Victor and
Victoria Trimondi
A light which
leads out from the Tibetan Buddhist Dream-Trance
Review of Chris Chandler’s
book
“Enthralled – The Guru
Cult of Tibetan Buddhism”
A renegade (turncoat) is a person who shifts
allegiance from one loyalty or ideal to another. He is a resistance
fighter, who rebels against an ideology or religion to which he once
belonged. Some of the famous renegades, who opposed Stalinism
are Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Manès Sperber, Ignazio Silone.
Others turned against Maoism like the French philosopher André Glucksmann who was a Maoist in his youth. Their
critiques of degenerated communism have been so important, because
they were authentic.
No one has more competence to judge an
ideology or system as former adherents who know it from within. The books
of the above mentioned authors brought elucidation and clarity. They have
allowed thousands of people to resist the totalitarian temptation of
authoritarian communism and they gave courage and arguments to thousands of
former “comrades” to leave the terror-system.
With her book, “Enthralled: The guru cult
of Tibetan Buddhism“ Chris Chandler is a renegade who once served Tibetan
Buddhism and Lamaism for many years and has now moved away. Therefore she
calls herself “Ex-Tibetan-Buddhist” and is operating a website with the
same name. Her critical study is authentic, brilliant, exciting, clear and
without compromises. We have no doubt that this book will motivate many
western Tibetan Buddhists to see their religion as problematic and to
leave. It will give them the courage to make the decisive step and it will
save many people from joining Lamaism. The author dedicated her book “to
all the abuse victims of Tantric Lamaism, whose voices have been silenced
for centuries”.
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After we published our book in 1998 The Shadow of the Dalai
Lama – Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, which
triggered world-wide intensive debates a lot of critical publications and websites
have been brought out in the meantime questioning Tibetan Buddhism and
Lamaism from scratch. The authors include Tibetologists,
religious and cultural studies scholars, historians and bloggers like
Melvyn Goldstein, Tom Grunfeld, Michael Parenti, Andrei Znamenski,
Mike Garde, Maxim Vivas,
Geoffrey D. Falk, Gilles van Grasdorff, Bernard
Faure, for mentioning only some of them.
But Chris Chandler’s enlightened book has,
thanks to its authenticity, and due to the fact that it has been written by
a woman and a victim, something very special. It may put the final nail in
the coffin of the irrational glorification of Lamaism and the Dalai Lama by
the western elite in politics and show biz. But it also will enlighten
Buddhists of all not-Tibetan schools and will make them realize that
Lamaism is a distortion and falsification of Buddhism.
Who is Chris Chandler? She belonged for
nearly thirty years to the Karma Kagyu lineage;
the most popular Lamaist sect in the United
States. She finished her studies in psychology at the Northeastern
University and is specialized in System Theory. She did work as social
worker, family therapist and licensed school psychologist.
Like thousands of young western people she
joined this eastern belief system in the quest for enlightenment. She took
seriously the promises of the Lamas made about happiness, equanimity,
tolerance, compassion for others, a socially fair world order, inner
and outer peace. Many of her generation, who converted to western Tibetan
Buddhism, came like her from the academic middle classes, have been
students, teachers, social workers, psychologists, artists and
intellectuals.
Most of them decided to go the way of a
Bodhisattva helping people and the world to create a better peaceful social
future. To “save the world” they connected Eastern religions, Shamanism,
Christian altruism, personal development and enlightenment. This was
connected with grassroot activism, alternative
lifestyles and socially engaged politics.
Also, the Kagyu
Lineage of the Lama Chögyam Trungpa,
that Chris Chandler joined, began in the West as an assemblage of young men
and women, who cultivated a protest attitude against the (repressive)
bourgeois value-system of the mainly capitalist American society. Their
radical outbreak from the dominating social norms was called by Trungpa “crazy wisdom”. But, what once began as
libertarian and altruistic, according to the author, did finish in a
religious dictatorship and in sexual excesses without limits.
In this group Chris Chandler played a
special role. Because of her academic qualifications she offered her
services as an administrator, direct care provider and legal guardian for Trungpa’s seriously ill autistic son and attended him
together with her husband Robert selflessly for nearly seven years. She
lived in the house in Vermont, where the meanwhile deceased Trungpa had resided. Also after his death she still
admired him as her first and best spiritual teacher. By her association and
contact to his family she had seen more than other western students
connected with the elite of the Lamas and with their rich western admirers,
who during these years also adored and idolized Trungpa’s
son as an incarnation of a Buddha and often visited him in Vermont.
Years later she found out that during all
her time in the Sangha she had lived in a kind of
trance. And one day she became enlightened. She did recognize the true face
of Tibetan Buddhism. But this awakening was a long and difficult process,
which she experienced together with her husband Robert, who also had become
a Western Tibetan Buddhist: “Without his encouragement, and unwavering
support, as well as his outrageous wit, we would never have escaped this
Tibetan Tantric world and this book could never have been written.”
Proceeding from the scientific studies of
two well-known psychologists, Robert Lifton and
Margaret Thaler Singer, who have worked out the
binding general criteria, whether a spiritual group must be seen as a
religious community or as a guru-cult, Chris Chandler investigated and
challenged Tibetan Buddhism and Lamaism. The classical criteria of a
repressive cult system are according to Lifton
and Thaler Singer: “The control of information
and communication in the group; the “mystical manipulation” of the adherents
orchestrated by the group or its guru; public confessions in the group;
undemocratic and autocratic leadership; infallibility and the divinity of
the guru, which renders any criticism of them impossible; absolute
prohibition of speaking negatively about groups internal working with
outside people; the threat of the monstrous torments of hell in the case of
disobedience; psychic terror and brainwashing; the construction of a
specific communication-language for isolating the group-members from the
external world; reduction and abolition of the familial relations;
systematic deconstruction of the personality, the person and the Ego.
Thanks to her deep insider information the author reveals a lot of
examples, by personal testimonials and with convincing arguments that
Lamaism shows all these above-mentioned characteristics and has therefore a
cultic character.
The Ex-Tibetan Buddhist also reports how
too much meditation may lead to awareness disorder. How the students are
brought to heel by mantras, which they have to repeat a million times or by
permanent prostrations, when they have to throw themselves on the earth
with their whole bodies. How books which criticized the Lamas, or their
beliefs, are forbidden and ritually burned, how rational modern thinking
systematically was destroyed and has been replaced by a magical world view.
How the difference of Good and Evil are blurred. She gives an inside view
into the multi-million-dollar streams, which are flowing through the veins
of the Lamocracy having its origins not only in
the western financial elite, which supports the world-wide Lama-cult. She
shows how this supposedly anti Communist movement in reality also
collaborates with the People’s Republic of China, where Tibetan Buddhism is
becoming (like in the west) a modern trend promoted by the rich of
the country.
Chris Chandler also deals with the Kalachakra-Tantra-Ritual
which has been performed by the Dalai Lama for dozens of years, and therein
includes the Shambhala-Prophecy. This ritual is
presented by the Lamas as a pretended vision for world peace. Without doubt
the Tantra text speaks in a violently martial and
apocalyptic language. The Lamas rectify this outwardly by saying that these
(entirely un-Buddhist) warrior-metaphors are to be understood only
symbolically. In a lot of publications we and others authors have shown
that this is not the case and that even such aggressive political movements
as Fascism, National-Socialism and Bolshevism made use of the Kalachakra-Tantra and the Shambhala
myths to construct an extremely militant ideology.
Also the Lamas themselves contrary to their
rehashed public statements, the Shambhala-texts
are understood not only symbolically but literally. In detail Chris
Chandler reveals the ritual practices and weekly long retreats of her
ex-master Chögyam Trungpa
to train his adherents as “Shambhala Warriors.”
She shows, how his bizarre Hollywood-style militant rites wearing a white
uniform and on a gray horse as a Shambhala
general and how the corresponding Shambhala-meditations
have not to be understood as pure metaphors or as symbols, but it was
intended that he himself and his students will become reincarnated as real
“Buddhist Warriors” in the last battle against the Powers of Evil.
Knowing that in the Shambhala
prophecies of the Kalachakra Tantra,
to which Trungpa refers in his
initiation-practices, all Abrahamic religions but
most of all Islam is the main enemy of the Lamaism. One can imagine how
dangerous such destructive visions are, and how they can draw the whole
world into an apocalyptic maelstrom and a final battle of religions. This
does not differ much from the jihadist ideology of the Muslim Mujahideen who want to conquer the decadent west in the
name of Allah. The horrific fate of the Muslim Rohingyas
in Myanmar gives a “foretaste” to what has to come if Muslims and Buddhists
are infused with this militant ideology.
The center of the whole Tibetan cult for
Chris Chandler are the Lamas. They are the apotheosis of Lamaism, the
highest point of glory, who are worshiped as omnipotent, infallible gods in
human form and who think themselves that they have supernatural powers. The
author called this “a cult of Divine Narcissism as a religion, perpetuated
throughout the centuries.” Very authentically she describes how the Lamaist gurus suggest again and again to their
students, that it was a higher purpose for them to have met the Lamas.
The book draws a special attention to the
cases of sexual abuse one can find in this Lama-cult. Since the Scottish
Ex-Tibetan-Buddhist June Campbell published twenty years ago her
much-noticed critique of the misogynic sexual practices by high Lamas, a
lot of other cases became known, which are well documented and commented
upon in Chris Chandler’s book. In the Karma Kagyu
group, to which she belonged, several students had been affected with AIDS
by the successor of Trungpa (Osel
Tenzin),Thomas Rich. This, too, was called
“crazy wisdom,” a “paradox event” on the way to enlightenment.
Shortly before “Enthralled” had been published,
the Buddhist Community was rocked by a spectacular scandal, the case of Sogyal Rinpoche. Sogyal Lakar Rinpoche is maybe the best-known Tibetan Buddhist
teacher, beside the Dalai Lama, who became famous for his bestseller, “The
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,” which has sold over three million copies
and which is a classic of modern Tibetan Buddhist literature. His
organization (Rigpa) is spread all over the
world. It contains 130 centers in 41 countries. In France he established Lérab Ling the biggest Lamaist
temple of the West.
This high and well-known Lama was accused
by eight of his former enablers and assistants of continuous
physical, emotional, sexual, financial and spiritual abuse of his students
since the nineties of the last century. Chris Chandler was able to add this
case to the text of her book. This story has gone off like a massive bomb
and the implications for the Tibetan Buddhist Movement in the west are not
yet foreseeable.
The author not only describes these cases
of sexual abuse as misconduct or assaults, but she shows how directly they
are connected with the Tantric sexual-magical rituals. So the sexual abuse
of women is shown as an integral and institutionalized part of Tibetan
Buddhism, even as the essence of their Tantric mysteries. The material
presented by Chris Chandler proves that Lamaism is an extremely
patriarchal misogynic cult, based on the androcentric
exploitation and appropriation of sexual and spiritual female energies.
Very illuminating are also the detailed
reports about several formerly emancipated women like Tsultrim
Allione, Sangye Khandro, Jetsun Khandro of Mindrolling or Pema Chödron who did submit
abjectly to the system and therefore have been consecrated by the Lamas;
that means they have been against all tradition recognized as female Lamas.
Chandler shows what their pretended mixture of tantric Buddhism and
feminism (also propagated as “enlightened feminism”) is like and that we
have here an ideological fraud, which is selling this fundamentally misogynist
system as pro-woman. “Writing books and creating movements that can be
marketed at new-age seminars as the new ‘spiritualized feminism,’ these
sexual consorts and nuns of the lamas have rationalized their own enabling
of the sexual abuse, by making themselves powerful as make-believe dakinis and women of wisdom; not victims of the lamas
and of their own fantasy-filled minds.” It is scary when one sees, how
these so called “Wisdom-Women” or “Power-Dakinis”
are closing their eyes for so many years in front of the systematic and
ritual-legitimated abuse of their sisters in the Sangha.
Chris Chandler’s book appeared also in a
moment, where women all around the world are organizing themselves to
protest against sexual abuse by men. The case of the Hollywood producer
Harvey Weinstein triggered a wave, which has become in a short time, the
campaign #Me Too, where women are witnesses to all forms of sexual
harassment, a strong international movement. In its depth this female
protest must be seen as a reaction and answer to the actual rise of
anti-feministic right-wing parties and patriarchs in many countries, who
refer back to outdated not seldom religiously-founded misogynic patterns.
In her book Chris Chandler shows that in the spiritual “universe” of Tibetan
Buddhism this masculine and misogynic development is predetermined. The
Lama-men claim their absolute say and use of women for their proper ends.
The Ex-Tibetan Buddhist asserts therefore: “It is time to start a #MeToo, a Tibetan Lamaist
Sexual Abuse movement, and stop pointing the finger away from the thousands
of western women who have been victims of these lamas and their
institutionalized sexual abuses.”
The institutionalized abuse of women is
assured by the widespread pederasty in the Tibetan monasteries. The author
speaks in this context also about the problematic institution of children
monks and mentioned the young Lama Kalu Rinpoche, who in a YouTube-Video speaks about his
personal history of suffering as misused child. Also, very interesting are
her statements about the children of the first and in the meantime already
second generation of western Tibetan Buddhists (dharma brats) and of their
indoctrination; what is known also by other cultic sects.
Another focus of the book is the critical
dispute about this great number of western scientists and intellectuals,
who are related to as the authority of Buddhist knowledge because of their
close contacts with the Lamas and the Dalai Lama. Their magical world view
and the occult rituals of Tibetan Buddhism are propagated by these
scientists as “secular ethics” or “secular spirituality”, when they are
gullibly repeating in parrot fashion, terms which are always skillfully
used by the Dalai Lama, to canvas the occult background of his system. Lamaism
is for Chris Chandler not this “positive happiness religion” nor a
forerunner of western science, as it is presented by the Lamas. Behind its
so-called “secular ethics” is hidden an authoritarian Buddhocratic
ideology of high priests, which does not know nor accept any ethical
standards as we understand them here in the West
In the centre of her research about this
phenomenon we find the Mind and Life Institute with hundreds of
internationally connected scholars from very reputable academic institutions,
mainly psychologists and neuroscientists. The problematic meditation
practices of the Mind and Life Institute, behind this international
movement, according to Chris Chandler, is hidden the global power claims of
the Lamas, who are already deeply anchored in American society. Big
companies like Google already work with these methods of “mindfulness” as
sensitivity training for their employees. Such meditations have even become
part of certain training programs in the US-Army. Politicians, actors, and business
magnates are made fit again in the costly wellness clinics of the Mind and
Life Institute. Also in Germany prominent neuroscientists like Wolf Singer,
who gave a lecture at the 50th anniversary of Angela Merkel, are members of
the Mind and Life Institute.
Particularly for intellectuals and
scientists, Chris Chandler’s enlightened book is an eye-opener to lead them
out of their trance and will show them what is hidden behind the stage of
the so-called wellness-Buddhism. Her intellectual honesty, her clear
argumentation line, her expert knowledge as a psychologist and as a system
theorist give her, combined with an active participation in the Buddhist Sangha for nearly thirty years, the academic and
empirical competence to write what she does. Chandler’s book proclaims the
final end of the Shangri-la illusion with its “peace, love, and harmony”
dreams of a global Utopia.
She comes to the following conclusion:
Tibetan Lamas and the Dalai Lama do have a politico-religious agenda for a
global Buddhocracy. Their sexual-magical tantric
cult-system would abrogate the main values and standards of Western
humanism, democracy, freedom of speech, gender equality, human rights,
social responsibility, education opportunities for everyone in favor of an androcentric caste-system and an anti-democratic
dictatorship of the priests. She shows how the western adherents of Tibetan
Buddhism are manipulated as “useful idiots”, to promulgate and push through
this extremely aggressive and apocalyptic doctrine and praxis all around
the globe, in the centre of which we find the so- called Adi-Buddha, the fantasized monotheistic sovereign of
the world, the universe and of time and who, in his incarnation as the Shambhala King “Rudra Chakrin,” will drag the world into an
apocalyptic-messianic religious war.
We want to finish our review with the
quotation, which you can read at the beginning of Chandler’s book. It comes
from Allen Ginsberg. The famous Beatnik Poet had been fascinated by Tibetan
Buddhism and by his spiritual master-lama Chögyam
Trungpa. But, for a brief period, he became a
renegade. He seems to have deeply regretted that he once motivated his
friend and poet-colleague William Stanley Merwin
and others to join the Lama-cult. Ginsberg wrote: “I accuse myself all the
time of seducing the entire poetry scene and Merwin
into this impossible submission to some spiritual dictatorship which
they’ll never get out of again and which will ruin American culture
forever. Anything might happen. We might get taken over and eaten by the
Tibetan monsters.” Nevertheless, Allen Ginsberg could not until his death
really distance himself from the “Tibetan monsters”. That shows how deeply
the system can occupy the mind of people.
In deference to, Chris Chandler and her
husband have been successful in their final exit from the Lamaist cult and we are certain that many will follow.
Her book is a light which can lead people out of the Tantric Tibetan
Buddhist labyrinth and Alan Ginsberg’s nightmare.
08.11.2017
© Victor and Victoria Trimondi
A light
which leads out from the Tibetan Buddhist dream-trance (Chris Chandler:
“Enthralled – The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism” – Review of the book by Victor
and Victoria Trimondi)
Is Lamaism a
cult? Dr. Robert J. Lifton’s Eight Criteria for Thought Reform and Lamaism,
the Cultist form of Buddhism by Chris Chandler
This is
the best research and the best material ever written on Tibetan Buddhism
– Review of The
Shadow of the Dalai Lama by Chris Chandler
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