In a small network of streets around the old fire station
in Bethnal Green, East London, can be found Britain's
last revolutionaries. But these are no socialist workers
- they are the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, one
of Britain's biggest and fastest growing Buddhist
organisations. They believe they are evolving the Higher
Individual and the New Society according to the 2,500-year-old
principles of the Buddha, as adapted for the late 20th
century by their revered leader, Sangharakshita -
formerly known as Dennis Lingwood. They might be called
the last remnants of sixties' hippie idealism.
Some - and they include many senior Buddhists - watch
their success with alarm, and privately accuse them of
peddling a quixotic ideology which owes as much to
Nietszche and 20th century psycho-therapy as to a highly
eclectic pot-pourri of eastern Buddhist traditions.
Even more disturbing, the cases of three vulnerable young
men have emerged which detail sexual manipulation and
oppressive authoritarian cult behaviour which, in the
case of one man, has been cited as a significant factor
leading to his suicide.
The nerve centre of this now international religious
organisation - with bases in Spain, Germany, the US and
Australia, as well as in 30 UK locations - is an enormous
Victorian house on a leafy street in Moseley, Birmingham.
There, Subhuti (formerly Alex Kennedy), widely regarded
as Sangharakshita's righthand man, admits with exemplary
honesty that he has been waiting for a journalist to
stumble on this murky past. "Thank God it's not the
News of the World," he comments with characteristic
mildness.
Nine years ago, one of the flagship FWBO centres
spectacularly imploded in a welter of allegations of
homosexual abuse, personality destruction and
manipulation. It bore all the characteristics of a cult
as Subhuti admits, and it left at least 30 people badly
damaged psychologically. "People got caught in a
collective delusion, a group psychosis which was very
interesting but distressing," Subhuti says. Even now,
he adds, he is still learning the full extent of what
went on within that tightly-controlled, secretive
community.
Such stories are hard to match up with the sincere
idealism of many of the 4,000 regular adherents of the
Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO). Hard to
match up with their benign public image to the 20,000
people who come to their 30 centres around Britain every
year to learn the calming and enlightening benefits of
meditation. And hard to match up with their rightly
recognised work with Buddhist Untouchables in India.
It belies the respectability of the FWBO. Articulate and
energetic, its members have established themselves beyond
the Buddhist community as an authoritative voice of
Buddhism. Some sit on local authority standing advisory
committees drawing up religious syllabuses for schools
and they offer teachers training in the principles of
Buddhism. Some broadcast on the BBC World Service. They
have won considerable admiration for their co-operative
ethical businesses, which now employ 300 people with a
turnover of £7.5 million.
Subhuti insists that the scandal was unique and due to
the head of the centre, a follower of Sangharakshita but
a manipulative and charismatic individual who
subsequently left the movement. It can never be repeated,
he emphatically asserts. But there are others who
disagree and who argue that Sangharakshita's teachings -
which are intensively studied by members - can be used to
legitimise sexual and emotional manipulation.
What makes these revelations potentially so damaging to
the FWBO is that they implicate its very founder. The 700
Order members and 1,400 mitras (novices) perceive
Sangharakshita as a man of great spiritual insight and
compassion. But Mark Dunlop tells another story. In 1972,
as a 22-year-old curious about Buddhism, he started a
FWBO meditation class. Singled out by Sangharakshita, he
became his virtually constant companion for years.
"I was very in awe of Sangharakshita," he says.
"He represented Buddhist ideals. But he was petulant
and controlling. He doesn't boss people about but
suggests something isn't spiritually appropriate. I
thought he was an important spiritual teacher and I ought
to do whatever I could to help him."
Sangarakshita persuaded Mark that in order to develop
spiritually he had to get over his antihomosexual
conditioning, which was blocking him from devoting his
energies to the spiritual life. He offered to help Mark.
"He would want to have sexual contact about twice a
week on average. He usually said something like, 'Let me
just lie beside you for a while'. I dreaded hearing this
but felt mean and selfish if I thought of refusing. It
was distressing, but some of the other Buddhist practices
I had recently learned were themselves strange, such as
meditation, but there were apparent benefits.
"He would get into my bed and perhaps stroke my
chest for a while. Then he would get on top of me and rub
himself against my stomach until he had an orgasm. I
found the whole business repellent but at least it didn't
take very long - only about four or five minutes usually.
I was completely passive throughout, just waiting for him
to finish.
"I felt on balance I had to take his ideas on anti-homosexual
conditioning seriously. If I protested he would admonish
me that I should not give into conditioning and allow it
to inhibit the development of our 'spiritual friendship'.
Giving up the homosexual relationship would be like
giving-up Buddhism and the spiritual journey. I kept
thinking I would have a breakthrough and would get
aroused. I was very embarrassed by the sexual
relationship and I saw this as my not being able to
accept myself as I was - bisexual. I felt it was my duty
to Buddhism and Sangharakshita as the person who was
bringing Buddhism to the West.
Eventually, Mark summoned the courage to bring an end to
the sexual relationship, and his friendship with
Sangharakshita - for whom he had bought a house with an
inheritance - then petered out. But Mark remained in the
FWBO until 1985, struggling to hold on to Buddhism. When
he finally left he felt a great sense of failure and
guilt about being heterosexual. He blamed himself and
became severely depressed.
Sangharakshita, who officially retired last year,
although he continues to be the FWBO's guiding influence,
refuses to comment on Dunlop's allegations, which were
first made a decade ago. But he has admitted several
times that, after his return from India to England in
1967, he broke his monastic vow of celibacy and "experimented
with sex" - "I was just exploring certain
things for my own benefit, for the satisfaction of my own
curiosity."
Subhuti, who knew Dunlop during his "close
friendship" with Sangharakshita, insists that Dunlop's
account bears no relation to his recollections of a
strong-willed, independent young man.
Mark is still, 20 years later, an angry man, but what
makes his story particularly disturbing is that it
appears to bear characteristics which were echoed over a
decade later at another centre with a different FWBO
teacher.
By the early eighties, one of Sangharakshita's followers
was heading a centre which was strikingly successful in
attracting new recruits. One of these was Tim (he does
not wish to give his surname), who was trying to throw
off drug addiction. Meditation classes became a full-time
commitment and, aged 19, he moved into the single-sex
community of 27 men. He worked an average of 45 hours a
week in the co-operative business for £22 a week.
"I gave up drugs overnight. I was torturing myself -
ashamed of having been in drugs. It was like my detox. In
the midst of that process of getting well and growing up,
I was exposed to the spiritual orientation of the place.
The head of the community was a very powerful, intrusive
personality and incredibly manipulative. He would
intuitively become aware of people's vulnerabilities. The
one thing you are when you are withdrawing from drugs is
very vulnerable. I must have had that printed all over me.
"He would massage my ego. Suddenly I was no longer a
normal kid coming off drugs, I was on the point of
enlightenment. He put me on a pedestal. I fell for it. At
the time I had no contact with family, friends - I was
told not to, because they would drag me back into samsara
("the wheel of suffering"). They said to me to
keep away from women and relationships because they are
totally neurotic. He abused my family in public. 'Your
mum's castrated your father emotionally, and she'll do
the same to you', he'd say. The first time it happened I
was shocked, but I was intent on getting away from my
addictions and I thought 'I just have to go through with
this' and I gritted my teeth.
"After six months, I said to a friend in the
community that I felt I was losing my marbles. This got
back to him. He suggested that the reason was because I
was gay and was repressing it. It was all to do with my
mother and that was why I had ended up taking drugs. I
thought, 'Well, I like my male friends and I'm close to
them but I'm not attracted to them'. But I was so
confused that I began to doubt everything about myself,
including my sexuality. I had put all my eggs in one
basket and I'd invested so much in it all - this was the
meaning of life and death.
"Then he used to say, 'Can't you feel what's going
on between us?' I just didn't know- yes, no, I don't know.
I was so done in and the meaning of life had become bound
up with my homosexuality and its repression. Gradually he
became more and more clear about my homosexuality being
directed towards him. He could solve this for me, he used
to say. In the end he took me to bed. It happened twice.
It couldn't have been much fun for him, it so obviously
wasn't where I was at."
Like Mark, Tim blamed himself and remained in the FWBO
unhappy and confused. He only finally left six months ago.
He emphasises that there are other FWBO members who have
always treated him with respect. But he has become bitter
about their failure to protect him at a vulnerable stage
in his life. In the last couple of months, a senior Order
member has apologised to him.
The tightly controlled manipulative environment at this
centre which Tim describes also played a major role in
the suicide of Matthew (his family does not wish the
surname to be used) in 1990. Like Mark and Tim, Matthew
started FWBO meditation classes at a vulnerable point in
his life. Highly intelligent, he had won a scholarship to
Oxford to read law but after coming down had grown
increasingly disenchanted with careerism and materialism.
He suffered from depression and was attracted to
meditation to cope with his emotional problems. He moved
into the FWBO centre where he lived from 1984 to 1987,
working in the co-operative business as a builder/decorator.
While he was there, he cut virtually all his contacts
with friends and family.
When he emerged, he was "withdrawn and bleak",
according to his mother, Denise. He was unable to hold
down a job or start a relationship and was referred to a
psychiatrist to be treated for depression. Three years
later, he committed suicide.
Some of his diary entries while he was with the FWBO
capture his confusion and anguish:
January 1985: I feel more trapped here. Trapped by
the ... routine, trapped by the ominous determination of
"spiritual friends" to keep me here. I'm losing
my will. Panic! I seem to have stumbled in desperate need
of shelter into the Tiger's Cave.
February: I feel sometimes that openness to the Order
means giving up one's mind, thus becoming merely an
adjunct of the Order. Still could be great!
After Matthew's death, his mother found two letters
he had written to FWBO members after he left but which he
had never sent. In one he wrote: "I have felt
manipulated all the way by people who have allowed
themselves to be manipulated. I am now out of reach of
all that ghastly sales talk ... [it was] a petty
totalitarian state, an Orwellian Albania with its own Big
Brother." In another, he said: "I could never
return to that ghastly concentration camp atmosphere with
its force-fed dogma and drip-feed friendships ... where
reason and individual experience are crushed by people
who expect total submission before any real friendship or
recognition is gained."
Matthew was seen for two years by a clinical psychologist,
who was in no doubt of the detrimental impact the FWBO
had on him. He concluded in his report: "Matthew's
problems as to a large part resulted from the traumatic
effects of his experiences whilst he had been a member of
the FWBO ... talked about them with great bitterness. He
told me he had decided shortly after entering the FWBO
community that he was unsuited to stay there; however he
felt trapped and unable to leave as he had fallen under
the influence of his tutor, a man he later came to see as
being an exceptionally skilful manipulator of other
people.
"Matthew felt that the senior members of the
community attempted to deliberately break up his identity,
in order to get him to accept the fundamental principles
and practices of the community. He tried to resist this
process and therefore entered into a prolonged period of
psychological conflict with them. He feels the community
attempted to alienate him from his family and from women,
and that direct attempts were made to encourage him to
practise homosexuality. He stated that he did not indulge
in homosexual practices, although attempts were made for
him to do so both by using inducements and by using
threats.
"In my opinion Matthew's three-year residence in the
FWBO had extremely harmful psychological effects upon him
... I have no doubt that this inability to cope with
rejection [of losing the job shortly before his suicide]
from others directly stemmed from the years of
psychological abuse and rejection he had experienced
whilst he was a member of the Buddhist community."
Senior Buddhists have been worried about the FWBO for
many years. While unaware of the scandal in the eighties
until now - remarkably, no hint of it appears to have
gone beyond the FWBO - they had feared just this
eventuality, and believe that Sangharakshita's
interpretation of Buddhism can be used to licence sexual
and psychological abuse. It is an allegation the FWBO
fiercely rejects.
Sangharakshita's and Subhuti's published writings reveal
an extraordinary agenda on sex, family and women. A
misogynistic biological determinism consigns women to a
"Lower Evolution", where their hormonal rhythms
and desire for children render them spiritually inferior
to men. The biological drive apparently makes women
manipulative as they seek to "ensnare" men into
providing for them and their offspring. Women as mothers
and partners suffocate the development of men's true
identity. The heterosexual couple is scorned as "mutually
addictive and neurotic" and the family is the "enemy
of the spiritual community". Rearing children is
dismissed by Sangharakshita in a memorable analogy as
being as spiritually significant as a rainy day.
Sangharakshita sees the FWBO as developing a blueprint
for a radically new society. Members are encouraged to
move into single-sex communities and in their businesses
work-teams are also singe-sex; this is regarded as more
conducive to the spiritual life. Even husband and wives
are encouraged to live separately. It is primarily within
same-sex relationships - whether or not they involve sex
- that members are expected to discover the full benefits
of spiritual friendship. There is no imposition of a vow
of celibacy; members are simply advised not to invest too
much emotion in their sexual relationships. Subhuti even
advocates casual sex as a way of achieving this.
The FWBO emphasises that these teachings are not all put
in practice. Most FWBO members are heterosexuals and a
large number have families. It says there is considerable
debate on some teachings and, given the importance placed
on individual judgement, there is plenty of room for
people to disagree. It also argues that the movement is
evolving and has become much more open to families and
heterosexual relationships. It points to a strong, self-confident
women's wing - a third of ordained Order members are
women - as evidence that there is no structural misogyny.
There are other parts of FWBO teaching which gained
currency in the seventies and eighties from which it is
now anxious to distance itself. Subhuti argued in an FWBO
internal magazine in 1986 that it could be beneficial to
change sexual orientation as a way of recognising - and
liberating yourself from - your conditioning; and that a
teacher/mentor could use sex as a way of opening up
communication with their pupil. Homosexual sex was
promoted as more conducive to the spiritual life than
heterosexual sex. Some members tried to raise the alarm,
warning that novices were being damaged by sexually
predatory teachers and demanding an end to the "glorification
of homoerotic feelings". But it was not until 1988
that the FWBO discovered how such ideas had been
implemented at the centre attended by Tim and Matthew.
It is not hard to see how one FWBO centre became a cult.
Like any new religious movement, there is a strong
tendency to denigrate the outside world in order to
strengthen its adherents' commitment to the movement -
Sangharakshita reserves his most contemptuous scorn for a
host of evils which include "pseudo-liberalism",
feminism and Christianity. There is always a danger that
this leads to a self-referential introversion in which an
unscrupulous, charismatic and sexually manipulative
personality can run amok.
This was exactly the outcome Stephen Batchelor, a
prominent Buddhist commentator and author of Buddhism
without Beliefs had always feared in the FWBO as a "potentially
totalitarian system". He says: "They operate as
a self-enclosed system and their writings have the
predictability of those who believe they have all the
answers. They are structured in a rigid hierarchy and do
not seem to question the teachings of their leader. As
with many new religious movements, their enthusiasm and
unconventional convictions have the potential to lead to
problems associated with 'cults' and one centre in the
eighties does appear to have tipped over into full-blown
cultish behaviour, which, to the FWBO's credit, they
closed down."
While he describes Sangharakshita as a "very
sensitive man", Batchelor finds his views on
heterosexual relationships "bizarre" and his
views on women "distasteful".
Ken Jones, lecturer and author of several books on
Buddhism, believes that the FWBO is now changing but it
still has a long way to go before losing its "locker-room"
culture of aggressive male bonding akin to public school
or the army: "There's a culture of angry young men
struggling against women, the family and the state. All
of that has nothing to do with Buddhism and a lot to do
with Sangharakshita's psychology. In that kind of culture,
you can get cult like behaviour and victimisation. It's a
deviant form of Buddhism."
A leading Buddhist teacher who did not wish to be named
is particularly concerned by the FWBO's belittling of the
family and child rearing, which he argues has
traditionally been perceived as a enormous valuable
"spiritual training ground" within Buddhist
tradition. "Amongst other Buddhists, attitudes
towards the FWBO range from caution to suspicion,"
he says, adding that the FWBO is a "Westernised semi-intellectual
pot-pourri of Buddhism" conflated with 20th century
psychotherapy and Nietszche.
"In the West perhaps people could distinguish
between Catholicism and the Moonies but they can't
distinguish between types of Buddhism. Not many know very
much about Buddhism. Even the well-educated who are
attracted to Buddhism are completely credulous when it
comes to spiritual things."
While the FWBO's Buddhism may be awry, and some of the
fruits of that have been disastrous, there are many
sincere Buddhists within the Order who will be profoundly
disturbed by this article. The FWBO argues in effect that
the day to day activities and friendships within it have
little to do with some of the ideas of Sangharakshita and
Subhuti. It seems that where the FWBO becomes dangerous
is when people begin to apply such teaching literally.
Some have done so in the past - with devastating
consequences. Could they again?
- The Guardian
|