Tricycle: In Europe we haven't had the experience that you have had in America of teachers reaching considerable peaks of eminence both in the Buddhist world and, in some senses, the broader culture, and then falling rather dramatically from grace, in the wake of scandal. And I notice, as a European, that on the one hand you have a tradition of liberalism, in which more or less anything goes, and that gives you tremendous freedom, but it also gives you a tremendous sense of being empowered to do what you wish-and often at the cost of not paying great heed to some of the ethical issues. Now there is a sudden lurch back, and one finds a kind of puritanical moralism taking over. Some of the Buddhist organizations are trying to regulate everything, to impose and create rules and structures to control this. From a European perspective this is an American oddity, this intense preoccupation with a kind of self-punishing edge.

Salzberg: Maybe the "self-punishing edge" is the flavor of what's informing American Buddhism. There's a quality of self-hatred in the American psyche which perhaps does not exist in Europe. A couple of years ago at a conference in Dharamsala, I asked the Dalai Lama a question about self-hatred. He had no idea what I was talking about. He started asking questions as though I were describing something very extreme. He was just astonished to learn that so many Americans experience that feeling. He asked, "Is that some kind of nervous disorder?" But then other Europeans described finding people all over America talking about low self-esteem.

Tricycle: Why would there be such a degree of selfhatred in American culture?

Salzberg: One could speculate about everything from child-rearing practices to the tremendous isolation to the heritage of guilt that so many labor under. What is compelling for us to look at is the specific implication of self-hatred in the context of an Asian teaching coming to the West. When people hear a message like "strive with diligence"-that has to be accompanied by a faith that one's own striving has the potential to realize freedom, and not with a bleak prognosis of endless striving. You want to communicate that the Buddha's teaching is about how all beings want to be happy. Sometimes there's a sense in this culture that it's embarrassing to feel that one deserves happiness, that it is not quite right. Sometimes it takes great effort to pull the mind away from all of the terrible mistakes and awful things one has said or done. This is almost palpable to those of us teaching dharma in this country. In the most extraordinary ways there will be self-judgment. Negative self-judgment. People feel very lonely.

Tricycle: Do Americans have a diminished sense of community because they have a diminished sense of history, of shared culture, of a shared religious heritage? In England or in France, there is an undeniable commonality in history and national identity that's been built up over centuries and that gives people confidence, don't you think? Perhaps even self-respect?

Salzberg: I think this goes back to what you said about Americans being extreme. We don't know how to relate to a tradition very well. There is a tendency toward "succumbing" to it rather than "surrendering" so that we lose all sense of proportion or value, which is very different from the way it is in Asia. We reject being rooted in something.

Tricycle: That introduces another contrast between England and America, and that is the absence of an ordained sangha in America. In the Theravada tradition, preeminent likewise in the Chinese and Tibetan traditions, is the idea that the dharma is not actually established in a land until a resident community of ordained bhikkus is established by members of the mainstream society. From a traditionalist viewpoint this indicates the dharma has barely arrived in terms of the America culture. Would you agree with that?

Salzberg: A most extraordinary facet of the dharma in America is the demand on the part of laypeople that it be relevant; not just about living a good, comfortable, peaceful life, but that it really be a dharma of liberation, that it be accessible to laypeople, that they receive teachings of the same caliber as anybody else and that it must develop in a fully integrated way.

Tricycle: Is that strong enough to preserve the dharma?

Salzberg: When we first established the Insight Meditation Society, one mandate was the preservation of the dharma. In part, that was because Joseph Goldstein and I had spent time in Burma, a country threatened internally and externally. On one particular visit somebody took us to a place where they had donated a great deal of money to construct an area for stone slabs on which the entire Tripitaka (the original Buddhist canon) was being engraved. It was like a graveyard, stone slab after stone slab, with people etching out every word in order to preserve the dharma. On a deeper level the dharma is preserved only through the realization of beings. It's not preserved as a body of knowledge but in the buddhahood of each realized being. Because America is relatively prosperous, there's often a flippancy about preserving religion. We have not necessarily seen or acknowledged the desecration of a religion, or the annihilation of a people, or a massive political upheaval. There are people here devoted to dharma, but a sense of preservation is not the common consciousness.

Tricycle: In Europe there is a greater recollection of the precariousness of culture and of religion; and consequently, one values it more. But going back to the ordained sangha: two traditional qualities are celibacy and a renunciation of money or business affairs. Yet it's precisely these two qualities, especially the former, that have been the downfall of many Buddhist teachers in the United States. Could that be one of the weaknesses of trying to establish the dharma in an essentially lay contextif we mean by "lay," not celibate? And does that again point to the necessity, or the value at least, of trying to create an ordained sangha, with a sufficient degree of commitment to renounce sexual relationships and the luxuries that money buys? If there is not a group of people prepared to make that sacrifice-literally, to live in that kind of simplicity-and another group prepared to support the ordained does that reflect, on that one level, a lack of commitment?

Salzberg: No, not a lack of commitment, but rather it reflects trying to figure out what creates the integrity of a bhikku's life-such as accountability, having nothing hidden. If it is a community, there's the need to express one's faults to the community. That is the basis of forgiveness. There are situations in this country, such as the predominance oflay teachers, that have not existed in the past. In our community the teachers have tried to create a code of ethical guidelines and a system of accountability for breaking a precept. It's very difficult without that reference. In many cases, the problem has not only been the actions of teachers but the aura of silence, the fact that there's no recourse, nowhere to go. It is very important to be open. The power relationship is so unequal in many communities that there is no way to ask questions.