All that glitters is not gold ~ Shakespeare An article called Broken Gold was recently published in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. In it various students of the dharma reflect upon their disillusionment with their teachers and/or sanghas. The individual contributors are very insightful about their experiences and the article as a whole is a thoughtful contribution to the subject. It details how three people who have been betrayed by their teacher or sangha face their personal “struggle with the story”. This is Buddhist-speak for the persuasive narrative that seduces us into self-pity or adversarial thinking, as in its- me-against-the-world. The moral of the story seems to be one about personal accountability. As the editor writes in her eloquent introduction: … at a certain point what matters most is not so much what shattered one’s trust and scattered one’s sangha, but the question: What heals? And in a way, this is true: what matters is not who-did-what-to-whom and why,...