“Crazy Wisdom” and Its Risky Polyvalence. Empirical Insights into the Didactics of Tibetan Buddhism

The didactics of “crazy wisdom” are regarded as a means of transforming epistemic attitudes. As a special teaching style, it aims on the dissociation of ontological concepts of the student and produces a close bond with the teacher (Sharapan & Härkönen, 2017). At the same time, the students are left in uncertainty about how they should understand the ambiguous, polyvalent meaning of it.

The prominent case of the Tibetan teacher Sogyal Rinpoche makes it clear that crazy wisdom may lead to great difficulties on the part of the adepts (Bell, 2002). By referring to “crazy wisdom”, a spiritual teacher can make all sorts of apparently dissonant or ruthless statements if this helps his student on the way to enlightenment. At the same time these masters stand above all criticism, for who understands what is going on in an enlightened spirit? Following the self-description of the Buddhist organization Rigpa, Sogyal Rinpoche, the (recently retired) head of this school, represents such a personality.

The empirical data presented here, is part of the research project »Buddhism in the West« (Vogd/Harth 2015) and provide insights to the difficulties of the concept of “crazy wisdom” which in this case lead to the multiple abuse of the teacher’s power (Sperry & Littlefair, 2017). Two cases from our empirical data clarify the polyvalence of “crazy wisdom”:

1) an interview with a novice will be used to reconstruct how the student’s contact with the teaching methods is reflectively observed and integrated in her practice. Here, it becomes clear that the “crazy” actions are characterized by a specific state of in-between. 2) the doubting of this didactics will be further clarified by an interview with Rigpa drop-outs. Here, “crazy wisdom” is interpreted as an abuse of power, a faulty deception, and even as (physical and psychological) violence.