Hello everyone.
I'm new to these forums and posted yesterday into what I hoped would be this Ole Nydahl forum but it appears to have appeared in a general forum and I hope the community shan't mind if I repost here in a lttle more detail.
It concerns my travails in getting an article entitled 'Buddhist sex abuse cases' onto the Wikipedia. I supplied one early September which included an entry for Ole Nydahl. The entry was deleted several times and restored by me with requests on the talk page to discuss the issue which were never taken up. The article was then deleted by an administrator without an opportunity to defend the article.
You can view the original article here on my personal website at [
www.gutclean.com]. The entry for Ole Nydhal ran as follows:
"Ole Nydahl is the founder of Diamond Way Buddhism. At age 68 he acknowledged having sex with his students but said "There’s no teacher-student relationship involved in that, they’re Diamond Way Buddhists, but they’re not my students in that moment. They’re equal partners". [
lacrossetribune.com] In a reply to a letter by Shamar Rinpoche criticising Nydahl's emphasis that the "bliss of sex is the experience of mind" [
www.tilogaard.dk] Nydahl said that he had never taught anything that the 16th Karmapa had not asked him to pass on and adds in a postscript "P.S. Any woman worldwide who has received sexual Tantra teachings from me will upon confirmation receive $1000" [
forum.culteducation.com].
I spent some time briefly with Ole Nydahl back in the late 1970s. I rather liked and respected him at the time but it's plain that his Diamond Way Buddhism organisation he went on to found has many serious issues which need to be addressed and require monitoring. I edited Nydahl's Wikipedia entry recently. Regarding his academic credential he has no degree of any sort from Copenhagen university as he claims. The 'examen philosophicum' he mentions as passing with the highest academic grades is merely a foundation course that is required completion before entering on undergraduate studies. The Ph.D. is a fantasy, yet he twice appeared as subject on the popular American TV intellectual program 'Thinking Allowed' introduced as possessing a Ph.D. and addressed as Dr. Nydahl. Those of us who knew him back in the '70s would have laughed out loud at the idea of Ole having a doctorate. He was rather naive, in an admittedly good natured way but he was nevertheless a natural-born idiot of that rather loud and penetrating sort familiar to us all. It was his wife Hannah who was the intellectual of the two, the translator and a restraining influence on his excesses, but she's gone now. Even at that time he was fascinated by the so-called 'po-wa', a tantric meditation practice which was supposed to result in a hole appearing in your head so that a transference of consciouness could be facilitated, whose 'endowment' (i.e. the right to practice it) I gather has become a feature of the esoteric teachings of the Diamond Way. I used to joke that Ole had the biggest hole in the head of all of us present at the time and it was all entirely wasted because he had absolutely nothing inside there to transfer ....
Even then I remember some resentment, even amongst the Tibetans, at the way Ole monopolised the Karmapa, the spiritual head of the Kagyu monastic order, whom he lionised and was essentially responsible for introducing to the West. Since then of course Nydahl has been a significant player in the current split in that order regarding the rightful heir to the Karmapa title.
I don't doubt that my Wikipedia article was nobbled by a Nydahl sympathiser. Any readers, perhaps a wiki adminsitrator themself, who cares to champion it are welcome. You are free to use the text as you like without condition but for myself I must now withdraw from the fray, other concerns pressing.
But I will look back into this forum from time to time.