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Guruyoga is dangerous. When it goes sour, it goes sour in a big way. Why? The guru is God if you're a Hindu, or the guru is the Buddha if you are a Buddhist. Students of the secret mantra are taught to consider their guru as a Perfectly Enlightened and Perfectly Infallible Buddha. The Saṃgha is the guru's body. The Buddha is the guru's mind. The Dharma is the guru's speech. The refuge in the three jewels, to a Vajrayānika, is refuge in the guru. That's all fine and dandy if the guru is actually a Buddha. Frequently, however, gurus are simply ordinary persons. Sometimes, gurus are horrible persons, and these extreme cases get a lot of press because people get very hurt by them. They stake their entire personal salvation on the Buddhahood of the guru. If the "guru" is in fact a conman looking for fame or sex or worldly power, the students get used to these ends.

This isn't a condemnation of Tantra/Vajrayāna. It's just a description of a tradition that even labels itself as potentially dangerous and not suitable for everyone.

I think the dharma very much speaks of universal human conditions, things that every human being encounters, and maybe are more obvious to people from minorities and fringe sexual orientations because they feel excluded more and have to struggle more. But in the end they are the same things we come back to, dukkha, the klesha’s, maya, illusion and ignorance.

If we can acknowledge that, that the themes of the dharma unify us more than divide us, that we are all in the same boat trying to cope with unsatisfactoriness, then there is hope for looking past our differences, whether they are ideological or lifestyle incidentals.

One version of the
Buddha's final teaching.

Let the Dharma and the discipline that I have taught you be your teacher. All individual things pass away. Strive on, untiringly.

A Guru who wishes to be followed, is simply someone who has not yet understood the Dharma.

@FleaMarket said:
I'm feeling a bit blind here in my examination but I'm struggling to see how this is different from any other relationship? From my observation, the same situation one who finds themselves in with a guru could be the same situation one finds themselves in with a trusted friend or family.

The main thing the book is objecting to is the surrender of personal authority. There is a streak of authoritarianism in the guru-disciple relationship, where the disciple is supposed to follow everything the guru says, as @Vimalajāti was also describing. It’s a kind of relationship which does not always turn out well.

Look at Sogyal for example — one moment the revered leader of the Rigpa organisation, the next moment castigated for sexual misbehaviour, excessive partying, and other irregularities. No longer a Rinpoche even.

Personally I think you can only surrender authority to a certain extent. You say to the guru, “I surrender until it no longer suits me”. The whole problem is, some people cease to think critically and take it way too far. For those people this book was written. It bills itself as an examination of all forms of authoritarianism, but in the actual writing it’s quite clearly anti-authoritarian. That’s not wholly a bad thing, but if your belief is still about trust it can be a bit of a shock.

@FleaMarket I was inspired by Shoshin. In fact, I always thought that skinny dip meant something else. I thought it was just to take a quick "dip" into the water (for some reason, skinny I translated to "rapidito", like a quick dip and out).

@Jeroen I have this app called Drops and they offer Sanskrit too. I'm between adding that to Japanese, or Ainu...

Google Translate is adding Sanskrit. Will wonders never cease.