Gyalwang Karmapa warned of the dangers of holding partisan and sectarian views such as “I belong to this lineage” or “I follow this lama” which deny the value and validity of other teachers or schools. He suggested that this was a form of abandoning the Dharma, and, as such, counts as worse than the five heinous deeds: killing your mother, killing your father, killing an Arhat, harming a Buddha, causing schism in the sangha. Abandoning the Dharma is defined as denying something was Dharma when it was, maintaining something was Dharma when it wasn’t, and, likewise, claiming that a genuine dharma practitioner was not practising Dharma, and vice versa. If one did any of these, one had abandoned the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
