A biography on the expedition website said convincing Ms Moharrak's family to agree to her climb "was as great a challenge as the mountain itself", though they fully support her now.

www.zuiganji-affair.com

On that page, I outline my reasons for agreeing to undertake the translations in a matter first brought to public attention by the Rev. Kobutsu Malone, a Zen priest and editor of a web page known as the “Sasaki Archive” where witness statements and other documentation are collected concerning reports of alleged sexual harassment of students by Rev. Sasaki stretching over several decades, by Rev. Eshu Martin, a long time student of Rev. Sasaki, and others. I would like to briefly “bullet point” here the same reasons I explain in more detail on that webpage.

• I agreed to provide such translations upon condition that I would stand neutral and impartial in attempting to convey their content. I have attempted to do so throughout.
•  I originally was concerned that the case was someone’s “youthful mistake” and best forgotten. However Rev. Sasaki was in his early to mid 40′s at the time, already a high ranked priest of several decades experience, the financial and de facto administrative head of the temple where the scandal arose and (based upon the court’s subsequent conviction and imprisonment of Rev. Sasaki) a central figure in the alleged crimes committed. The charges on which he was convicted were also very serious, not merely a traffic offence or the like. 
• Reports of sexual scandal surrounding Rev. Sasaki, also contained in the news reports and seemingly admitted to by Rev. Sasaki in interviews with reporters, seemed sufficiently to foreshadow the current claims of alleged sexual harassment and improprieties such that they should be retold. 
• The news reports from two separate newspapers, coupled with panels of judges in two separate courts finding guilt and each imposing a sentence of imprisonment (they could have imposed lesser penalties under Japanese law), left me some confidence in the general basis of the news stories.
• Rev. Sasaki is a figure of great import to Zen in America, and some material indicated that the scandal was one reason for his first being sent to America, and thus has historical value to the story of Zen in the West.
• The very inability to report it years earlier than today must be attributed in large part to the failure to disclose this story by the principal figure himself and by the people around him either (i) not knowing or (ii) knowing and choosing to keep it undisclosed.
• In either case, it should have been told earlier as important information needed for informed consent by past, present and potential future students. I believe that potential students and those encountering a teacher have a right to consider such important information before placing their spiritual and psychological well-being in that teacher’s hands. Students have a right to know.
• I am not the police who arrested Rev. Sasaki, the prosecutor, the judges who convicted him, nor the newspaper reporters who wrote about the events, nor am I a person who caused the case in the first place. I am merely a translator whose role is limited to conveying, without understatement or exaggeration, the contents of reports containing descriptions of what they said and did.
• I take seriously Right Speech and my Vows regarding the Precepts concerning refraining from “gossip” and “criticizing others’ faults”. However, like the late Rev. Robert Aitken and Kobutsu Malone in their work to gather and publicize information regarding the long history of abuse by Rev. Eido Shimano, I believe that my obligations are also to potential or present students who have a right to know in order to prevent future harm, and to past students and possible victims of abuse who have a right to be informed and consoled as past victims.

I believe in forgiveness and forgetting, but also believe that openness and honesty are required first. Instead, what seems to have occurred is several decades of effort to keep this story, as well as the many cases of alleged sexual harassment, hidden. That is the central factor in the long delay in discussing these events until now. It is very different from a case in which a person may have made a single mistake in their youth which was openly admitted, well known by the community of students and potential students, openly apologized for with amends openly made (as in the Buddha’s time as well). In this case, right to the time these news reports were discovered, there have been high placed individuals around Rev. Sasaki who publicly have denied to anyone asking that the case happened at all, thus failing to disclose or honestly represent such information to other current students and potential students who had a right to know, or who may even have inquired about rumors of these events only to be given incorrect and misleading information in return.

And a final word …

Let us completely put aside from discussion this particular case involving Rev. Sasaki, any question of what happened in this matter, and speak in general terms about all the scandals and controversies which have appeared in the Zen and Buddhist world over the years.

I do not demand perfection from any Zen Teacher. They are only people. But I do demand that they do what they can to avoid harm to others. Most (the vast vast majority of Zen Teachers I know) do just that.

Sitting with the beautiful AND the ugly in this world … finding that which simultaneously transcends and holds, breathes in and breathes out, “beautiful vs. ugly” … is our Practice. Is it not the same when we find a certain ugliness amid the beautiful in Buddhism too? A naive student who demands ONLY beauty and goodness in the world … even the Buddhist world … one sidedly rejecting the sometimes distasteful or even criminal, may miss the Real Treasure that shines through all of it. That is so even as, in our Wisdom and Equanimity, we keep pulling the weeds we can and nurture the flowers, praise the good and punish the wrongdoer.

All at Once, the Eye of Buddha holding all.

Gassho, Jundo Cohen

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