Lineage is Buddhism's substitute for a magisterium and it does real work: it transmits what a text cannot, it puts a face on authority, and it makes claims checkable in principle by asking who authorised whom. It is also the tradition's single greatest structural vulnerability, and the record since Buddhism arrived in the West is grim — a long series of teachers in Zen, Tibetan and Theravada lineages found to have abused students sexually or financially, sometimes for decades, protected by the same lineage authority that legitimated their teaching and by a devotional idiom that made questioning them look like a spiritual failure. The Tibetan tulku system, which identifies reincarnated teachers as children, adds an additional layer of unfalsifiable authority. Reforms since the 1990s have mostly meant importing lay governance, ethics codes and grievance procedures — institutional machinery the tradition never had.