Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups. — Friedrich Nietszche

The building in this photograph is The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, in Colorado, USA. One of its functions is reliquary for the skull of Chogyam Trungpa, 1939-1987, a Tibetan lama who attracted a following in America.

I attended a lecture by Trungpa in Philadelphia in 1983. I’d been meditating with the local Buddhist community for two years at that time. Buddhism had interested me since I heard recorded lectures by Alan Watts and read his books in high school. The Philadelphia community had an open house in 1981, where I met a man named Jonathan who taught classes.

This meeting turned out to be bad for my judgment of the greater effort.

Jonathan did not talk about Tibet, but about his own search for meaning and what the Buddhist concepts meant to him in his American life. I fell in love with Jonathan. I liked the way he talked, the little half smile on his sculpted face. I liked looking at his pretty wife, Ellen. I went to their apartment, on a tiny tree-lined lane off Rittenhouse Square, got drunk and watched our thoughts fly around the room.

The year after I met him, Jonathan went off to a Buddhist seminary. I stayed on, meditated and tried to make meaningful contact with the other Buddhists. This did not go well. Many of them of them spoke to me as if from behind a stone wall. I wanted to know what they cared about besides Buddhism. Either they kept all that secret, or else the rest of their lives was an accident. It was a shelf of empty vessels, people without a thought in their heads, and they found Buddhism because it happened along. They could just as easily have followed Joseph Smith or Jerry Garcia. They were obsessed with Chogyam Trungpa and the Wisdom of Tibet. Every scrap of information about the teacher was treasured like a diamond. If he drank tequila, they drank tequila. If he liked David Bowie, they ran out and bought all of Bowie's records. I often wondered what they did with their lives before their lama arrived.

More serious warning signs appeared. The Buddhists did a lot of whispering. Many questions were answered with, "We'll tell you that when you're ready." Even at age twenty-two, I knew this secret-keeping was a bad sign. I read an article from a Boulder newspaper, telling of another "seminary," at which Trungpa's personal guards dragged a married couple out of their room and stripped them naked before the other students. When I asked a local teacher about this, she said, "I can only tell you that he would never do anything to intentionally hurt someone. Whatever he did was for the good of his students, to help them reach enlightenment sooner." I'm ashamed that I didn't get up from that conversation and leave the whole business for good.

I was still trying to judge whether to continue when Trungpa Himself came to town. I put my best blue shirt on and rode my bike down Sansom Street, locking it to a light pole. We sat in the shrine room and waited for the divine presence. New people were standing by all the doors, men with scary expressions on their faces.

I saw a short, stooped man with slick, black hair.  His tanned face was perfectly round and flat, and too large for his small body. His voice was grainy, and he held a shiny paper fan in his hand as he sat and talked to us. He began by referring to a new book, How the Swans Came to the Lake, about the arrival of Buddhism in America. "The swans come because there is lake," he said. He went on about the path, and finding your seat, staying put. At the end of his talk he thanked everyone for their hospitality. He said, "I have heard of this place Philadelphia. Thanks to all of you, now I know there is a place that is Philadelphia. When you finally loose your ego, you realize there is no one to witness, no need for announcement. And I think that is why Liberty Bell is cracked." Everyone joined in a soft "Aw."

During the question period, I asked, "How do you reconcile those ideas you spoke of, traveling a path, but also finding your ground, staying grounded?"

CT: "Every step you take, when your foot touches ground, then you are stationary. So in this way, you travel while staying grounded."

After the talk, we all got in line to greet the great teacher. I was excited by the prospect, though I had no idea what I'd say to him. While standing in line, I got a little nervous, listening to the others as they looked for divinity in his every gesture. When he held a little child on his lap, a man whispered in my ear, "When he touches that child, something happens!" Um, yeah.

Before I reached him, Trungpa got tired and moved slowly out of the room, with the help of the creepy door guys. All eyes were on him and the silence was oppressive. He turned around with effort and said, "Cheer up." Another pearl of wisdom.

If you want your own Trungpa experience, you can get a sample here and here.

To summarize a long story, Trungpa died of alcoholism the age of 48. His designated heir, Thomas Rich died three years later  at age 47, under contemptible circumstances. You can read about their transgressions online in Geoffrey Faulk’s important book, Strippping the Gurus: Sex, Violence, Abuse and Enlightenment. The chapter on Trungpa appears here.

The elaborate housing of Trungpa’s skull demonstrates his followers’ continuing devotion. They referred to him as “venerable” while he was still alive. Ever after, they confound themselves, adding new honorary titles. Nothing in Trungpa’s life or teachings justifies this adulation, in any way. At best, Chogyam Trungpa and Thomas Rich were skillful opportunists. They destroyed themselves and damaged many people around them. But many of these victims continue to venerate them today, and they rewrite history in favor of the dead.

If you read more than two biographies of cult leaders, you will notice they use exactly the same tactics to attract and manipulate their followers. Faulk’s book is a good example. Tactically, Yogananda is L. Ron Hubbard is Maharishi is Thomas Rich. Next door, Reverend Moon is Jim Jones is David Koresh is Michael Travesser. And these are only a few recent examples of the game, played successfully since ancient times. The monotony is shocking.

Love and suffering are bound together in us. Suffering attaches us to others in ways pleasure cannot. I once ate dinner with two men who had lived with Bagwan Shree Rajneesh at his ranch near Antelope, Oregon. They answered Bagwan’s mail, and witnessed many of his excesses. They joked about their naivete, but always stopped short of dismissing the Bagwan as a charlatan. They did not believe they’d wasted their time with him. Carl Sagan wrote about this pattern:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise. —The Demon-Haunted World

To set the record straight: I was bamboozled, I was taken. My involvement with Tibetan Buddhism was largely a waste of time, an extremely un-clever choice.

Each of us contains dangerous forces. One is the will to power over others, and another is our desire to be protected by an elevated hero. When these two forces collide, reason flies out the window. And it's no good waiting around for reason to return; it won't.