Quote

The first time we touched sexually, I was cut off from a certain consciousness of myself. He told me to lock the door. There was a whole delegation waiting in the cars. The only ones missing were him and me.

I had been sleeping very little for two months. I had gotten used to being abused by demands and words. We accepted everything. I no longer listened. I did what I had to do, no longer asking any questions. I was running on the adrenaline of constant desperation and fatigue. After the first sexual relations, he made very explicit threats, prohibiting me from talking about it to anyone.

All the dakinis knew about it, but we were not allowed to bring it up. And yet we covered for each other in monitoring the house when one of us entered the master’s room. Nobody was allowed to approach. The older the girls got, the more they sensed that the end was near. They got anxious.

LOYALTY TO THE GROUP

At the end of the summer, I had a period of amenorrhea and feared I might be pregnant. I talked about it to a disciple who was a doctor. Since I was the girl closest to Sogyal Rinpoche, it was impossible for me to have had any other relations. This doctor ordered a blood sample without asking a single question. In the Rigpa centres, loyalty to the group trumped everything else.

And yet, the community consisted of people who were often educated: doctors, magistrates, lawyers, businessmen or pilots … Buddhist masters don’t go looking for Tibetans living in India on three dollars, but rather for white people with money, in the West.

The adults submerged in this environment have to readapt reality in order to survive. They talk of compassion all day long while witnessing public humiliations. They question and repress every form of instinct or feeling. They share a common resentment and anger at living a life of unresolved deceptions. In order to ease this frustration, the master encourages them to eliminate their empathy for their families and immediate friends.

And he then fills that void with a different form of compassion, for a state of humanity reduced to a concept: abstract and distant.

I THOUGHT I WOULD DIE

I distanced myself very progressively from the group, by making excuses. I think that the rupturing process was confirmed to me once I started taking singing lessons. A singer had heard me and decided to give me free lessons once a month. She called me and insisted that I come. I thus started to relive my emotions.

For several years I had been incapable of admitting what had happened. It took the fact that my dreams and my health were being taken over for me to react. I was having nightmares every night, and I started getting asthma and fevers. I thought I would die if I kept all of this to myself.

On a whim, I went to London at the master’s invitation. One of his chauffeurs came to pick me up, and I asked him,

You know very well that all the girls sleep with him. Do you think that’s normal?

He replied,

You would all be prostitutes and drug addicts if you hadn’t found this master. Consider yourself lucky, you have nothing to be angry at him for.

This reaction reassured me that I was making the right decision. When I arrived, I offered the master a drawing that I had made the night before. I had drawn him in the centre, with me on top of him in the lotus position. All around us, in a circle, I had written the names of each of the dakinis. He understood right away and asked me if I wanted money. I left.

THE REAL RAGE BEHIND THE FALSE COMPASSION

My departure started a panic. The power is in the group, not the master. Sogyal Rinpoche is neither cultured nor particularly intelligent. What he does have is hundreds of thousands of people who allow him to assert his sovereignty. I am not even sure that he himself believes what he says. He repeats what the people need to hear.

All of sudden the group was afraid of being called into question, of revealing itself. That the world might realise that these disciples spend all day prostrating themselves and kissing the feet of a master who never went to school, and who strolls around with a bunch of glamour girls that he humiliates. That people might notice all the rage that actually drives this community – behind a front of compassion.

For a long time, I thought that I was alone in being crazy. How was it possible that so many people around the world so adored Sogyal Rinpoche, and that I was the only one disgusted by his presence?

The threats that I received after leaving reassured me: I was doing the right thing.

Quote

This is a very interesting project many survivors of abuse in Buddhist communities, including survivors of PY and Pathgate, are contributing to:

Dr. Miriam Anders from the LMU University in Munich, Germany is conducting a three year research, financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Part of the research is also to examine possible harm individuals have experienced in Buddhist communities or by Buddhist leaders via cultish / manipulative structures, sexual abuse, spiritual or emotional abuse, violence etc.

If you want to support this research or if you know people who are effected by harm within Buddhist communities or by Buddhist teachers and who are open to support a research project, please kindly forward this email or information to them.

Here is a link to some testimonies already submitted:
[www.en.transtibmed.ethnologie.uni-muenchen.de]

***************************************

RESEARCH ON ABUSE IN BUDDHIST COMMUNITIES

In August 2018, a three-year research project started at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich under the leadership of Dr. Miriam Anders, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The objective of the project is preservation of the knowledge conveyed in Tibetan medicine as well as its foundations within Buddhist philosophy. It covers three areas:

• translations of interviews with physicians of Tibetan medicine
• health and resources of seminar participants in Buddhist centers
• knowledge transfer, education and training

Within the framework of this research project, health and mental health of Buddhist seminar and meditation group participants will be investigated. Furthermore, interviews will be conducted with people affected of manipulation, exploitation or abuse in that context. Details are available at [www.en.transtibmed.ethnologie.uni-muenchen.de].

For links to fill in questionnaires in German or English language, please contact the email address: Miriam.Anders@campus.lmu.de. There will be more questionnaires available for a period of three years. Additionally, interviews will be conducted at different locations (Vienna, Munich, Kathmandu etc.). Any appointments for theses interviews may be arranged with the same email address.