoken about for several years is what happened to women, sexuality and tantric union when Vajrayāna became increasingly incorporated into powerful monastic institutions.

This is not an argument against monks, monasticism or Vajrayāna union practices. Celibate renunciation is one of Buddhism’s oldest and most important paths. It is a question about what happens when two very different models—the celibate monastic and the sexual or subtle-body unions of a tantric yogin—are combined without sufficient honesty, transparency, reciprocity or regard for the woman involved.

In my 2022 article and Bhutan conference presentation, Going Back to the Female Roots of Vajrayāna, I examined the “invisible, silent female consort” and argued for renewed attention to Vajrayāna’s female and yogic roots. I questioned whether monastics who engage in sexual or consort union should follow the Indian mahāsiddha model and relinquish the security and public status associated with celibate life. The conference organisers did not publish my presentation; I was later told that its recording had been lost or deleted.

Indian tantric Buddhism developed both inside and outside monasteries. Miranda Shaw’s Passionate Enlightenment presents women as teachers, adepts, founders, ritual experts and partners, challenging accounts in which they appear merely as passive aids to male practitioners. Sacred partnership presupposes a woman’s agency and spiritual purpose; it is not male attainment assisted by an interchangeable female body.

Yet many figures revered in Tibetan Vajrayāna belong unmistakably to a yogic and householder world. The mahāsiddha lives preserve wandering yogis and yoginīs, unconventional practice, sexual symbolism and female teachers that sit uneasily beside Vajrayāna’s later presentation through overwhelmingly male monastic institutions. The problem arises when men simultaneously claim monastic prestige and tantric intimacy, while the woman is expected to remain invisible and subordinate.

When Refuge No Longer Feels Safe and the “Religious porn-centred, F-Boy Culture”, sexual harassment of female devotees and an underlying sense of sexual perversion/repression

When I entered Vajrayāna Buddhism around twenty years ago, I was naïve and wore “rose-tinted glasses” to some extent. I believed Tibetan Buddhist monks were very pure and saw monks and nuns as genuine sources of refuge whose main concern was to help others attain awakening. Perhaps this was a kind of orientalism (often perpetuated by Tibetans themselves in Tibet and exile), but that soon changed.

My experience as a devout Buddhist woman, student, translator and scholar was often very different. Male teachers, particularly monks and senior tulkus, frequently treated me dismissively, derogatorily or unequally, focusing on my physical appearance more than my intellect, abilities, talents and desire for liberation.

As my study of Tibetan and philosophy became more advanced, I became the focus of intense interest and attention (mentally and physically) from several senior tulku Rinpoches, including heads of major lineages,  involving my subtle or energy body in unions—some welcome and very blissful, others unwelcome, invasive, violent, domineering and nauseating, like a “psychic rape” which I fought off mentally with revulsion. Although I experienced some of the most blissful orgasmic experiences of my adult life, I also  came to feel that Vajrayāna monastic environments were not necessarily safe spaces for women or their children. Places I had experienced as refuge sometimes felt hostile and psychologically unsafe.

At times I felt intoxicated, overwhelmed or mentally affected. When I objected or withdrew, I experienced later rituals and conduct as hostile or threatening, including what I interpreted within a Tibetan tantric framework as wrathful or harmful ritual activity directed against me, aimed at “making me lose my mind” as one monk recently angrily stated he would do verbally.

I discovered how radically different some monks and tulkus could appear from my idealised image: a Jekyll and Hyde persona that, once annoyed or exposed, revealed cruel, calculated and heartless misogyny and lack of compassion. Ordination, robes, titles and lineage status do not guarantee ethical conduct, respect for women or freedom from sexual objectification.

At its worst, the dynamic can resemble a religious “f-boy” culture: a man with enormous status and charisma who regards women principally in derogatory and inferior terms of sexual availability, their bodies, devotion or usefulness. The excessive and normalised use of internet porn by monks to relieve their sexual frustration, only adds to their distorted views of laywomen [2].

This is not the first time it has happened, but is an example of how prevalent it is. Robes and titles do not necessarily remove male entitlement; but an aura of holiness (given by the robes) can make it harder to challenge.

It is not sufficient simply to blame individuals. Many monks grew up in institutions shaped by patriarchal assumptions about women, sexuality and the female body. Some entered monasteries very young without what modern people would regard as fully informed adult choice. They may be educated to view women’s bodies as objects of attachment, impurity or danger to celibacy. Monks can also be products—and sometimes victims—of structures that subordinate women. This does not remove personal responsibility, but robes alone do not provide the emotional maturity or ethical capacity required to guide female students safely.

My historical research likewise forced me to abandon the fantasy that Buddhist institutions existed outside ordinary struggles for power. Tibetan religious history contains political conflict, sectarian suppression, appropriation and violence. This painful recognition helped me distinguish the Dharma itself from the institutions and individuals claiming to represent it.

The Female Teachers and Consorts of Mahāsiddhas, Yoginis, Dakinis  and Women Disappeared from the Lineage

Tilopa provides a striking example. In “Dakini is Truth!” Tilopa’s “Overlooked” Female Teachers, I discussed Mātaṅgī, Samantabhadrī, Kalpabhadrī/Sukhasiddhī and Dharima as teachers, guides and agents in his development—not passive objects of a male path. Traditional accounts describe Tilopa serving Dharima while undertaking unconventional conduct. Instead of an exalted lama surrounded by subordinate women, the woman possesses spiritual agency and the male yogin serves in the subordinate role.

Nāropa moved from institutional prestige toward an arduous yogic path. Marpa lived as a householder, not a celibate monk. His wife Dagmema also deserves recovery from the margins. In Hearing “Her-story” (II): Dagmema, I explored her role in the Marpa–Milarepa narratives as an active moral and spiritual presence, confidante and teacher.

These histories challenge the assumption that Vajrayāna transmission naturally centres a powerful, privileged male authority while women facilitate his realization. Women teach, transmit, practise and realize. Their histories, voices and experiences matter.

Sacred Union or Energetic Extraction?

“Union implies reciprocity and equality. Extraction does not.”

If a woman’s body, sexuality, subtle energies, devotion, intelligence, wisdom or spiritual labour primarily benefit a male practitioner’s longevity, vitality, realization, status or activity while she remains hidden, subordinate or unacknowledged, is “union” still the right word?

Vajrayāna represents wisdom in female form, yet symbolic reverence for “the feminine” can coexist with poor treatment of women. As I explored in The Creative Power, Bliss and Wisdom of a Woman’s Body, a monastery may contain magnificent Vajrayoginī, Tārā and Prajñāpāramitā images while living women possess far less authority than male monks. A practitioner may praise the ḍākinī as wisdom while expecting a woman to remain obedient and silent.

Highest Yoga Tantra speaks in sophisticated ways about winds, channels, drops, bliss, sexual polarity and transforming experience into the path. These teachings cannot responsibly be reduced to ordinary sexuality, but esoteric vocabulary should not shield relationships from ordinary ethical questions.

I experienced subtle-body unions as forced and unwelcome, leaving me invaded, psychologically distressed and difficult to stop. Other women have publicly described distress in relationships with male Buddhist teachers while on retreat with male monk teachers.  Whatever metaphysical interpretation one gives such experiences, subtle-body practice cannot remove the requirements of consent, competence, non-harm and accountability.

If a woman’s subtle body, sexuality, presence or devotion is said to be necessary for a man’s longevity or realization, what does she receive? What responsibility does he assume for her welfare? Can she meaningfully withdraw? Is she recognized as an equal practitioner and permitted to speak afterwards? If these are exceptionally powerful methods of realization, where are the publicly recognized female adepts emerging from contemporary unions—their teachings, biographies and voices?

Long-life rituals, mandala offerings and intimate practices are distinct ritual categories and should not be conflated without textual evidence. Chülen (Tib. bcud len, “taking the essence”), for example, ordinarily means extracting or subsisting on nutritive essences; the term does not prove that a practitioner extracts a woman’s life force. The ethical argument does not depend on that disputed equation: any intimate practice involving another person should be consensual and mutually beneficial rather than one-way.

A woman not generally be viewed or used as an “invisible battery” for male long-life and enlightenment. Nor as I wrote about previously a mere “dollybird” pretty cheerleader for the male teachers.

The Contradiction of the “Celibate” Monk

The difficulty becomes acute when the male practitioner is ordained. In the Theravāda Vinaya discussed by anthropologist Charles F. Keyes, sexual intercourse is a pārājika, or defeat, entailing loss of monastic status. In Sexy_Monks_, Keyes writes that sexual desire, particularly regarding women, is the foremost impediment faced by monks. He also observes that long-term celibacy contributes to senior monks’ charismatic authority and that women often predominate among their followers.

Keyes writes about Theravāda Thailand, not Tibetan Vajrayāna, so his study is not direct evidence about consort practice. Its comparative significance is that public celibacy can itself generate religious authority. A monk perceived as conquering ordinary desire gains an aura of purity and spiritual power. If that prestige gives him unusual influence over women while he enters hidden intimate or sexualized relationships, he may receive both the public authority of the renunciant and the private intimacy of lay or yogic life. The woman receives no equivalent institutional status.

I raised a related tension in my 2022 Bhutan Vajrayana conference paper, in which I discussed Atiśa’s Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment states that those observing celibacy should not receive the secret and wisdom empowerments because they would be obliged to engage with practices their discipline forbids, endangering their vows.

Today, Highest Yoga Tantra empowerments containing those stages are routinely bestowed upon monks, nuns and laypeople. Tibetan traditions have developed symbolic and visualized interpretations, so this does not mean every monastic is instructed to undertake physical sexual union. Yet Atiśa considered the connection with practices incompatible with celibacy serious enough to warn celibates against receiving them.

The Fourteenth Dalai Lama has acknowledged this tension. As I discussed on Dakini Translations, with Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, he explained that fully ordained monks and nuns cannot take an actual physical consort except in the highly exceptional case of practitioners who have genuinely transcended conventional purity and impurity. Yet he has publicly bestowed Highest Yoga Tantra empowerments—including the vase, secret, knowledge/wisdom and word empowerments—upon assemblies including monastics, as his office described his 2022 Gyalwa Gyatso empowerment. During these empowerments he tells monks not to visualise a consort but more a spiritual friend.

A tradition whose foundational authorities recognised tension between celibacy and higher tantra’s union dimensions now routinely transmits their ritual framework within monasteries. Vajrayāna appears caught between the celibate renunciant and tantric yogin. The twenty-first century is the right time to examine this openly. I also discussed this in my 2022 Love & Liberation conversation, The “Inner” Life of Bliss, Celibacy, Desire, Love, Tantric Union and Women.

The Pāli Vinaya’s Aniyata rules even address a monk sitting privately with a woman where they cannot readily be seen or heard. The rules distinguish settings and possible offences, so not every private meeting constitutes the gravest breach. But the caution is unmistakable: privacy, intimacy, appearances and sexual possibility required boundaries. Highly intimate relationships between monks and female disciples should not escape scrutiny because they are called “tantric” or “secret.” And if they do, a tension and “deception” is created that leaves the woman feeling ignored, disrespected and powerless to stop it.

When the Invisible Woman Speaks: Sera Khandro

Women’s accounts transform how consort practice appears once the story is no longer told only through the male practitioner. In my earlier work, on Tantric Buddhism, vows, sex and consent– the importance of love, respect and consent and what happens when a woman speaks out about lama misconduct I discussed Sera Khandro, June Campbell and other women because they reveal agency, cost, ambiguity and power relations erased from idealized presentations.

Sarah H. Jacoby’s Love and Liberation, based on Sera Khandro’s autobiographical and biographical writings, shows a gifted female visionary navigating a world of overwhelmingly male authority. Arriving in Golok as a teenage outsider, she survived as a servant to attend teachings. As a treasure revealer and consort she faced opposition within consort households, pressure to keep revelations secret, and the tendency to read a woman’s religious identity principally through her relationship to a male master. Yet she became a teacher of lamas, monks and laypeople.

Jacoby complicates any simple opposition between “empowered consort” and “exploited woman.” Sera Khandro recorded consortship’s social costs and moral ambiguities. Most pointedly, as Jacoby discusses in her survivor-centred work, she refused a monastic abbot’s request to serve as his sexual consort for longevity. She asked why, if he wished to practise sexually, he maintained the public identity of a celibate monastic instead of living openly as a non-celibate tantric practitioner. Her refusal offers historical precedent for a woman asserting discernment and sexual agency before male religious authority.

Sera Khandro’s story is not only interesting to me as a woman in the same tradition, but has a deep personal resonance too. I write as a researcher, translator and practitioner, and as a woman who experienced many times over the past eight years in particular,  subtle-body consort practice with more than one senior teacher tulku.  I had no devotional relationship with most who tried it, and did not consent to what I experienced or understood them to be doing and was able to block it.

Even where I initially consented, I later experienced profound abandonment and trauma, intensified by the contradiction between their public celibate identities and the intimate nature of what occurred. As well as deception about their personal feelings and intention towards me as a student and woman.

When I withdrew consent, questioned the ethics and spoke publicly, I faced a sustained, and ongoing six-year campaign of smearing, exclusion, and professional and spiritual sabotage, culminating in an anonymous website and Youtube channel full of unverified, false and derogatory, misogynist allegations about me, whose sole purpose is to destroy my name and years of effort and work for the Buddha Dharma and beings. I documented aspects in my Survivor’s Testimony / Experience.

A woman who stays quiet may be praised as devoted. When she questions, withdraws consent or refuses invisibility, she may be called angry, unstable, impure, disloyal, obsessive or accused of breaking samaya. Even worse, face a vindictive, malevolent smear and cyberbullying campaign that causes lost funding, opportunities and connections, by the very community and teachers that are mean to be a source of refuge and safety and love.   Secrecy cannot remove her right to describe her experience. Samaya cannot mean one party possesses a voice while the other loses hers.

Robes Are Not Proof of Virtue: Monastic Power, Violence and the sexually and physically abusive Dob-dob Legacy within Gelug sectarian culture

The idealisation of Tibetan monasticism has too often obscured the experiences of those most vulnerable within it. A particularly troubling historical example is the culture of the dob-dobs (Tib. ldab ldob): fraternities of physically powerful, often non-scholastic monks associated especially with Tibet’s enormous Gelug monasteries. They performed practical, athletic and disciplinary functions, but historical and autobiographical accounts also associate dob-dobs with fighting, intimidation, abduction and sexual exploitation.

Melvyn C. Goldstein’s early anthropological study describes the dob-dob as a recognisable institution within the great Gelug monasteries, which were not merely centres of religious study but vast, wealthy and politically powerful organisations containing thousands of men. The point is not that every dob-dob committed abuse. It is that monasteries could accommodate a male subculture organised around physical power, factional loyalty and violence while continuing to present themselves as embodiments of Buddhist discipline.

One of the most important firsthand sources is The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering. Tashi Tsering recounts entering the Dalai Lama’s dance troupe as a child, enduring severe physical punishment, and becoming involved in an exploitative sexual relationship with a well-connected monk. He also describes being abducted by a feared dob-dob. Most damning is the surrounding normalisation: when he questioned such conduct, monks and monastic authorities reportedly treated it as simply the way things were.

This was physical and sexual abuse of children inside a religious culture that claimed the highest ethical authority, and it was tolerated for years. It cannot be dismissed as an isolated lapse by one bad monk. Tashi Tsering’s account exposes a pattern in which institutional prestige, male solidarity and cultural silence protected those with power while children and less powerful people carried the consequences.

This history also challenges the romantic orientalist fantasy of Tibet as a uniformly compassionate Buddhist society. Acknowledging it does not justify the Chinese occupation of Tibet or political propaganda against Tibetans. It does mean refusing to conceal brutality merely because those responsible were Tibetan or wore Buddhist robes. A tradition cannot demand honest recognition of the violence inflicted upon Tibetans while suppressing honest recognition of violence committed within Tibetan institutions.

The large Gelug monasteries were also embedded in Tibet’s sectarian and political history. Monastic establishments accumulated land, wealth, influence and coercive power. Religious affiliation could become inseparable from political authority, institutional rivalry and the suppression of competing voices. This does not invalidate Gelug philosophy or the accomplishments of sincere Gelug practitioners. It does invalidate the childish assumption that a monastery, lineage or monk stands outside ordinary struggles for dominance merely because it invokes the Dharma.

I knew a monk very well who told me as a child below age of 15 years, who had been put into the monastery by his parents and never spoke or saw them again for five years, that the monasteries are full of physical and sexual abuse. He told me that he had been held down by four adult monks who all beat him with sticks for being late to class. That would be illegal in most countries as child abuse, but for some reasons monasteries seem to be “above the law” when it comes to children and women. As I have recently found out!

Bhutan recently announced that there should be no corporal punishment for children after a recent case when a former young monk, aged 17, committed suicide after running away from the monastery, who had also been beaten severely by adult monks holding him down. There seems to be a pattern of this punishment, which is unlawful. So why are women still supporting and following such cruel, brute, and violent cultures and institutions against women and children, both physically and verbally.

Women and male monastic systems

Women – especially laywomen – should not be told to adopt these overwhelmingly male monastic systems as their unquestionable ethical models. Tibetan Buddhist texts and institutional cultures have repeatedly represented women as sources of attachment, impurity or danger to male celibacy while simultaneously using female bodies, imagery, devotion and labour as indispensable supports for male religious accomplishment. A system that views the living woman as a threat but worships the symbolic feminine as wisdom is not practising equality. It is appropriating the feminine while subordinating women.

Large, overwhelmingly male institutions do not embody the Buddha’s teachings merely because their members wear robes. When authority is concentrated in men, protected by secrecy and shielded from independent scrutiny, violence and sexual exploitation can be minimised as private misconduct, cultural custom, karmic consequence or an unfortunate aberration. Those harmed are then expected to remain silent to protect the monastery, lineage or teacher. This is not compassion. It is institutional self-protection.

The same patriarchal pattern is not confined to the historical Gelug establishment. My own direct experience in the Karma Kagyu world has shown me how monastic and lineage power can still be deployed against a woman who speaks, objects or refuses submission.

I experienced the resulting exclusion, smear campaign, bullying, intimidation and reputational harm as the conduct of men who, despite wearing robes or serving a religious institution, acted like worldly thugs. At times their behaviour appeared more cruel, cowardly and brutish than that of the ordinary worldly people they presumed to instruct.

The institutional question is unavoidable: how can organisations claiming to embody compassion impose serious, international consequences upon women without due process, independent investigation or a right of reply? When male authorities can circulate accusations, close ranks and exclude a woman across a network of centres while denying her an equivalent platform from which to answer, misogyny is no longer simply an individual prejudice. It has become a system of power.

Symbolic Female Equality, Lived Female Subordination: All-male panels and token “female voices”

As I wrote about in “Where Were the Women at the Global Buddhist Summit?” The Diplomat (2023), and about the almost all male line-up of the Global Peace Prayer in Bhutan (2025), many contemporary empowerments, eminent male tulkus sit high on thrones and senior monks occupy raised platforms, while the predominantly lay audience—often many women—sits below an overwhelmingly male hierarchy.

Seating alone does not prove spiritual inequality and may have historical, ritual or practical explanations. But combined with overwhelmingly male institutional authority, lineage representation and limited recognition of women’s contributions, it symbolizes a deeper contradiction. Women are told the feminine is wisdom and indispensable to Vajrayāna, yet the living institution may place them visibly and socially beneath male monastic authority.

The tension between symbolic female equality and lived female subordination is no longer theoretical. If women are essential to the path, equality should become visible not only in paintings and texts, but in who teaches, speaks and is recognised, and in how living women are treated.

That system is displayed publicly at major Buddhist events.   These are not cosmetic questions of representation. An all-male stage reveals who controls Buddhist property, prestige, teaching authority and public speech. It also determines which questions can be avoided: sexual and physical abuse, unequal ordination, misuse of tantric power, retaliation against whistleblowers, economic dependence, and the expectation that women protect institutional reputations at the cost of their dignity and safety.

The repetition across historical monasteries, contemporary lineage institutions and international Buddhist gatherings is the point. The forms change – a dob-dob fraternity, a draconian banning letter, a closed male network, an all-male platform – but the underlying structure remains recognisable: men possess authority, define the narrative and protect one another; women and children bear the harm, are denied an equal voice, or are instructed to accept their exclusion as tradition.

Conclusion: Women (or men) Are Not Obliged to Sustain These Systems of Patriarchal and Misogynist Power

The time has come for Buddhist women, together with male allies who genuinely support equality, to reconsider where they place their devotion, labour, money, public endorsement and trust. A monk’s robes are not proof of realisation, compassion, courage or even ordinary decency. A prestigious title does not transform bullying into enlightened activity, cruelty into ‘wrathful compassion’, sexual exploitation into tantra, or institutional retaliation into protection of the Dharma.

Women are not obliged to support institutions that exclude their voices, minimise abuse, deny them fair treatment or demand silence in exchange for belonging. Nor should laywomen be expected to imitate monastic systems permeated by assumptions of female inferiority and male entitlement. The Buddha taught practitioners to examine conduct and consequences. That examination must apply equally to monks, lamas, monasteries and lineage authorities.

Walking away from an abusive or misogynistic system is not a rejection of Buddhism. It is ethical discernment. Women can withdraw their attendance, money, labour, translation work, devotion and public support from institutions that refuse accountability, and direct them instead towards communities – monastic, yogic or lay – that practise equality, transparency, reciprocity and genuine compassion.

A monk who genuinely practises celibacy should be respected for doing so. A man who wishes to practise intimate union with a woman has another venerable model: the yogin or householder. What is unacceptable is claiming the public purity, wealth, security and unquestioned authority of the celibate monk while privately claiming women’s bodies, subtle energies, devotion or sexuality, and then denying those women recognition, reciprocity or a voice.

The mahāsiddha tradition offers another possibility. Tilopa can be taught by women. Nāropa can leave institutional prestige. Marpa can live openly as a householder. Dagmema can be remembered as part of the transmission rather than edited out. Women can be teachers, practitioners and realised authorities rather than invisible batteries supporting male enlightenment.

Female students should ask bluntly how a teacher actually regards women and women’s bodies: as dangers to his celibacy, objects of desire, sources of subtle energy or instruments for tantric accomplishment – or as full human and spiritual equals possessing intelligence, autonomy, Buddha-nature and the capacity for realisation? No woman should surrender that inquiry to robes, thrones, institutions or titles.

After twenty years in Vajrayāna, I will not assume that monastic status constitutes refuge or safety. I will judge teachers by their conduct: their love, compassion, bodhicitta, honesty, ethical integrity, courage and respect for women. I am more inclined to learn from realised women, lay tantric practitioners, ngakpas and ngakmas, yogic practitioners, and teachers whose behaviour I have been able to observe over time.

This is not rejection of the Dharma. It is refusing to confuse the Dharma with men and institutions that fail to embody it. A teacher worthy of profound trust should not require a woman to become smaller, quieter, less autonomous or less intelligent in order to follow him.

Vajrayāna does not need more praise of an abstract feminine principle while living women remain silenced, excluded and used. It needs to recognise the women who embody wisdom and to confront the institutions that exploit them. Sacred union requires reciprocity, equality, consent and recognition. Without them, union becomes extraction.

Dakini Translations | Adele Tomlin. 18 August 2026.

Sources and Further Reading

Jacoby, Sarah H. Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Publisher page

Jacoby, Sarah H. “To Be or Not to Be Celibate: Morality and Consort Practices According to the Treasure Revealer Sera Khandro’s (1892–1940) Auto/biographical Writings.” In Buddhism Beyond the Monastery: Tantric Practices and Their Performers in Tibet and the Himalayas, edited by Sarah Jacoby and Antonio Terrone, 37–71. Leiden: Brill, 2009.

Jacoby, Sarah H. “She Said No: Toward a Survivor-Centered History of Vajrayāna Buddhist Sexuality.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 92, no. 1 (2024): 110–129. DOI. See also the author interview, “She Said No”.

Shaw, Miranda. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994; paperback ed., 1995. Book record

Tomlin, Adele. “Going Back to the Female Roots of Vajrayāna: A 21st Century Review of the Female and Yogic Roots of Vajrayāna, Monastic Vows and Tantric Practice, and the Invisible, Silent Female Consort.” Dakini Translations, 23 December 2022. Article

Tomlin, Adele. “‘Dakini is Truth!’ Tilopa’s ‘Overlooked’ Female Teachers and Entering ‘Unconventional’ Conduct (Tul-zhug).” Dakini Translations, 31 October 2021. Article

Tomlin, Adele. “Hearing ‘Her-story’ (II): Dagmema. Marpa’s Wife and Milarepa’s Confidante, Friend and Teacher.” Dakini Translations, 8 March 2023. Article

Tomlin, Adele. Creating ‘Her’story: Female Lineages and Teachers. Dakini Translations, 2024. E-book

Tomlin, Adele. “The Creative Power, Bliss and Wisdom of a Woman’s Body.” Dakini Translations, 13 October 2025. Article

Tomlin, Adele. “Survivor’s Testimony / Experience.” Dakini Translations, 2026. Testimony

Keyes, Charles F. “Sexy Monks: Public Criticism of Sexual Scandals Involving Buddhist Monks in Thailand.” Paper prepared for the EUROSEAS 2007 conference; revised 2015. Paper

Davidson, Ronald M. Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Book record

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. The Buddhist Monastic Code, discussion of the Aniyata rules. Online text

Goldstein, Melvyn C. ‘A Study of the Ldab Ldob.’ Central Asiatic Journal 9, no. 2 (1964): 125–141. Open-access paper

Goldstein, Melvyn C., William R. Siebenschuh, and Tashi Tsering. The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Book record

Tomlin, Adele. ‘Where Were the Women at the Global Buddhist Summit?’ The Diplomat, 28 April 2023. Article

Tomlin, Adele. ‘“Pictures Speak a Thousand Words”: All-Male Guest Line-Up Photos for Bhutanese Global Peace Prayer Festival.’ Dakini Translations, 12 October 2025. Article

Endnotes

[1] Even recently, when I stayed at Palpung Sherab Ling monastery, I was seated alone in the restaurant, and had to move seats three times, to avoid the unwanted attention of a monk in his twenties who despite my kindly requesting him not to sit with me alone, he followed me when I moved, and kept saying “hot” when he sat next to me.  If it had been a layman, I might have made more of a scene, but it was kind of sad that a young man would be so “desperate” as to act in that way on monastery premises, towards a Buddhist devotee.

[2] Sexual abuse of children was also very common among dob-dobs.

“They were also notorious for fighting with each other to see who was toughest and for their sexual predation of lay boys. All schoolboys in Lhasa were fair game for these dob-dobs, and most tried to return from school in groups for protection against them. I knew for some time that I was being pursued and had several close calls. But I was always able to escape until one fateful day when that monk caught me after a gadrugba performance in Lhasa and forcibly took me to his apartment in the monastery. He made me a prisoner, threatening me with beatings if I tried to escape or I refused to cooperate with him sexually. It was distasteful, but he released me after two days. The incident, however, reawakened my ambivalent feelings toward traditional Tibetan society. Once again its cruelty was thrust into my life. I wondered to myself how monasteries could allow such thugs to wear the holy robes of the Lord Buddha. When I talked to other monks and monk officials about the dob-dobs, they shrugged and said simply that that was just the way things were.” Tsering, Tashi (1997). Struggle for Modern Tibet.