The happiness part was too much: Confession of an Apostate

by FrozenFlame

Yet another morning of waking too early, feeling uprooted, distracted, and in the midst of transforming into something else, my wish and ability to “meditate” utterly gone. That’s what they told me once – that apostates become like bardo beings, as if already in the dreamlike state between one death and the next rebirth. Well, I grimly think. At least for once I’m feeling exactly the way I’m supposed to feel.

Yesterday I did what would have been unthinkable just a week ago. My Centre was already filled with the aroma of hearty soup brewing for one of those “Food for Thought” classes when I walked in, fortunately not encountering anyone, and discreetly dropped off my freshly laundered robes, my pictures of Kelsang Gyatso (KG) and even my NKT t-shirts, then briskly walked out and tapped my phone to send a pre-written email to the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) letting them know that I was done with them.It all could have been worse, much worse. I am a Millenial who never experienced poverty, sickness nor discrimination. Some bullying at school for being a teacher’s pet and know-it-all, but that was long before cyberbullying and the technological basis for it even existed. Overall I have long felt that my good fortune was undeserved, and dreaded that someone would judge me on that account. If there is someone I admire, I easily imagine them watching me and judging everything I do, and it’s like I will never be able to accept myself until I become exactly like them. My opinions are easily swayed by whatever I get into, and yet once my heart is set on doing something, I get as stubborn as one of Tolkien’s Dwarves. All those are traits that made me vulnerable to KG’s mind-warping books and the kind of pressure one feels in the organization he has created.

I didn’t set out to be a cult survivor, that wasn’t one of my goals in life. This is the story of a man who ended his existence as a “fortunate modern ordained Kadampa disciple” lest he should have eventually ended his existence altogether. There is not much here that hasn’t been said by other survivors before, and my experiences were by no means the worst, nor will I speak to KG’s character, life as a resident in a Centre (which I never was) or the obscure circumstances surrounding the NKT’s foundation; others more qualified than myself have amply done so already. Please consider this to be my humble contribution to building a critical mass of testimonies against this cult. I dedicate it to those who were drawn in at a younger age than I was. Am I then like the founder of the nihilistic Charavaka school, who, according to Chandrakirti, committed many negative actions then wrote an extensive treatise to justify himself and salvage his reputation? Well, I have no reputation left to salvage with the NKT members. As for the “outside” people, most never knew I was a monk to begin with, even my extended family knew it but vaguely. I kept quiet about the matter out of fear, mind you, that my bad example would reflect negatively on the organization. And is it self-justification, considering how the human mind is amazingly good at rationalizing choices that were driven by unconscious motives? If so, that’s my own affair.

The Guru’s Mandala, revisited

The NKT as I understand it consists of four concentric circles, which we’ll look at from the outside in. The further in you are, the harder it is to leave/question the Tradition and its dogmas, not least because is becomes your role to promote them. This model is subjective and imperfect, being a model, but it should be helpful to those (wise) people who didn’t stick around for very long.

The first circle is the General Programme (GP), not including Celebrations/Festivals. Those are the weeknight teachings, the guided meditations, the Branch classes, the Saturday workshops, the open houses, the public talks by guest teachers – whatever a Centre advertises broadly to attract newcomers, as solutions to anger, anxiety, feelings of powerlessness and so forth. KG once said that the most important person in any Centre was the casual student or the potential one who had not yet walked in. Prayers and protocol are kept to a minimum, and some themes are avoided as they would send people running, including parts of the credo – I laugh to think of how someone would react if they heard the “Request to the Lord of All Lineages” on their first visit. If you attend those regularly, you are eventually encouraged to attend a Festival or Celebration, as a “rare and precious opportunity”.

The second circle consists of Celebrations/Festivals, which are technically part of GP but will impress you at a deeper level, especially the first time. The chanting, the decorum, the expansive/expensive offerings, the size of the enthusiastic crowd, are like nothing you’ve seen before, so if you walk in as I did simply expecting a casual Buddhist talk, you’re in for a treat. Welcome to “creating merit” as a synonym for volunteering, to hearing catchphrases from the throne like “our Guru’s Holy Speech”, “unmistaken Dharma”, “our mind appears things”, “how wonderful”, “what could be more meaningful than this” and more repetition of the word “pure/purely” than you’ve ever heard.The most striking contradiction between KG’s books (specifically Joyful Path of Good Fortune and Great Treasury of Merit) and his organization’s own practices pertains to the teaching on relying upon a Spriritual Guide. Choosing someone to guide you on the path to enlightenment is supposed to be a very serious matter, a well thought-out process, and you should first get to know them well enough to be satisfied that they have higher realizations than yourself (at the very least). Furthermore, breaking your commitment to your Spiritual Guide is described as having very severe karmic consequences, such as amounting to forsaking all the Buddhas, being blocked from any further spiritual realizations, exposing yourself to disease and demonic possession, and last but not least, repeated rebirths in hell (Joyful Path 1995, p. 103). If you raise any concerns about that list they are gently laughed off (“what are you so afraid of?”).But my point is, when you enter the second circle, that choice is made for you, because most Festivals/Celebrations feature “empowerments”, which involve committing yourself to KG and entering his Tantric lineage, if only through the ritual closing phrase “I shall do everything the Principal [the teacher, as a representative of KG] has said”. Not to mention that all empowerments also involve taking the Refuge Vows and the Bodhisattva Vow – promising to attain enlightenment for the sake of all living beings, which, to an unprepared mind, amounts to taking the weight of the world on one’s shoulders. After my first empowerment I remember wondering, wait, did I just promise to pray to this scary deity (Dorje Shugden) for the growth of this tradition, and the destruction of its enemies, every day of my life? An even more absurd example is that of a practitioner who recalled how after her first empowerment she had told her friend, “I’m still not sure I’m a Buddhist” and the friend had replied “you just took the Bodhisattva Vow, so now you are!” In short, no later than the second circle, commitments are exacted from you by sheer pressure, much like signing the adhesion contract for a social media platform, where the legal clauses are so long and hard to understand that nobody bothers to read them. One last thing: in a Festival/Celebration, you are certain to get at least one spiel on how the NKT is KG’s heart and the last pure Buddhist lineage in the world, which you must help to “flourish” by serving your Centre. This all tends to make a strong impression on your unconscious, and be more than what you bargained for.

The third circle is the Foundation Programme (FP) and the more intensive Teacher Training Programme (TTP), which do involve a written commitment, including among other things to help your Centre “to the best of your ability”. That in entirely one-sided, but also vague, making it hard to determine how much money and how many hours a week is enough. At this level the all-hands-on-deck spiels become regular occurrences and you are regularly called upon to help distribute publicity. My last resident teacher (RT) would often say as a disclaimer “I know I’m speaking to the TTP students here”, implying that whatever she said was not suitable for newcomers but nonetheless true, i.e. that the NKT could not show its fanatical, expansionist face to people not yet conditioned, lest it should scare the good prospects away. In the classes themselves, the teacher gives a line by line commentary; the paired “discussions” are limited to helping each other remembering what was said, whereas in the group “discussions” two students sit in front and answer the others’ questions while the teacher sits behind them ready to intervene at any time. Often we are reminded beforehand how these group discussions should proceed, including “if we have negative feelings, those are coming from our self-cherishing mind, and therfore we should not blame others”. There is no room for critical questioning, only for interactive indoctrination. Doubts are tolerated only as a phase, something to be overcome on the path to “correct view”.I entered the second and third circles almost simultaneously (within one month), about two years after I had entered the first.

The fourth circle, the one I never entered nor seriously considered entering, is to become a Centre manager, especially an RT. This is where you have the most prestige and responsibility, but not the most power. Arguably, you have even less power over your own life than ever before, because your only currency is reputation for loyalty. I won’t speak through my hat here nor merely repeat what others have said, so please see “Why I no longer study Kadampa Buddhism”, from buddhist-controversy-blog.com.

About the same time I entered my first Centre, I joined a mystical organization, with I’ll simply call [the Order]. One of its leaders insisted in an introductory talk, among other things, that [the Order] was not a religion because it did not seek to convert the masses with dogmas they would have to believe no matter what, nor a cult, because members could leave it without needing to explain themselves whereas cults were very difficult to leave due to the alienation they induced. True enough, when I left a few years later [the Order] gave me no trouble at all and it felt more like ending a love affair than escaping from an abusive relationship.

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice. “Can’t you? the [White] Queen said in a pitying tone. Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes. […] you haven’t had much practice […] I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass.

The quote above about Alice and the White Queen will be hilarious to anyone who’s ever had their doubts about meditation as taught in the NKT. Take something you don’t believe, then hold it in mind until you’ve convinced yourself that you do. Take someone else’s knowledge and “mix your mind” with it until it becomes as your own. If that doesn’t work, then you need to spend more time “preparing” your mind, that is, making it more suggestible. You are free to turn the teaching around in your mind as much as needed and “come to your own conclusion”, but BTW, the only correct conclusion is the one dictated to you, and if you don’t agree you have delusions or karmic obstructions and are creating more of those by the mere mental action of hanging on to your disbelief.

Fast-track Ordination

The idea occurred to me at my first Festival, when a practitioner I knew did it, then confirmed itself when I went to Portugal for KG’s final public teaching. I wanted to be a part of what he had created, to “lock myself in” (as someone else put it) and stop spriritual window-shopping, feeling a sense of urgency. Now for something I did not consider at the time, not that I would have listened if anyone else had told me. To become a priest or enter a congregation in the Roman Catholic Church is a long, drawn-out affair, it takes years, you are mentored and constantly assessed, and once you have taken your vows there are legal implications and the Church/congregation has a responsibility towards you. Not so in the NKT. Becoming ordained is surprisingly easy, even if you’re hardly over 20. I myself was 30, but still, a mere cover letter to someone who didn’t know me at all (Gen-la Dekyong, the general spiritual director at the time), with no background checks nor psychological assessment, is what many would call a botched admission procedure at best, condidering how ordainees commit themselves for life to a Tradition that owes them nothing at all in return. Some are wise enough to go through a noviciate first (I wasn’t), but this is entirely informal and not even advised. The same goes for mentorship: I was lucky enough to be mentored by my first RT (hereinafter “my mentor”) and admittedly, we got along well, but still, he had not known me for even one year.“This will always be a perfect decision” is one of the things they said to us. Ordination day felt like a wedding. I would long think of it as the best day of my life. Finally I would have it so hard, my bar would be set so high, that no one could judge me on my undeserved good fortune. For months I got a lot of attention, and my ego loved that. It quickly became clear however that “acting the monk” was easier when surrounded by Kadampas than at home, without my robes and among “ordinary” people calling me by my lay name.

A year or so after ordination was when I chose to leave the Order, as it was beginning to contradict KG’s teachings on fundamental points. I basically broke down at a Sojong and confessed to the others (even though the ritual demands nothing of the sort) that I had been exposing myself to “wrong views” – officially views that “interfere with the attainment of liberation and enlightenment”, but it actually means views that may make you reject anything taught by KG. The others were genuinely moved and congratulated me. This breakup resolved the cognitive dissonance and for a time, all was smooth again.

That same year I joined in my only two protests against the Dalai Lama’s policy. Not much I want to say about that, except how disturbing it is to consider how easily KG deployed us over a Tibetan feud, how the group pressure made it inexcusable not to go, and how out of character it all felt. Just like seeing that picture of Gen-las Dekyong and Kyenrab shouting, or hearing a respected monk and teacher in the dorm at night sleeptalking – and cursing (that happened at a different time, but still). Had the Dalai Lama and his entourage become the objects of our Two Minutes of Hate?

“I had rather be myself. Myself and gloomy, rather than somebody else, however jolly.”– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Being told that you have the most enviable position in the whole wide samsara and that you practice is the only thing that gives your life any meaning, and indeed makes you human at all, feels great, until it doesn’t. Variously called the honeymoon or the “ordination high”, it can end pretty harshly.

One September, after I made a donation far beyond what I felt comfortable giving, something broke. Feelings of inadequacy evolved to depression, and promptly to suicidal thoughts. Aside from a proper diagnosis or paralysing physical fatigue, I got everything that comes with that: medicine that makes you sicker, an old friend severing ties because you’re no fun to be around anymore, being bombarded with advice, being taken to the ER by your college teacher, getting a visit from the police because a someone you trusted called them, being abducted by colleagues “for your own safety” and, ah yes, spending a night in the psychiatric ward. Hardly things that improve one’s self-confidence. Yet throughout those humiliating experiences I insisted to the “outside people” that, thank you very much, I appreciate your concern but all I need is just to get my Dharma practice back on track and then all will be swell. Although some overtly questioned what the heck I had gotten myself into, I dismissed that as irrelevant, as the confusion of those who had not “met” the Dharma. Prominent among those was my father, who, bless his soul, had always been vocal about whoever he felt was harming me. I told myself I had to live because otherwise he would make war on the NKT. He died first however, and I was left with the regret of having shown him the bad example of an unhappy monk. How ironic.

Now then, if the reactions I got from the outside were akin to a tragedy, those from the inside were more like a farce. Granted, I may have expressed my despair a little too openly, being such a poor actor, especially when it comes to faking happiness. I would have such passive-aggressive behaviours as not replying to “how are you” or go through whole pujas deliberatly not chanting. I bitterly complained that the textbook stories intended to inspire us just made me feel worse. They would give me comments like “It’s really gotten in there”, or “you’re really determined”, and I would feel proud. For all their good intentions really didn’t know how to deal with me at all. Pride or not, though, that was still the case.It seems in retrospect that the Sangha were only relatable to me in general, and helpful in a crisis, to the extent that they were “deviant” and said things outside the box of the teachings – those who raised their voices, sometimes looked nervous, didn’t smile, didn’t take on a different tone when teaching, didn’t hesitate to say that the managers sometimes took advantage of those more readily available and/or gave unsolicited advice outside of their province.

My mentor was one of them. But the RT who took his place after he had to step down for health reasons was not. We were nice to each other but never bonded, and I felt no love for/from her at all. To be fair, her position was intenable and I would not have fared any better. Imagine you are an RT, appointed to a position of spiritual authority on the basis of your faith and commitment alone, without a background in mental health and with a practice of strictly policing your thoughts and words on top of whatever emotional baggage you had in the first place; then here comes a “monk” who trusts you more than he would a therapist or his own family even though you hardly know one another (!) and repeatedly tells you that his thoughts of ending it all are not going away and undermine the very practices that are supposed to defeat them. This was clearly not part of her job description – then again, was there anything in there about how to handle such cases? Her responses were sometimes kind, sometimes not. I suppose she grew exasperated, because here are some things she told me in our last interview: “You’re not thinking of others, you’re just caught up in your own thing”, “if you die hating yourself you’ll go straight to the lower realms”, “start doing what this outfit [your robes] stands for”. For a time that put me back on track , in the way a spanking would a schoolboy – in an uptight, unsustainable way (and I actually thanked her for it later, saying: “your wrath found its mark”).

Then COVID came along, and I moved back to my hometown and joined the Centre there (I had not yet met the NKT when initially moving away) as part of a professional transition. That involved going back to school, and I reflected that studying was the only thing that kept me going through the boredom of the lockdowns and kept me from those dreaded distractions. Relying on busy-ness rather than my own determination in order to “keep my vows”. I joined FP in my new Centre after the lockdowns were lifted, and quickly upgraded to TTP merely because the RT had said there was not one of us she could not picture in TTP. Maybe the policies had changed, maybe it was the teacher or the Centre’s culture, but only then did I perceive that I had entered the third circle. This last chapter is the one when not one Festival would go by that we wouldn’t be strongly encouraged to at least “keep the wish” to attend and reminded that there was nothing more meaningful to do with our lives; when we would be told that “cherishing our Centre” (i.e. giving it our time, energy and money freely and without counting) was the best medium to cherishing all living beings; when that phrase like “One Mind, One Vision, One Determination” came up (sounds a little too Nazi for my taste), when I noticed that even the most respected teachers would make spiteful, uncalled-for remarks from the throne, such as saying that “we can do absolutely nothing about” political matters, that the only thing on a dog’s mind is the next treat, or that “the robots are coming” – an insulting thing to hear from someone whose job is not threatened by AI, unlike many of ours. Like Dorian Gray’s picture, my wardrobe, artistic tastes, and views on non-spiritual topics took off in unexpected directions. Like a storm-chaser, it’s like I was trying to get as close to disaster as I safely could. This tightrope-walking kept my “ordination” bearable, and thereby prolonged it. Sometimes it would make me feel better to mentally call myself the worst names possible, and among those “fraud” and “part-time monk” were always the first.If I brought up the elephant-in-the-room called climate change I’d be condescendingly told, “You really think it possible to fix samsara?” In truth KG’s solution to world problems is simple: “If everyone were to practise cherishing others, many of the major problems of the world would be solved in a few years” (Eight Steps to Happiness, Revised Edition, 2012, p. 95); a sweeping and hardly helpful statement. Those few years would still be very eventful. KG himself acknowledges that our times are “degenerate” and that attaining liberation takes a long time. Well, things are going downhill much faster than humanity’s spiritual realizations are growing; but bringing that up within the NKT is pointless because you’ll be automatically told that the solution is to devote yourself to the organization even more.

One last incident. I overheard once that our Centre was planning to give classes to the staff of a notorious multinational corporation of the primary and secondary sectors, on the company’s own premises. When I spoke up they told me, “everyone needs Dharma”. But that wasn’t the point. To accept a venue offered in this way amounts to accepting sponsorship and becoming an accomplice in corporate whitewashing – that of an environmental delinquent, to boot. At the time I believed that the Centre was making a grave mistake; today I think it was simply typical of what happens when the expansionist drive is so strong that it justifies anything, even the most blatant spiritual bypassing. I can wholeheartedly relate to Rob (“Ordained Too Early”) when he describes how his practice had become an exhausting obstacle course to be repeated every day and a far cry from inner peace. My daily life had also become as a series of hoops for my elephant mind to hop through, of observances and mentally repeated vows and prayers that resembled not so much a mindful spiritual practice as superstition or even OCD. From the White Queen to the Red one: having to run faster and faster merely to stay in one place.In the last week when I told an eminent guest teacher that ordained life was not a walk in the park he replied “There is nothing else [out there that’s of any value]”. That certainly made me feel a lot better. And the happiness part was too much.Through the Looking-GlassThen one fine morning, while looking up a specific phrase from a Kadampa blog, I accidentally came across a website giving an outside look at the NKT – calling it a cult –, and everything fell apart. The spiritual aneurysm ruptured, my mind was turned inside out like an old sock, I came back through the looking-glass and suddenly everything about the NKT became unpalatable. I had to leave. And the scariest part in retrospect is that until that day such a thought had not only been anathema, it had been unthinkable. The indoctrination had really come that far.It was reported to me in my first year as a monk that an ordained person had once gone to Gen-la Dekyong and confessed that they had thought of leaving. “Don’t worry”, Gen-la had replied; “if you had really meant to leave, I’m the last person you would have wanted to tell.” That was the definite test – I didn’t feel like telling any Sangha member of my decision, let alone one in a position of authority.From the time I decided to leave (two days before actually doing it) I immediately felt more authentic, light-hearted, (dare I say it?) patient, and kind to others, including the TTP students, whom my dark moods had tended to weigh down for some time. All that I had been supposed to get by staying, I got by leaving. You don’t need to take a wrong turn You just need guidance, guidance from aboveWe don’t need to have this conflict‘Cause I can take you, tooTo a place of delightGive peace of mind to the whole world– Meguro Shoji and Benjamin Franklin [not the Founding Father], “Throw away your mask”, P5R OST.The only means of honourable discharge for a monk in the third circle of the NKT who has outlived his usefulness are burnout and death; if he leaves before either of those as I have, he becomes an outcast and/or an object of pity, the object of the attitude illustrated by the quote above.I am not blaming the NKT for all the evils of the world. A war is on for our minds (sorry if I sound like a conspiracy theorist), there are plenty of NGOs, governments, and corporations out there vying for our attention and trying to recruit us for life as followers, clients, debtors, etc. The NKT is just not special, all it has is a unique flavour. In short, no matter how it came to be so, what its members believe or what its leaders in earnest think they are doing, but simply in terms of how it functions, I believe the NKT:- is a cult, valuing its own growth over the wellness of its followers;

– has developed terribly effective methods for drawing people in and keeping them in, but does not care whether its teachings actually function to make people happy all the time as it claims;

– makes the unverified claim that the practices it teaches will work for everyone regardless of their background and life history, and that the solution to any obstacles encountered on the way is to take up more of those practices, thereby drawing them further in;

– steals its adepts’ ability to think for themselves 1) on non-spiritual matters by making them believe that those are ultimately irrelevant, and 2) on spiritual matters a) through its meditation techniques by giving them topics to “contemplate” while telling them in the same breath what the correct conclusion is, and b) through the functioning of its in-depth study programmes, where orthodoxy is valued more than authenticity;- irresponsibly encourages people to make commitments they may not be prepared for (most notably taking the Bodhisattva Vow) in the midst of the group pressure inherent in Festivals/Celebrations, then frames service to itself as the best way to keep those commitments;

– lets overenthusiastic [mostly young] people take ordination far too quickly and easily, with a lightness that does not counterbalance the horrible consequences it predicts for disrobing, and the way it shuns those who do;- is in no way as universal and unpolitical as it claims to be, as the Shugden controversy has amply proven;- blurs the line in its followers’ minds between its own interests and the “flourishing of Dharma”, “world peace” and indeed, the ultimate welfare of “all living beings”;- encourages its followers to spiritually bypass the world’s problems and is indeed a de facto accomplice in several of those, notably climate change through the carbon footprint of its international festivals, and Chinese imperialism through its attacks on the Dalai Lama (even though I never got one yuan for my participation in the demos).

Slamming the door has opened floodgates of energy, emotion, creativity… and fatigue. My spiritual life is in shambles, my flame frozen. I realize I know nothing about the Dharma or meditation at all, and the mere thought of an NKT prayer or even words and phrases commonly used in KG’s books like “does not exist”, “again and again”, “from the heart”, “each and every” or “from its own side” trigger me. Though I have some wish to remain a Buddhist don’t know if I’ll ever be able to meditate again, or disentangle my understanding of the Dharma from KG’s influence.Thank you for reading this far. I did not expect my account to be this long, yet it feels like the most meaningful thing I have ever written. “Meaning” is one concept now to be reclaimed, one of many.