As damtsig has come into contact with Western psychological materialism, self-defence tactics have taken a variety of forms. The one that has most intrigued me is what I have dubbed the "feast on fæces fallacy" - of which there appear to be two variations. I encountered the first during my introduction to Vajrayana at Vajradhatu Seminary - a three-month practice and study retreat designed by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. I attended this retreat after Trungpa Rinpoche's death, when his son, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, taught it. As the summer progressed and the teachings grew more challenging, speculation about samaya heated up. The speculation took on an odd repeating pattern. At some point in every conversation on the topic, someone would inevitably say, "I heard that samaya means that if the Sakyong tells you to eat shit, you have to do it." The conversation would then devolve into everyone deciding whether they would eat shit or not. After puzzling over it for a while, my eventual response to this statement was, "How likely is it that the Sakyong would ask you to eat shit?" The whole discussion was a scare tactic, however unconscious it may have been. It presented one with an extreme, reductio ad absurdum proposition from which one could quite justifiably turn away in disgust. In the process, it just so happened that one also cut oneself off from finding out what samaya actually did mean. That version of the Feast on Fæces Fallacy operates by the student scaring himself or herself away from damtsig.
The second variation on this theme operates to discredit the Lama with whom the student might make the vow. A good example of this was in a report on the first conference of Western Buddhist teachers with HH Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 1993. At one of the conference sessions, Robert Thurman reportedly said that anyone who allowed himself or herself to be called a vajra master should be presented with a plate of excrement and a fork. If he or she was not capable of eating it, based on the principle of rochig (ro gcig - one taste), then he or she was a fraud and should take up knitting. This politically devious perspective is one which seeks to neuter every Lama who is not invested with the correct degree of current western adulation. Evidently a Lama who denies being a vajra master but who is nonetheless regarded as a vajra master is exempt from the offer of Robert Thurman's fæcal feast.
