A Buddha by the name of Wallenstitter Believe it or not: a far-eastern holy woman began her career in the hotel “Bayerischer Hof.” by Nanouk Wilmer Charming. She was very charming. Industrious also. Always industrious, always hard-working. And tiny, quite diminutive. “and yet also so...”--her former boss spread his hands and tapped with his fingertips. ++80 improbably bubbly.” Wild. Although it was twenty-two years ago, he remembers well the young waitress, who made such an impression on the people of Munich. ‘The waitress worked her way up to the top. Millions worship her name daily. A magazine devoted solely to her is published in fourteen languages. She runs her own restaurant chain and fashion label. She decribes herself as “the key to God.” Blessed is all that she touches. Her old socks cost four hundred dollars--per sock. Suma Ching Hai works as a guru and is en route on a worldwide holy mission. It all started in Munich. In the mid-seventies she worked in the nightclub “Trader Vic's" in the hotel “Bayerischer Hof.” It was a Polynesian-style bar, with teak and wooden figures on the walls. Little umbrellas with Chinese symbols for luck decorated the drinks. Hue Dang Thi Than Thacker, as she was then called, was twenty-two, had been living for a short while in Germany and was dating Francois, another Bartender. Never again has he met someone like her,Frangois Germain says today. “Hue could involve complete strangers in conversations that lasted for hours, although at that time she couldn’t speak German very well.” she could fill a room simply with her presence. Meanwhile she filled lecture halls. Welcome, mistress of the blue ocean--“Welcome, Suma Ching Hai” it Says on the purple banner above the stage. One of her rare visits to Europe. In the conference room of the University of Uxbridge in London a thousand people sit on folding chairs. Although no one speaks aloud, because the master does not like it, there is an atmosphere of muffled hysteria. Until the door opens. First, appear the two bodyguards, who will not move for the length of the lecture. Then--the crowd roars--she enters: in a white costume [dress/suit] and light blue tights. On fifteen centimeter high stiletto heels she walks through the room, [s]plashes along the way to the front the shoulders of those sitting along the edge and walks up to the podium, in the middle of which a snow-white sofa waits for the master. She flops down on the pillows and hits the microphone, so that the loudspeakers blare. The room is still now. “Okay, here I am.". She speaks English with a Vietnamese accent. . “And? What’s up? What do you want to know from me?" Today the master will answer questions--although the master does not love questions, and that is why it is normally forbidden to speak to the master. Only today is it not forbidden--but today no one dares. “Has anyone seen a good film recently, hm?” she asks. “I saw Mr. Bean.” she says immediately, because no one answers. “very funny. Very, very funny. Does anyone know the Mr. Bean film?” Hesitatingly, a disciple raises his hand. “Well, afterall,” the master says, “I like Mr. Bean because he looks like me.” Amused, she snorts in the microphone. “Just joking, hm? I don’t look like Mr. Bean. How does your master look? Well, come on, how?” She waves her right hand encouragingly. “Ahh!” rings out in the room instead of an answer. A woman in the first row cries with feeling. Suma Ching Hai giggles and on her face appears that mysterious asymmetrical grin that belongs only to the master. She is unable to move the left half of her face--the result of becoming paralyzed as a child. She has never said much about it. She is also a master of keeping silent about certain things. only a few know that she was born in the year 1952 in South Vietnam. That when she was eighteen she married an English engineer by the name of Thacker, who was stationed in Vietnam. That she followed him to Sheffield in South England, where she gave birth to a child. And that in 1972 they were both in an automobile accident, in which Hue was badly injured and Thacker lost his life. while Hue lay in the hospital, her mother-in-law deprived her of the right to care for her daughter. Hue left England and moved to Paris, so as, as she says, “to improve my French.” She learned it in various hotels and pensions, where she worked as a cleaning lady and maid. In 1975 she came to Munich. After a year in the nightclub “Trader Vic's” she and her boyfriend Frangois opened their own bar/restaurant. “But she didn’t like the job,” Frangois Germain remembers: “Every day she had a new idea, how she could become famous as a fashion designer, as a singer, as a poet or as a model.” Hue tried her luck as an extra. In the feature film Flitterwochen [Honeymoon] by the director Klaus Lemke she had, after all, a bedroom scenewith Wolfgang Feirek and Dolly Dollar. That was not her last film appearance. In her more than one hundred videos there is one star--herself. All appearances of the master are videotaped and sold to the disciples. At her London appearance stand two of the sect’s own cameramen in front of the stage. One zooms straight into the crowd. In the back rows a woman who is about forty-years-old stands up. On her [low] neckline burns a red spot that, as she speaks, slowly spreads to her chin. “Master. I ask on account of my husband. His third eye is kaputt [broken].” The master taps herself between the eyebrows--there, where her disciples believe the invisible eye is. During a strictly private initiation it was opened for them. Now they see during their daily meditation Buddha, Christ, and as they are all called. The belief in Suma Ching Hai makes all gods and prophets the same. “My husband gets headaches when he meditates,” the woman stammers, “he can’t sleep in bed next to me anymore. And also not any longer with me. 1 don’t know what to do, Master.” The master closes her left eye. She says: “That is serious. Does he have a job in which he has to think a lot?” The woman shakes her head. Well, after all. Too much thinking is bad,” the master says. She takes a mineral water bottle from the table next to the couch, unscrews the cap, and peers into the bottle. “Maybe we have a little magic drink, hm?” The master dips her index finger into the liquid and screws the cap back on. “Okay. Rub a little bit of the water on his forehead every day and pray to some god, yes? The pains will go away, okay?” ‘The woman stares at the master. “Here. There, take. For you.” Applause. The womanstands up, stumbles, meanwhile turkey-red, to the mistress’s lace- covered sofa and picks up the half-liter bottle of volvic. The cameraman follows. Hue had not had any formal experience with religion, says her former boyfriend Frangois Germain. Hue discovered Buddhism rather by chance--as a possibility to make social contacts. Since she began living in Munich, she had tried to make contact with the Vietnamese community. The then leader of a Buddhist student group (“Please do not reveal my name, I do not want any trouble with her.”) remembers an obtrusive woman, who always grabbed the microphone at student meetings. She called herself Ching, sang Vietnamese pop songs and recited her own love poems. It was embarrassing. Allegedly she also wanted to study Buddhism--in reality she was after our men. In 1978 Hue worked as an interpreter in the Munich-Allach Vietnamese refugee camp. Here she was better received than she had been by the arrogant students. A then colleague, a woman doctor named Dr. N, describes her as “kind, but a little bit crazy. A constantly chattering, much too colorful, almost ordinarily dressed person, she took care of her countrymen and at the same time was equipped with a sure sense of theatricality. Hue literally gave the refugees the clothes off her back. Her dedication/commitment became apparent: Soon she was a boardmember of the refugee home. After an “excursion to the zoo with Prominent individuals” her picture even appeared in a women’s magazine. In the photo Hue stood between two prominent people: Petra Schiirmann and Rex Gildo. “I believe that was and is the most important thing for her,” says the doctor, “that she mingleswith truly famous people. For that she would give away all the money she has.” “Master!” someone calls from the crowd in the London conference xoom, “Master, what was the reason for the gift of millions of dollars to Bill Clinton?” The master stops short, looks across the room to see who has spoken, apparently not a member. Then she hits the table. “What’s the idea of bringing that up?” Now she is sour. One can understand her annoyance, because the story with the most powerful man in the western world had begun well. In 1996 a sect member named Charlie Trie worked as a fundraiser for Clinton. Trie was an old acquaintance of the president from Little Rock, Arkansas, where he owned a restaurant at which the Clintons enjoyed dining. rie told Suma Ching Hai about the Clintons’ financial needs, of their debts from the trials concerning the Whitewater real estate scandal and the sexual harassment lawsuit. The master decided to help the President of the United States--with six hundred checks for a over a thousand dollars each, allegedly donated from American members of the sect. It became a scandal when it turned out that the checks were successively numbered and had each been filled out in the same handwriting. Moreover, many of the donors were too poor to spare even a hundred dollars. So wurde nichts aus der milden Gabe. [So nothing would become of the charitable donation.] “I want to say something to you all,” called the mistress, "I could have met Clinton recently, but to what purpose? I thought that after the election he would help the Vietnamese refugees. But he has not.” Ever the master. Her appearances at refugee camps are7 famous. Her ambitious project is connected with the boat people: She wants to buy land with which Vietnamese refugees can found a new state. Many Asian politicians have therefore met with her, among others the dictator’s widow Imelda Marcos, allegedly a close acquaintance of the master. “For what purpose do I need Clinton? I have more money than he. Much more!” For twenty years Hue’s world was much smaller. In the Munich- Allach refugee camp she met her second husband, who worked there as a doctor. Hue now had the last name Wallenstatter and was unbelievably proud of her husband's title as doctor. The Wallenstatters lived in Obermenzing. Hues altar stood in the living room. She was now a practicing Buddhist. In addition she rehearsed her first public appearances. She taught vegetarian cooking at the Munich Volkshochschule [adult evening classes]. Rudolf Wallenstatter thinks back with fondness on his “lovely time” with Hue: “We often had guests, but it actually didn’t matter who came, in the end she [Hue] was always the center.” In 1982 Hue shaved her head, burned in effigy her conversion smoked candles on her head. Her master, one of the most famous Buddhists in Germany, had found her worthy of being ordained a monk. “I had many students. She worked seriously. No one could foresee what she would become.” Tiech- Nu-Dien, today the abbot of the Buddhist Pagoda in Hannover, sometimes feels as if he must apologize for his former pupil. He didn’t know that Hue also looked around in the esoteric scene. The German middle class had just discovered the New age. Here Hue made an acquaintance that changed her life. One day a German married couple appeared in the Wallenstatterapartment. Both were emissaries of the Indian guru Thakar Singh. Singh was a former government employee who had declared himself a follower of the Sikh leader Kirpal Singh and wore a Rauschebart [a long, flowing beard?}. He predicted the imminent end of the world and taught the Shabd Yoga, a type of meditation through which the third eye is opened. In addition, he had many German admirers and supporters, among whom was Gerda Achternbusch, the ex-wife of the German filmmaker. Years later Singh attained a certain fame when a television report about the guru accused him of raping his female followers during meditation sessions and even of murdering one of them. In addition, in his Ashram in New Delhi he forced hundreds of small children to take part in twenty-hour-long meditations with the goal of creating “deified humans.” Hue should, so her German representatives recommended, become Thakar Singh’s student. That was the big chance. As in every public appearance, the master uses the show at the University in London to intitiate a few new disciples, among whom are two small Vietnamese boys, a six-year-old and a seven-year old. An employee of the master will lead the two to a side room and cut their thumbnails. Then they must swear to inform no outsiders of the details of the ritual. Otherwise a terrible, perhaps deadly punishment is in store for them. According to the will of the Master that should be the most beautiful day of a new life. One thing is certain: It [the day] will have consequences. First the Master removes bad karma; then the employee will teach the disciples to hold their thumbs in their ears and their fingers before their eyes while reciting the mantra, “Namo Ching Hai wu Shang Shi” (I revere the very highestq master Ching Hai), until they feel the “Guanyin,” the inner godly stream of sound. The psychologists Gabriele Niebel and Reiner Hanewinkel described in a testimonial from the University of Kiel in 1997 the consequences of these extreme forms of meditation. The endless repetition of a mantra has the sole intention of interrupting the natural stream of thought and isolating the mind from the outside world. This arrest of thought stimulates the cerebral cortex in the way in which it is stimulated during states of dreaming and can lead to hallucinations/delusions, and in grave cases even to epilepsy-like states and total loss of reality. Findings that the master regards as nonsense. Two million disciples see it the way she does: They meditate two and half hours a day and manicure their thumbnails once a week. For their entire lives they follow the commandments of the master: no stealing, no lying, no killing. No meat, no drugs, no sexual indecency. The Ching-Hai-Religion, so writes the evangelical Berliner Dialog, counts worldwide as one of the fastest growing cults. Berlin, Diisseldorf, Hamburg, and Munich already have Ching Hai centers. In Fall 1982 Hue explained to her husband that she would go “forever in homelessness”--that meant to Singh. He tried to get her back, Rudolf Wallenst&tter says. He went to New Delhi; he hardly recognized Hue anymore: “She looked terrible, she was haggard, and her hair was a complete mess, but she said she was doing well. She would learn a lot. She left me standing in the street. Hue stayed with Thakar Singh for a year. Subsequently she10 went to America, and from there to Asia. She was now Singh's representative and gave lectures in his name. one must imagine the teaching and wandering years as the development of a star performer, says Willi Réder, one of the few cult experts in Germany who have concerned themselves closely with the Ching Hai Phenomenon. “She tours through the provinces and meets her public. Disciples, as she herself once was. People, who search for subjugation. She notices that the disciples do everything for her. She learns how to use them. Until it is at some point time for the really big show.” In 1986 it is time. Hue turns up in Taiwan. She gives up Buddhism and has herself christened with the name Suma Ching Hai. Then she makes herself independent with her own religion. Her doctrine, Taoism, Christianity, and Buddhism used as a collection of quotations, and her meditation methods, which she borrowed from the Indian guru Singh, she spreads throughout all of Asia. After a tax incident she turned her back on her chosen home of Taiwan. She lives, although as of now not very many people have seen it, in a tent in changing locations. On her snow-white sofa at the University in London the master tells meanwhile of Jesus, who--like she herself--merely abided by God's direction. “It is exactly the same as with Buddha, yes?” she says, “therefore some people also say Buddha to me. As far as I’m concerned, you can call me what you want. But seriously--do I look like him? Like Buddha? I don’t have a bald head, I’m not so fat, hm? Hm? I’m better looking. Much better, no?”