Over the course of this investigation I have heard a great deal about the witnesses’ understanding of ‘path to enlightenment’, which was described as a graduated path, starting with basic meditation and working up to the Vajrayana and, ultimately, the Dzogchen teachings.
What is set out below reflects the information that was provided to me by witnesses about their experience of these teachings with Sogyal Lakar as their teacher. I recognise that not everyone will agree that this reflects their own experience, and fewer people may agree that this is an accurate description of Buddhist teachings more widely, but this context is important in terms of setting out the experiences of the witnesses that I spoke to.
The Dzogchen teachings were described to me as “the fast path to enlightenment”. Witness B explained that the Dzogchen teachings are like taking Concorde to enlightenment instead of getting there on horseback. Witness N explained that one part of the Dzogchen teachings involves your teacher working with you and ‘pointing out’ aspects that you need to work on. Witness N explained that if, as part of these teachings, Sogyal Lakar felt that someone’s thinking or emotional response showed a lack of openness, he would seek to intervene.
Witness P provided me with a variety of texts which seek to explain the permission granted by a student to his or her teacher to work with them. The paragraph I found most helpful to understand the purpose of this technique comes from Dzogchen Ponlop’s “Rebel Buddha” text:
“Essentially our spiritual friend has our permission to turn up the heat, to push our buttons, to add fuel to our fire of wisdom so that it blazes more intently and burns up our self-clinging. We trust our teacher to do this and also to make sure that the fire doesn’t get out of control and become destructive. In this sense, it’s like a controlled burn in a forest to make it more healthy and productive”.
Several witnesses told me that Sogyal Lakar uses a technique known as ‘crazy wisdom’ or ‘skilful means’ as part of his teachings. This has been explained to me as a means of pointing out egocentric tendencies and different understandings that a student might have. This was described by Witness O as “a last resort, when conventional methods don’t work”.
Witness P explained as follows:
“The connection between a student and a master is undertaken consciously; you request to be a student and would then give permission to your master for them to help you wake up, even if this would mean some direct guidance of their attention. You get into a situation where permission is granted to a master to take care of your spiritual enlightenment and they will use all sorts of different ways to help them get over their self-defeating patterns – ego, delusions …
For example, he would give me jobs to do which seemed pointless – eventually the penny dropped. He was trying to show me that I was doing the work based on self-regard. It would sometimes be absurd things, he would ask you to do repeatedly”.
Other examples of crazy wisdom that were given to me included asking someone to run to the top of a mountain to see whether the sun had set, asking a student repeatedly to find answers to questions that they already knew the answer to, or asking someone to build a tower then take it down and rebuild it over and over again. I was told that the student is meant to watch their reaction to the seemingly impossible or pointless question or task and use this as an opportunity to “look into their mind”. It was accepted by almost all witnesses that this process is not intended to be easy or comfortable, but challenging and, at times, difficult to understand.
Rigpa management Witness N acknowledged that there is an expectation that people will progress to the highest levels of the teachings, but Witness N agreed that, due to the challenging nature of these teachings, “some people truly should not”.
Witness O described the concept of crazy wisdom as “a wisdom entirely for the student’s benefit; not crazy, mad or out of control, but unconventional”. Witness O accepted that Sogyal could, on occasion, be wrathful as a means of achieving this, but that it was “not ordinary anger as a gut reaction to a situation, it was anger as a method of showing people something, it was not uncontrolled”.
I note that Rigpa’s new Code of Conduct expressly states that: “if a guru asks you to do something and you cannot do it for whatever reason, you should know that you are allowed to say no”, however, this document did not exist until after the Complaint.
Some of the witnesses that I spoke to had a significantly more negative take on Sogyal Lakar’s teachings and the ability of students to say no or question what they were taught. For example, a former instructor, Witness U, told me:
“We were taught to see these daily displays of anger not as anger but as kindness, specifically as wrathful compassion, as ‘cutting through ego’. I was never comfortable with these displays as I couldn’t see why they couldn’t be done in private, but we were told that they were a teaching for us—activity teachings teaching us how to be better workers, to be more efficient and more aware … Sometimes [Sogyal] would spend the first hour of a ‘teaching’ finding fault with those who served him, sometimes sending someone into tears. These ‘activity teachings’ are not Buddhist teachings, they’re Sogyal’s own made up speciality.
A mark of our devotion was our ability to see these outbursts in a positive light, and we needed to show our devotion if we were to be allowed to receive the highest teachings, the Dzogchen teachings which we all sought.
In various sessions we were asked how we saw these ‘teachings’ and I, like everyone else, did my best to see them in a positive light. I took his ‘grumpiness’ as part of the package - if I wanted the Buddhist teachings Sogyal imparted, I had to take the bad along with the good, so I did, but I did my best to make sure I would never be on the receiving end of his verbal attacks—when offered a [management role], I turned it down, knowing that anyone in a major role opened themselves up to this kind of attack. He picked his targets though; he didn’t do it to everyone.
We were also taught that any attention given to you by a lama was good attention, even if it felt bad at the time. The situation is similar to a child with an abusive parent in that, for the student, the abuse is better than being ignored. (I likened the attitude we were taught to take about this as similar to my father strapping me for being naughty while saying that he did it only because he loved me.) The fact that Sogyal gives you any kind of attention at all is seen as an indication that he cares for you, and students on the receiving end of the public humiliation or ‘dressing downs’ said they felt ‘blessed’ by getting this kind of ‘wrathful compassion.’
One meditation instruction is to ‘let go of your risings’, meaning to let go of any thoughts or emotions that arise. This is not a wrong instruction, but in this instance we were taught to see our natural disgust with the public humiliation as ‘just a rising’ and we were taught to let it go without giving any consideration for the possibility that what we were letting go of was actually something we should be paying attention to. The instruction became a way to ignore, or suppress our instincts.
I see now that all of this was a form of brainwashing that desensitised us to his behaviour. The longer we stayed the more this attitude became programmed in”.
I recognise that the above description may not be accepted by those who remain students of Sogyal Lakar, but this context is important in order to understand the perception of many of the witnesses I spoke to.
I listened to a recorded public teaching delivered by Sogyal Lakar in which I heard evidence of the fact that senior students are taught to have pure faith and pure trust in Sogyal as their master. In this teaching, Sogyal said:
“With trust you can relax, with faith you can have peace. When you have trust and faith, for example with my masters, then you can really receive the blessings.
When you don’t have trust, you diminish the blessings because you doubt and you think this and that. You get yourself confused, you begin to mistrust things. This cleverness only brings you more suffering and confusion …
I do everything for your benefit.
Don’t resist; trust. If you resist, you’re very stupid”.
It was explained to me that, in theory, students only progress through the nine levels (or yanas) of Buddhism when they are ready and once they have gone through a specific initiation process at each stage. Before I met with any of the witnesses, I conducted some initial basic research into the nature of the Samaya relationship and I understood there to be a long process of introduction to the basics of Buddhism before students would be ready to embark upon the Vajrayana path. Many of the witnesses that I spoke to, however, did not appear to have undertaken any meaningful initiation which would have enabled them to understand the true nature of this relationship, and the potential ways they might be tested, in advance. It is evident to me that many of the students I met did not truly understand what might be involved until they had already embarked upon the journey and, in their view, there was no going back.
Within Sogyal Lakar’s teachings, there appears to be a very informal approach to these initiations in some cases. For example, Witness N had started off by attending Buddhist courses and meditation practice and received an initiation around two years later. I asked whether Witness N felt that Witness N understood what this meant at the time, to which Witness N responded “probably not”.
Witness N explained:
“It was generally not a quick transition to go from being new to Buddhism to being a Vajrayana student, but not always. Some people go quickly - Buddhists would say there were past life connections. It’s akin to falling in love and the situation where most people do it slowly but some people might get married within a week. The teacher should have a good sense of where they are, and some people don’t really get there in 30 years”.
Witness D, a Dzogchen student, told me that Sogyal would give initiations quite freely; “you turn up to a retreat and you’re part of it, you discover bit by bit what you have let yourself in for.”
Several of the witnesses did not consider that they had undergone any form of initiation.
Witnesses explained to me that, once a student has asked a teacher to teach them and has been accepted by that teacher, there is said to be ‘Samaya’ between them. The meaning of Samaya is an area where there is considerable divergence of views. At its simplest, I am told that the meaning of Samaya is described (by Mingyur Rinpoche) as “to maintain unwavering respect towards the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, and in the case of Vajrayana, the guru”.
Several of the witnesses that I spoke to described to me their understanding, which is that when a student agrees to enter into the Vajrayana path of Buddhism they enter into an agreement whereby they are permitting their teacher/master (in this case, Sogyal Lakar) to help them on the road to enlightenment by whatever means he believes will help them. In return, they understood that the student is bound never to criticise their master in public and is encouraged to have absolute trust that what their master is doing will help them on their path. They told me that it is meant to be understood that the means employed by the master will push the student’s boundaries and that this may not be an entirely comfortable process.
Several of the witnesses I met told me that they were taught the consequences of breaking Samaya (which they understood included criticising or speaking out against your teacher). Witnesses told me that Sogyal Lakar’s teachings describe a Samaya breaker as being condemned to Vajra Hell; I was told that this is described at length in historic teachings as the worst of the eighteen hells and a place of eternal torture. I heard evidence that breaking Samaya is taught by Sogyal to be the worst thing a student can do; it is said that it will damage their own health, the health of their family and cause harm to the teacher / damage his long life. Many witnesses considered that there was pressure on them to keep their Samaya.
For completeness, I was also told that the teacher is said to be bound by Samaya as well, and it is said that if a teacher breaks Samaya, they too are said to be bound for Vajra hell.
The fact that many of the witnesses I spoke to considered that they are, or were, bound by Samaya, and felt that they would be said to be breaking that vow by speaking to me, has been a particularly challenging aspect of this investigation. It is also a factor which I have had to take into account when assessing the credibility of the evidence available to me.