Her practice escalated and intensified, to the point where she was meditating as often as possible, obsessively. “I went to about 50 sesshins,” Elaine said, “which is unprecedented, I’m told, for a layperson. Each sesshin is a week, and I was working full-time.” She never took vacations, spending all her vacation days and sick leave to attend sesshin. She lived on the Upper East Side, not far from the zendo, so she attended every possible sitting, “four nights a week, on Sundays, sometimes the morning service at five in the morning.”

Elaine knew from the start that Shimano had affairs with his students. “People knew Eido Roshi, and warned me what he was like,” she said. When she first started at the New York Zendo, she heard that a whole crop of students had just left in disgust. For the first four years, she and Shimano did not have sex. Elaine insisted that when they finally did, it was consensual and not exploitative. But her language was ambiguous.

“Eido Roshi—in my day he was more subtle in his exploitation of us,” Elaine said. She remembered his occasional acts of generosity or deference, like his refusal to hit her with keisaku. “He knew that was something not to do me,” Elaine said. “I was battered as a child, and that was not for me.” And she gave him credit for not coming on to her, at least not right away. Or at least being willing to take no for an answer. “He left me alone for the first four years,” she said. “Well, he didn’t leave me alone, but I didn’t succumb for about four years … I observed him, I was warned … But then slowly things started eroding, and you start being a little curious, and he’s so powerful.”

The more Elaine defended Shimano, the more indefensible he looked. “Subsequently, I found out he was sleeping with my friend before me,” she said. “And when I came to the zendo, she started tearing her hair out later on, because she knew I was next. But I wasn’t next, because I was four years later. So there were other people during that time.” Elaine believed that what Shimano did with vulnerable students was abuse. She called him a narcissist. He was “always hurting people,” she told me. But Elaine was also convinced that the two of them had something special. She was not one of his typical easy marks. Their relationship was, she believed, more equal than his others. “I felt that I really loved him, even though he was a scoundrel in a way. Whatever delusions I had, I felt that it—I think he really respected me for standing up to him. I think he was in a really lonely position. He had everyone bowing to him and this and that, and I was a spirited person … He said that in a way I was more enlightened than him, which is pretty big.”

She stayed with Shimano for 11 years, having sex with him, off and on, for the last seven. After all that time, what they shared was, she was sure, nothing like what he had with the other women. “I was always there, and I was the only person who was always there through those 11 years.” The monks were “coming and going,” and nothing else, nobody else, was constant. “I really had the closest relationship, and I challenged him.”

Eventually, however, Elaine knew that she had to leave. He was sleeping with other women, and it tormented her. A Japanese mistress arrived midway through a sesshin, several days after it had begun. “She wasn’t a serious student,” Elaine told me with disdain. “And you know why she was there—because she was going to sleep with him … So it was a torment. It was my own fault … I knew all that stuff, but I couldn’t quite get free of him.”

Until one day, when he demanded sex, she finally refused him. “He pleaded with me to sleep with him again, and I refused. I just said no. And he said, ‘One more time?’ And I just said no.”

IX. “I took a vow of celibacy”

“Regardless of what it’s called,” Robin Westen told me, “it’s a cult. You go away, you sleep maybe five hours a night, you’re eating three bowls of rice on your knees, there’s no talking, you’re sitting on a cushion until your knees are killing you for 12 fucking hours a day. You’re waking up at four in the morning and chanting, and the only person you can talk to is this dude in a little closet of a room. They’re breaking you down.”

Today, sociologists shy away from the word cult, mainly because the word is frightening without being very precise. After all, the kind of intense practice that Westen describes could just as easily apply to life in many Catholic monasteries or convents. Are they cults? And many religious laypeople—Orthodox Jews, evangelical Protestants, devout Muslims—pray every day, sometimes multiple times a day; alter their diets; even, as in the case of Mormons, wear special underwear, all because these are their religion’s customs. Are these people cultists, or just fervent believers?

But even if we eschew the word itself, it is useful to consider that while, in theory, there is a place in Zen for moderation, Shimano’s students came to believe that the more deeply they studied—and the more hours one spent sitting—the better their practice would be. As a result, they often became so identified with Shimano that breaking with the sangha could be more traumatic than enduring whatever pain he was inflicting. Zazen, the hours of meditation at the heart of Zen Buddhism, is best practiced in a community; at a quiet, properly appointed zendo; and under the guidance of a skilled teacher—monk, nun, priest, or abbot. Even in Japan, it is increasingly difficult to find all those necessities together, and in the United States such a confluence exists in only several dozen cities. It all flows from the teacher, who can build up a community and raise the dollars for a zendo.

And of the few teachers in this country who can do that, how hard must it be to find the teacher who works for you? If you found such a teacher, how grateful would you be, and how reluctant to leave? Not only can a departing student despair of ever again finding a comparable teacher with whom to sit and meditate, or an equally supportive community, but such a student has to ask whether the previous year—or two years, or 10 years—has all been a waste. The longer one stays, the harder it is to leave. And so it becomes very appealing to ignore, minimize, or deny the faults of the leader. If women and men hoped that Shimano could make them whole, they stayed because it seemed that he was the only one who could. This totalizing effect of Zen Buddhism characterizes other deep practices, and many intentional communities. To live such a life can be exhilarating. But the intensive Zen life can also be disabling, robbing people of their good judgment and causing them to abdicate their self-regard to leaders who may not be worthy of their trust. And when students identify Zen practice wholly with one teacher, their practice might not survive a rupture in the relationship.

In 2006, Andrea Rook, then 31 years old, was leading a rather unremarkable life in Concord, New Hampshire, with her husband, whom she had met on Match.com, and their young daughter. Then she began studying at Dai Bosatsu. Her tutelage with Shimano lasted from 2006 to 2008, and she never slept with him, but she speaks of him with an ardor, and a kind of horror, unmatched by any of his more enduring partners. She left her husband and child for him.

“I would have done almost anything he asked me to,” Rook told me, when we spoke by telephone. “All I wanted was to be there in that monastery with him and learn Zen.” Rook sounded nostalgic as she described her practice, learned from Shimano: the typical “mu” meditation, in which one breathes in and out while concentrating on the word mu. “I loved him so much,” she said. “Basically, I left my family. I divorced my husband. We had, up until that point, a decent marriage. It wasn’t the deepest, most meaningful marriage, and maybe we would have ended up divorced in 10 years, but not for 10 years. And my daughter was 2 years old when I left her. I was one of those ferociously protective moms, and I picked up and left Eva for 90 days. As much time as I could get with Shimano, I wanted.”

At first, Rook tried alternating 90 days at Dai Bosatsu with 90-day periods with her daughter. “But after a year, I realized I was forgetting what it was like to be a mom.” She left the sangha, and today she is back with her daughter. Rook is enrolled in college, studying psychology, and she teaches Zumba classes. During my second interview with Shimano, I alluded to Rook, and asked him how he felt about students’ leaving their families to study with him. He replied that in the United States, people can do as they please. “In this country,” Shimano said, “people express their own reasons, and if he or she is not crazy, normally I would accept them to come up.”

Unlike Rook, who got out relatively quickly, and never slept with Shimano, “Anna” (not her real name) did have sex with Shimano, although she said that she had hoped not to, and it took her almost a decade to leave. We met at her house, where she lives alone, but for her dog, in a poor, small town in a sparsely populated state. She agreed to speak with me as long as I thoroughly hid her identity. She met Shimano in the late 1970s; beyond that I am not permitted to give specific dates or lengths of time. Even her children don’t know the entire story, although they do not know the role that Eido Shimano played in what their mother calls her “self-imposed exile.” She spoke anxiously but compulsively, both afraid and thrilled to have a curious visitor. Anna is trying to recover from her loss: not the loss of love (for she never loved Eido Shimano), but the loss of her Buddhist practice.

Anna grew up in a liberal Protestant household but never derived much meaning from Christianity. In the 1970s, as a single mother, she read an article about Soen Nakagawa, the great Japanese roshi, and decided that she would like to learn from him. She soon discovered that Nakagawa was in Japan, but that she could sit with his leading student in the United States, Eido Shimano. Her practice began slowly, just a weekend at Dai Bosatsu now and again, but as her children aged and became more independent, Anna began to visit for longer periods: seven-day sesshins, three-month kesseis, eventually multiyear residencies. For years, she learned from Shimano without incident. But she was always on guard.

“I’d heard these rumors,” Anna said as we sat in her kitchen. “And I thought, Well, he is a great being.” Either the rumors were untrue, she guessed, or there was more to the story, some good reason for Shimano’s behavior. Still, Anna preferred not to find out. “I did try to avoid that with him, in a number of ways. I tried to make myself unappealing. I—well, I took a vow of celibacy.” Buddhism does not require celibacy of its practitioners, but Anna felt that it enhanced her Buddhist practice. And it kept Shimano away.

After three years, Anna decided to lift her vow of celibacy. “And then he was right there,” she said. “And I was not prepared.” She volunteered little about their sexual relationship: Shimano initiated it; the encounters were regular but intermittent; she was the one to end it. Given that the relationship felt to her like “a kind of rape, just as statutory rape is a kind of rape,” I asked her why she had allowed it to begin. Was she flattered by the attention?

“I don’t think I had the chance to think of it as flattering when the first incident happened,” Anna said. “No, I was totally taken off guard. Prior to that happening, I’d heard rumors, and I wondered, what will I do? Because I didn’t think I was allowed to say no … What I might say, as a distant cousin, is the feeling that if he was approving of you, that you were on the right path. I see it as part of the Zen tradition, too: the more serious the student is, the more shit they might give you.”

Zen does, in fact, have an aspect of sadism to it, or what we might more charitably call tough love. The Zen teacher roams a zendo with his stick, his keisaku, hitting students between the shoulder blades if they look sleepy or inattentive. A typical meditation session may last for 40 minutes, but two hours isn’t uncommon, and on the last day of one annual sesshin, the Zen Buddhist sits for a whole day and night, with breaks only for meals. The enforced silence of Zen, whether for an hour or for seven days, can also be torturous—although students insist it can lead to rapture.

In Japan, sexual aggression was never an accepted teaching method, but then again, traditional Japanese monasteries were all-male, limiting the possible temptations for heterosexual teachers. In the United States, in coed monasteries, it is not surprising that a student—trained to see fatigue, hunger, physical pain, and enforced silence as necessary spiritual disciplines—could figure that a teacher’s sexual demands were somehow reasonable, even desirable.

When it all went bad, Anna, like Olivia Wood, was torn between justice for herself (and protecting other possible victims) and the all-consuming importance of Zen practice. After all she had suffered, Wood still promised to keep quiet, not wanting to harm the Zen center. By contrast, Anna left Dai Bosatsu convinced that what Shimano had done to her was criminal; she told her story to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, but it did not find sufficient evidence to charge Shimano with a crime. (The assistant district attorney who had met with Anna remembered the case, but her notes from that meeting, more than 20 years ago, did not survive.) Yet Anna eventually decided that Shimano’s great crime was robbing her of her Zen practice. She never found another sangha, and, after all her years with Shimano, she never connected with another teacher. By insisting on being her lover, Shimano robbed her of a teacher.

Anna still misses sitting at Dai Bosatsu. “I have tried to connect with some other places,” she told me, “but it’s not the same thing.” She said she has spoken with other Shimano victims, and they too bemoan the isolation they have felt after leaving Shimano’s community. “I do believe that a lot of us have found ourselves without a religion, without a community, and, for Zen Buddhists, without a practice—you know, a meditation practice.” In other words, to be without a community is to be without a practice. “That to me is at the core of Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism. I struggled for a long, long time not to lose that, which I eventually did. I’m trying to get back to it, because it was a wonderful thing. I guess it was too tied up with Shimano.”

X. “Unfortunately, we don’t have God”

According to a recent agreement between the plaintiffs and the defendant, the lawsuit Eido T. Shimano Roshi and Yasuko Aiho Shimano v. The Zen Studies Society, Inc. will go first to nonbinding arbitration, where a mutually agreeable arbitrator will advise the parties what he or she thinks would happen if the case went to a jury. Jeffrey Hovden, the lawyer for the Zen Studies Society, told me, “The two sides are in arbitration over who the arbitrator will be.”

Most of the issues in the case are rather mundane. The most compelling aspect of the reply brief, the most interesting question if this case goes to trial, is the argument that Shimano’s sexual activities voided the terms of his agreement. “As spiritual leader, Shimano Roshi had fiduciary and ethical duties to the ZSS members who were his students,” the brief maintains.

On numerous occasions, Shimano Roshi engaged in sexual relationships with students of his. Shimano Roshi’s sexual relationships constituted an abuse of Shimano Roshi’s position … [His] sexual relationships harmed the ZSS and ZSS members and students. By having sexual relationships with students, Shimano Roshi caused damage to ZSS’s national and international reputation. After Shimano Roshi’s sexual relationships became known to members of ZSS and the wider Buddhist community, contributions to ZSS fell precipitously.

This is a legal brief, so one should not inspect it too closely for moral coherence. But it does seem that the Zen Studies Society is arguing that Shimano should not have had sex with students—but that if he was going to have sex with students, then publicly known sex was especially bad, because it could harm the organization’s reputation, causing donations to fall. So if there isn’t money to pay Shimano’s pension—which, according to many sources I spoke with, there isn’t—then it is mostly Shimano’s fault. Because he couldn’t keep his sex secret.

Lawrence Gerzog, Shimano’s lawyer, is arguing that Shimano’s discretion, or indiscretion, is immaterial. To begin, Gerzog told me, it is not clear that abstaining from sex with students is a requirement of Buddhism. And if Shimano did not abstain, then his alleged inability to keep his activities quiet could, paradoxically, be a reason that he should get his pension. For if there have been rumors of Shimano’s womanizing for so many decades, then the Zen Studies Society must have known about the rumors in 1995, when they promised the Shimanos a pension. How, Gerzog asked, can they now turn around and say that Shimano was not providing sound ethical leadership? If his behavior was good enough for the sangha all those years, it can’t turn around and tsk-tsk him now!

Here is how Gerzog stated this argument, at our second group lunch: “The society is alleging that recent claims of Roshi’s sexual activity surprised them, and that’s why they’re taking the steps that they took now. But there have been suggestions or allegations since, I think the 1950s.” Gerzog drew an analogy to Casablanca, in which the Vichy commander is “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling—and then seconds later is handed his winnings. “I think these allegations have been brewing about for many years, and for the society to suggest that they were unaware of them, and/or that it was a deal breaker or that it concerned them is, is the utmost—”

Here I interrupted: “So your argument will be ‘He didn’t do it, but if he did, he was doing it all along?’”

“Absolutely,” Gerzog said. “Absolutely.”

Shimano has almost entirely refused to discuss his sexual past, deferring to his lawyer’s wishes. At our two lunches, Shimano often seemed about to answer a question about sex when Gerzog would say, “Roshi, don’t answer that!” And Roshi wouldn’t. But at our second lunch, on June 20, 2013, at Montebello, a New York City restaurant, Shimano did say that he has had sex with “far fewer” than 12 of his students.

And Gerzog did allow Shimano to answer my general questions about sex between teachers and students. I asked, “Is there any ethical concern relating to affairs between teachers and students?” And Shimano replied, after some hesitation, “I guess—I guess—no matter what, it should belong to [the] unethical category.” I reiterated: “It should belong to the unethical category? Teachers should not have affairs with their students in Buddhism?” And Shimano said, “Even—no matter how aggressive the student may be.”

Soon thereafter, I asked whether having sex with a teacher could affect a student’s Zen practice. “Negatively or positively?” Shimano asked me.

“Either,” I said. “Could it affect it positively?”

“Could be,” he said.

“Could be?” I asked.

“Could be.”

“Could it affect it negatively?” I asked.

“Could be.”

“So,” I said, “who would decide, in that situation, whether it’s a good idea?”

“Unfortunately,” Shimano said, “we don’t have God”—there is no Western-style, Judeo-Christian, yes-or-no answer. He started and stopped a bit more, searching for the right words, until he found something he was happy with. “Maybe dharma”—nature, the universe—“is our answer.”

XI. “You may not see your own shadows”

Sherry Chayat, the new abbot, or head priest, of the Zen Studies Society, is 70 years old. She was raised Jewish, and she is going through her second divorce; her first marriage was to a noted Buddhist teacher, Lou Nordstrom, who used to be close to Shimano but will no longer speak of him. Chayat is a dharma heir of Shimano’s, a chosen disciple, whom Shimano handpicked as his successor. When Shimano agreed to step aside in 2010, he and Chayat, who goes by the dharma name Roko, had a warm relationship; in fact, she was generally derided by Shimano’s critics as a patsy, eager to believe anything he said, or perhaps too afraid to challenge him. In the past two years, however, and especially since the lawsuit was filed, they have become adversaries. In an October 2012 e-mail about some rather arcane controversies concerning Shimano’s Japanese Buddhist lineage, an e-mail that I have obtained, Chayat wrote, “The reason we are in such a mess is that we believed in a manipulative sociopath.”

Having to face Shimano’s true nature, having to acknowledge the depth of his possible transgressions, and having to defend against a lawsuit brought by her former teacher have been painful aspects of Chayat’s job as abbot. But these new and unwelcome responsibilities cannot be wholly surprising for her, as she herself left Shimano’s sangha in 1976 because of his sexual indiscretions—then in 1990 accepted an invitation to return. When she and I met upstairs at the East 67th Street zendo in October 2012, she spoke to me of her gratitude to Shimano. It’s the kind of gratitude you have, she said, “when you’ve had a teacher who’s brilliant, who has shown you the way in a fundamental sense, not in a relative sense. Who has really been able to help you see for yourself the fundamental reality beyond the duality of good and evil.” Alas, she added, Zen Buddhists can “forget that we have to live in the relative world of good and evil, that we have to make choices based on right and wrong.”

Without saying so explicitly, Chayat was describing the potential for evil at the heart of Zen Buddhism. The true dharma knowledge, what students come to Shimano to learn, is that there is no good and evil, that all is one; but true dharma knowledge isn’t very helpful to a woman being pressured to have sex. And—here’s another way that Buddhism can protect, even incite, evil—those who seem to possess the greatest wisdom, or the most spiritual magnetism, may be uniquely incapable of telling right from wrong. “When you yourself are so in the light, you may not see your own shadows very well,” Chayat said, about Shimano. “He is a remarkably astute, deep, profound, spiritually evolved, charismatic leader. But as we know there can be these flaws.” In an e-mail months later, she clarified the term flaws: “As we have come to realize, there has been a long history of secret maneuvering and sexual misconduct."

Although our conversation occurred less than a week after Chayat had referred to Shimano as a “sociopath,” I do not believe there was anything insincere in her measured praise of the man. Good/bad, compassionate/cruel, empathetic/sociopathic: although his life’s work is to defeat such simplistic dualities, he embodies them.

Nobody knows that paradox better than Chayat, his chosen successor, who now must rescue the Zen Studies Society from Shimano’s wreckage but who once, many years ago, fell for him herself. “Someone said that in the early years you had a relationship with him,” I said to her. Several members of the sangha had in fact told me that Chayat could never possibly make a clean break with the Shimano era, since she had her own secrets to protect.

“You know,” she said, “I had, like many women, perhaps a surprising physical approach that never led to an affair. So, no. Working very closely together, you felt it’s natural if someone throws their arms around you and starts kissing you. It wasn’t a big deal. It didn’t go anywhere.”

“You didn’t have sex with him?” I asked.

“No, it never turned into an affair.”

“Because people have said …”

“No. I had physical contact with him.” This was in the summer of 1974, she later told me. “There was a passionate embrace. But it didn’t—I guess I was surprised, but it wasn’t something that harmed me in any way … I was married, he was married, we were both at the monastery. For some reason it never went any further. If I had been given the choice to go further, I probably would have. Everybody was in love with him.”

Right now, Shimano is not permitted on any Zen Studies Society property, and his artifacts have not been returned to him. Membership at the Zen Studies Society is down; Chayat will not confirm or deny the rumor that she has had the East 67th Street building appraised for a possible sale. Shimano continues to live with his wife in the apartment that they may or may not own; he occasionally sits, at various sites in Manhattan, with a small, loyal group of followers. In a statement he released this past July 4, he said that he is beginning work on a translation of the correspondence between two of his late teachers, Soen Nakagawa and Nyogen Senzaki.

“All of this has not made me feel any less grateful to him as a profoundly realized teacher,” Chayat said of the whole ordeal. “But I also feel a deep sadness, deep regret about people having—the alleged relationships’ having harmed people.

“So I feel both, at the same time.”