The Double Dorje: Looking at Modern Vajrayana Buddhism.
Bad gurus, tosh gurus and good gurus
Wed, 04 Sep 2024
A heavy criticism of the whole "Shambhala" cult, describing the behaviour of Chogyam Trungpa and his chief defender, Pema Chodron, recently went viral on the net. I had intended to express some thoughts about these issues sometime, so it seemed like the time had come. I reveal nothing new here - this is just stuff to think about. Trungpa's "wedding" to his Nth wife Words or phrases you might want to look up: Pema Chodron Cassidy and Zeoli Mahasiddha Lakshminkara Tilopa Sogyal Lakar Robert Spatz Ole Nydahl Vajrayana #Buddhism #Vajrayana #Tibet #DoubleDorje #cult #abuse In the early weeks of this podcast I included an approximate script, not particularly well edited, on a blog page. For the episode dropped on 4 September entitled “Bad gurus, tosh gurus and good gurus” and for episodes due to be dropped from 18 September onwards, starting with “Jyekundo / Yushu: travelling in East Tibet” there is a transcript file which is much closer to the actual words used. Note that other distribution platforms do not necessarily pass this on, and if you want to read it you may need to listen on podbean. YouTube has been making its own transcript, which was an unholy mess. I think I have now deleted all of these "auto-generated" scripts, but it will not be possible to retrospectively add properly edited transcripts to episodes prior to September 2024.
Hello to all my friends, and in fact, all my listeners, of course. Please be welcome to this episode of the Double Dorje podcast. I'm Alex Wilding, and in this episode, I want to talk a little bit about a few of the bad gurus who are sadly out there.
I'm not going to attempt a list of llamas to avoid, partly because that kind of list is in fact easy to find on the internet if you want them, and in part because it is at least in some cases more a question of there being a lot of red flags around a particular teacher, rather than of them having conclusively proven themselves to be bad.
For similar reasons, I won't be naming all the names that I might refer to. It's not pleasant having to do this, but cover-ups and secrecy are, as any fool knows, exactly what will make an organisation become poisoned from top to bottom.
Firstly, though, let me encourage you to pause for a moment, to like this episode, subscribe to the podcast, to tell your friends in whatever way is appropriate for the channel that you're listening on. At the time of first publishing, the podcast is hosted on Podbean, but it's very likely that you're listening somewhere else.
So if you do want to see the brief comments that I provide, but they don't appear in your particular channel, you will find them on Podbean. Before I get into this, and I will repeat this point at the end, I want to make it very clear that in my personal experience, the bad ones are few and far between. Maybe I've been lucky.
Maybe I didn't switch off my natural radar even at the beginning and didn't come into serious contact with many wrong-uns. So be wary, be warned, but do go forth with hope in your heart. I'm strongly convinced that one of the most serious threats to the Buddhist teachings and to the benefits they can bring is not, as some would have it, the rocking of the boat through criticising bad teachers.
In fact, it's the opposite. It's the turning of the blind eye, the secrecy, the sweeping under the carpet. Did those things help the Roman Catholic Church? At first, perhaps they did, but long term, hardly. I was going to do... an episode about bad teachers sometime.
But I was spurred to have a quick look at this topic right now because of an article recently released on the internet by an author known as B. Schofield, or B. Schofield, I'm not sure. An article that genuinely does seem to have gone viral. I've been seeing the link on the pages of all sorts of friends. The article is called Secrets of Shambhala in Pema Chodron's Shadow.
It contains a few bits of information that are new to me, and perhaps therefore to most people, but for the greater part it's an assembly of stuff about Trungpa's behaviour that is already publicly available if only one has the determination to do some digging. I previously knew nothing about Schofield and would not venture to pass judgment on the quality of the journalism.
But since so much of the content is familiar to people who've kept their ear even halfway to the ground, I'm inclined to give a fair degree of credence to the new material. What the article does, and why I think it has been spread so first and widely, is that it brings together information which...
as I said, has been publicly available, but has been scattered in little corners, archives and blogs. The effect of seeing it all described in one place is rather like seeing a car crash and watching it turn into a massive pile-up.
I myself am not really an expert on Trungpa either as a critic or an enthusiast, except for one little corner of his story, which is the fable that he studied at Oxford University. This fable is widely circulated and believed amongst his followers and is touted as evidence of his exceptional genius. The only problem is, it turns out not to be true.
If anyone wants to know more, contact me and I will point you to a blog post that goes into this story in some detail and with plenty of checkable references. Now, it's entirely clear that in his early days, Trungpa was quite charismatic. And that's exactly why I now count myself lucky never to have met him.
I got into the Dharma scene in the UK not long after he had been obliged to leave Samye Ling in Scotland. In those days, of course, I was young. I was a naive seeker, and who knows, I might well have fallen under his spell. But I escaped. However, while his behaviour got him ejected from Samye Ling...
His charisma found fertile ground in the United States, particularly amongst the hippie community, and some of his followers from those days, I think they refer to themselves now as the Old Dogs, are still around. He does have his supporters and defenders. One of the supporters, William Cassidy, who styles himself Urgen Tenpa and sometimes adds Rinpoche to that name,
recently wrote that, and I quote, these gals crying about sexual matters are either just plain stupid or totally down for it. I trust you, my listeners, not to need a lengthy explanation of how unregenerate such an attitude is. Those who want to know more can simply do an internet search, putting in the two names Cassidy and Zeoli into the search box.
You'll soon get an impression of who we are dealing with here. Zeoli, I will just explain now, is the legal surname of the woman widely known as Ahon Llamo. What's interesting to me is that, at least at the time that I'm recording this podcast, And, as far as I have seen, none of Trungpa's defenders have yet stood up to say that any particular points in the article concerned are false.
It has, again, as far as I have seen so far, just been a matter of personal attacks. Schofield has, for example, been attacked for being transgender. Now look, I'm an old, white, middle-class, straight, cis male, and I will admit that sometimes I find the way today's media focuses on the question of whether people are or are not transgender is a little bit strange. But hey, each to their own.
When it comes to the content of such an article, surely the gender orientation of the writer is no more relevant than whether he or she is black, white, brown, tall, short, or anything else. It's the facts that matter in it. Fact-based criticism might be interesting, but irrelevant personal insults certainly aren't.
Along with the general claims that the article is rubbish, that it is mean, or that the author is transgender, we also find the tired excuse that Trungpa was a mahasiddha, implying that anything he did the collapsing drunk on stage, the animal cruelty, the obvious egomania, was in some mysterious way enlightened and enlightening, actually good for the people subjected to it.
This same William Cassidy wrote very recently, and I quote, Trungpa Rinpoche was a Mahasiddha. His conduct cannot and should not be judged by ordinary eyes. End of quote. I say that that is precisely the poisoned chalice, the noose that he and others who share his view are putting around their own necks. Calling someone a Mahasiddha is in fact empty of any serious meaning.
Attaching that high-sounding name to someone does not excuse cruelty or abuse. Attaching it to a narcissistic egomaniac is beyond ridiculous. Cassidy supported his opinion with the claim that if someone thinks that they are a Vajrayana practitioner but has a low opinion of Trungpa, they should know that they have utterly failed and evidently don't have the slightest idea of what is entailed.
Do I need to say any more about that view? My position is that if anyone wants to have such an astonishingly high opinion of Trungpa or of any other supposed guru, that is their affair. They may be happy with it, and they are, of course, free to express that opinion in public.
But what is quite ludicrous, bizarre and arrogant, stupid and unworthy of any Buddhist of whatever type is to insist that other people should or even must share their view.
If every Vajrayana practitioner is supposed to shut down their intelligence about every and any guru who they've never met and with whom they have no spiritual connection, but who is idolized by one or another random dude on the internet,
If that means that the Vajrayana practitioner is supposed to abandon all ethical judgment and therefore, let it be said, all basic Buddhism, just because that random dude says so or says that the teacher is a Mahasiddha, well, words actually fail me. But enough of that.
I mention it in such detail here because it is something that has recently erupted across the Tibetan Buddhist corners of the internet, and because the structures illustrated by this particular case are, sadly enough but unsurprisingly, really quite widespread. Some listeners might by now have wondered about what a Mahasiddha is in any case. You may even have heard of the 84 Mahasiddhas.
These are figures who put a strong stamp on the thinking and practice of the Vajrayana, especially in Tibet. The historical details about these Mahasiddhas are sometimes a bit hazy, and many of the stories we have are quite short, don't have a lot of detail in them. There are different lists of the 84 Mahasiddhas.
Some different Mahasiddhas have shared names and some names have applied to more than one Mahasiddha. So that's all a bit confusing, but the general thrust of what the 84 Mahasiddhas represent is fairly consistent. They represent a willingness to step outside of convention in order to really and truly practice in the pursuit of enlightenment.
Their stories do demonstrate how any circumstances can, if only we can rise to them, be circumstances for attaining enlightenment. A small fraction of these Mahasiddhas were rich and powerful, but many of them follow the more popular Buddhist pattern of riches to rags and then onward to enlightenment. This is, after all, very much what the Buddha himself did two and a half thousand years ago.
The Mahasiddhas themselves lived, roughly speaking, in the later part of the first Christian millennium. One of my favourites is the story of Lakshminkara, the Mad Princess. She was born, as you might guess from that title, as a princess, and was given a good education, including in religious matters, including the tantras and so on.
She was promised in marriage, in one version that I read, this was when she was about seven years old, to a prince of Sri Lanka. A few years later, as a teenager, she was sent with her royal party and significant wealth to marry her prince.
Due to some mix-up, the party arrived late at the royal palace, and the astrologers of the place said that the day was not auspicious, so the party had to wait outside for another day.
As it happened, while they were waiting, a hunting party returned from the hunt, and she was quite upset to see the leader of the hunt spattered in blood, carrying the dead animal that had been caught casually across his shoulders. she realised that the huntsman was in fact her betrothed. At this point, it seems that her thinking amounted to something very much like, No!
She gave all her dowry, jewels and the rest of her wealth to her servants and sent them off. Nevertheless, she was taken into the palace, where she shut herself in her room, covered herself in ashes and threw things at anyone who tried to approach her. Since she was now perceived as mad…
the wedding was called off, and at some later stage she was able to escape to live in cemeteries and dark, deep parts of the forest, where she was assisted, and I suppose that also means, to some extent at least, fed, by a cleaner of the royal latrines. Eventually, as it is said, she achieved city. Her assistant was the first person to whom she gave empowerment,
And when at some later stage the king, that is to say the father of her former fiancé, her former betrothed, sought her teachings, she declined, but assigned him to the latrine cleaner. As far as I know, he accepted that assignment, and that, I think, speaks rather well for him, don't you think?
This, in my opinion, giving up wealth, status, prestige and protection and accepting danger, poverty and bad food in the pursuit of enlightenment is worthy of the name of crazy wisdom. If someone's happy to dress in rags, eat scraps like fish entrails as Tilopa did, sleep among the dead bodies in cemeteries and be happy in all this,
then I too would be willing to say, well, perhaps this person is a Mahasiddha. Admittedly, as one or two of the other Mahasiddha stories show, it is also possible to be rich and powerful, and yet pursue enlightenment with this focus and intensity. But if it's not clear that such a person isn't actually attached to the enjoyments which they do continue to indulge in, then I'm sorry.
If the person wants to be a king, wants to eat using the finest cutlery, drink the finest wines from the finest cut glass, and have a copious supply of drink drugs and girls, then, well, what can I say? It is pretty bad. What word would you choose? Now, I've been speaking here about Trungpa most of all because of the way his story has suddenly flared up across the internet.
Sogiel Lacher, who still has his followers, fell very publicly into deep disgrace before his death. There are other cases, such as Robert Spatz, who seems still to be at large in France, while Ole Noudal, who has been surrounded by a lot of red flags, seems to have become less of a problem as a result of age-related dementia. How did these people get away with it for so long?
This question is often asked, and I have to say that while a large part of the answer is simply that they used the same techniques as any other cult leader, another large part of the answer lies right in the middle of Tibetan culture. Tibetans simply loathe to speak ill of people with high status, especially high religious status, and especially in public.
I was given a glimpse of this at a very early stage in my Buddhist journey. A Western-born teacher, then known as Namgyal Rinpoche, with a rather patchwork backstory in Buddhism, was visiting the centre with which I was then connected. He'd obtained some kind of recognition from the 16th Karmapa. How and why that happened is a mystery to me personally.
though I suspect that some high Tibetan lamas are in many ways much more naive than we tend to assume, and are far less able to read the personality of Westerners who want to pull the wool over their eyes than, again, we might assume. I might mention Stephen Seagull, who, for instance, was recognised as a tulku. I haven't got the energy to figure out what lay behind that.
Anyway, this Namjial was due to give a Chenrezig empowerment. The Lama in charge of that center let his students know on the quiet
that, as a first point, Namjau was not the real deal and did not really know what he was doing, but, as the second point, because he had this acknowledgement from the Karmapa, he had to be shown respect and the students were asked to attend this empowerment even though they had no sense of trusting Namjau. Otherwise, face would have been lost.
But more importantly than any list of bad gurus, bad lamas, it's in the first place necessary to acknowledge that they do in general exist, and then to be alert to the pretty much standard red flags that surround such people, Buddhist or not. The authoritarianism, the intolerance of criticism, the lack of financial transparency and the financial exploitation of members.
The exclusivity, where the bubble of insiders are right and the outsiders, who supposedly do not understand, are all wrong. The threat that things will go very badly for anybody who leaves, either in a supernatural way or in a physical way. And so on. If you can use the internet, you can find advice about all this.
The expectation that followers will have blind devotion to the leader is of course another flag. The article that triggered these comments here quotes a former follower of Trungpa by the name of Fred Coulson.
He described Pema Chodron who, I now quote, was giving me a teaching on how serious devotion is and that she then told him that, I quote again, if she were shown photos of her guru Chogyam Trungpa molesting children, her devotion would be the same.
Now, if this was a piece of writing rather than audio, at this point I would insert a variety of emojis, exclamation marks, asterisks and other signs of startled or even horrified incomprehension. The people I've mentioned so far, and others, have their different styles of being wicked. But in most cases, an awareness of the dangers and of the red flags can provide at least some protection.
For beginners, on the other hand, the gurus who simply teach Tosh might be harder to spot.
These teachers may not be cultish at all, but they do tend to claim training, experience and authorisation that they simply don't have, or are just peddling feel-good pablum with perhaps a bit of tranquil meditation, talks on vague themes like Buddhism in everyday life or how to be more resilient in the modern world with the help of Buddhism.
These people may even have good hearts, but are either providing milk and water, pap, or, in some cases, worse than that, selling sheer baloney. As an aside, when I was looking for the right words to use there, I looked up nonsense at thesaurus.com. You might get a laugh if you read all the suggestions made out loud in one string. It might cheer you up.
Here, I will just provide two well-known, very old examples of such people, namely Madame Blavatsky from the late 19th century, founder of Theosophy, and Cyril Hoskin, who wrote under the pseudonym of Lobsang Rampa. Now, both of these, while they are very much in the past, still do have a few adherents, believe it or not. We don't need particularly to get hot under the collar about them.
As far as I know, neither of them did anything much worse than selling fantasy as if it were truth. There are plenty of that kind about these days. But because they are not so bad, the red flags may not be so obvious. You just have to listen carefully, think, take advice, and keep your intelligence switched on.
Frankly, all this talk of the wicked and the stupid does leave a bad taste in my mouth, although I think it must be faced up to. So that's why I now want to turn from the wicked and the stupid to the good. In my experience, that is the great majority of lamas. This, of course, is only my personal snapshot, and you could argue,
that even at an early stage I was sensitive enough to recognize flakes, that I somehow avoided most of the wicked and stupid, and led me to make contact with a prime selection of teachers, those whose devotion to their own teachers or lineage is palpable, or whose care for students shines out of them, or who do in fact teach the actual steps of the regular Buddhist path as the tradition knows it,
In terms of the Tibetan styles of Buddhism, of course, that is the four revolting thoughts, refuge and compassion, I'm talking about teachers who perhaps give empowerments to just a few students at a time, in person, and who see to it that those students do know how to perform the practices associated with that empowerment.
Perhaps these teachers will take some of the students on through the more advanced things, like the physical yogas, or even the Hayadzogchen and Mahamudra teachings. I'm talking about teachers who are relaxed, human, approachable, kind, responsible, humble. I've met quite a few of those. They are out there. And so it's time to say goodbye.
Please remember to like this episode of the Double Doge, to subscribe or to provide support in whatever way suits you. And remember, don't despair, but do take care. Bye.