Editorial Review by Tibetan Scholars and Authors: Victor and Victoria Trimondi:
A light which leads out from the Tibetan Buddhist dream-trance
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 prevented 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 go out. It will give them the courage to make the decisive step and it will save many people, to enter this system ever. The author dedicated her book “to all the abuse victims of Tantric Lamaism, whose voices have been silenced for centuries”.
After we did publish in 1998 our book The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, which triggered world-wide severe 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 point 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.
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 divineness of the guru, which renders any critics of them impossible; absolute interdiction to speak about group-internals with outside people; threat of 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. Thank to her deep insider information the author reveals by a lot of examples, by personal testimonials and with convincing arguments that Lamaism shows all these above-mentioned criteria and has therefore a cultic character.
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 world-wide the Lama-cult but also collaborates with them in 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.
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 has 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 afffected with AIDS by the successor of Trungpa (Osel Tenzin), Thomas Rich. This, too, has been called “crazy wisdom”; a “paradox event” on the way to enlightenment.
Shortly before “Enthralled” had been published, the Buddhist Community has been shattered by a spectacular scandal, the case of Sogyal Rinpoche. 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 has been still able to introduce his case in her text, which did hit like a bomb and whose implications for the Tibetan Buddhist Movement in the west are not yet foreseeable.
The author not only describes these cases of sexual abuse as misconducts or assaults, but she shows how directly they are connected with the Tantric sexual-magical rituals. So – 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 Tsultrim Allione, Sangye Khandro, Jetsun Khandro of Mindrolling or Pema Chödron. 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. “
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. Chris Chandler shows that in the spiritual “universe” of Tibetan Buddhism this masculine and misogynic development is predetermined.
The institutionalized abuse of women is assured by the widespread pederasty in the Tibetan monasteries. 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.
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 an 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, the enlightened book of Chris Chandler maybe 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 empiric competence therefore. 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, liberty of thinking and speaking, gender equality, human rights, social responsibility, education opportunities for everyone in favor of an androcentric cast-system and an anti-democratic dictatorship of priests.
Victor and Victoria Trimondi, Tibetan Buddhist Scholars and Authors of Hitler, Buddha, Krishna and The Shadow of the Dalai Lama
