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.
Full Episode
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.
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