The trouble seems to have started last February, when Gomyo Kevin Seperic, a graffiti artist and Shingon monk affiliated with the Sitting Frog Zen Sangha in Phoenix, went public about a disagreement he was having with its abbot, Dogo Barry Graham, over Graham’s authority to teach. On his Hoodie Monk blog, Seperic said,

How many Sitting Frog Zen Sangha teachers does it take to change a light bulb? Not two, apparently. I’ve just been kicked out of the Sitting Frog Zen Sangha for asking Dogo to show me his inka. Huh....The cheese stands alone.

Soon, the Zen teacher Kobutsu Kevin Malone, with whom Seperic and Graham had both been affiliated, added a comment to Seperic’s post, in which he acknowledged that it was a “a serious error in judgment” on his part to have agreed to serve as Graham’s teacher without checking his credentials. “It has become increasingly apparent that Barry is in serious difficulty and that his words and actions have become increasingly erratic and delusional,” Malone wrote.

A few days later, it was Graham’s turn. “I have been the subject of some scurrilous rumor-mongering by a couple of former friends and colleagues,” he wrote on his own blog. Graham went on to allege that one of his accusers (he omitted the names) had been convicted of assault, and that the other’s own teaching credentials were fabricated.

The flurry of charges and counter-charges between Graham, Seperic, and Malone over inka—the authorization to teach in the Rinzai tradition of Zen—played out before an online audience, quickly blossoming into a fullon dharma smackdown that drew 171 partisan comments from Hoodie Monk readers. But a few found the whole thing painful to watch. The reader rg1313 commented:

The fact that three zen masters have to air there [sic] dirty laundry on blog sites seems a little childish. . . . You teachers are supposed to be role models for our practice not a buddhist sitcom.

Indeed. If any newcomers exploring an interest in Zen had stumbled upon the fray, they wouldn’t have been inspired. With Buddhist virtues like compassion and right speech in short supply, the whole affair looked more like a schoolyard brawl than enlightened discourse between experienced dharma teachers and students. Unfortunately, the Sitting Frog squabble was hardly unique. In the era of Internet blogging and online forums with their unfiltered, rapidfire exchanges, disagreements among Buddhist teachers and practitioners seem to erupt out of nowhere.

It’s hardly news that Buddhists sometimes disagree— there is a long and colorful history of Buddhist teachers debating one another, often quite forcefully, over their understanding of the dharma. And American Buddhism has weathered its share of internecine conflicts, including sex scandals, financial shenanigans, and power abuses. What has changed in the past few years is that some Buddhists are now accustomed to casual online mudslinging and name-calling—in short, behaving just as badly as everyone else on the Internet.

“People say and do things online that they wouldn’t ordinarily say and do in person,” says John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University, in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, who has studied computer users’ behavior for years. Buddhist or not, Internet users readily fall prey to what Suler calls the “online disinhibition effect.” The medium itself drives much of this acting out, he says. “People experience their computers and online environments as an extension of their selves—even as an extension of their minds—and therefore feel free to project their inner dialogues, transferences, and conflicts into their exchanges with others in cyberspace.”

One might suppose that Buddhists, with their mandate to realize no-self and manifest lovingkindness, would be able to navigate such pitfalls a bit more skillfully than most Internet users. But Suler, who has some familiarity with Buddhism—in 1993, he published a book titled “Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought”—isn’t surprised that teachers and students get carried away online.

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