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The Observer Buddhism

Buddhist, teacher, predator: dark

secrets of the Triratna guru
British-born guru Sangharakshita was mired in
allegations of abuse for years. Now it seems the
scandal in his wealthy order went far wider than
previously acknowledged

Sangharakshita in 1966. Photograph: John Twine/ANL/REX/Shutterstock

Jamie Doward
Sun 21 Jul 2019 08.59 BST

Coddington Court, near the Herefordshire market town of

Ledbury, is a late-18th-century red brick mansion surrounded
by farmland.

These days it goes by the name of Adhisthana, reflecting its

reincarnation as the headquarters of one of the most
influential Buddhist orders in the world, the Triratna
Community, whose founder, Sangharakshita, lived there
until his death last year at the age of 93. With its impressive
grounds and gardens, it looks like a serene place for someone
to spend their final years. But behind the scenes, the picture
is a rather more turbulent one.

For decades the order has been dogged by claims of sexual

misconduct, claims that often strayed into allegations of
coercion and abuse but which were thought to involve only a
handful of individuals at worst.

But now a bombshell internal report, produced by concerned

members and shared with the Observer, has found that more
than one in 10 of them claim to have experienced or observed
sexual misconduct while in the order. Many of the allegations
are against Sangharakshita himself, but others make it clear
that he was not the only alleged perpetrator. Indeed, the
report seems to indicate that the licentious culture the guru
encouraged when he established his first centre in the 1960s,
at a time when Timothy Leary was urging people to “turn on,
tune in, drop out”, flourished across the order.

Yet, despite the lurid revelations, Sangharakshita’s influence

lingers. The Adhisthana website carries many pictures of
him, a bespectacled, slight man draped in holy robes. The
photographs invite comparisons with Gandhi, but the two
gurus come from very different backgrounds.

Born Dennis Lingwood, the son of a French polisher from

Tooting, Sangharakshita, meaning “one who is protected by
the spiritual community”, deserted from the British army in
India during the second world war and wandered the
subcontinent, studying with several leading Tibetan lamas.
 Adhisthana (formerly Coddington Court) in Herefordshire is the
headquarters of the Triratna Community.

Two decades on, he returned to London at the invitation of a

group of Buddhists in Hampstead, with a mission to set up
one of Britain’s first monasteries, before leaving for reasons
that are disputed. Some claim that he was caught using rent
boys, an allegation that the Triratna community said it had
not heard before. At the time of his departure, the
Hampstead group issued a statement that said: “Whatever
may have been said to the detriment of his character in the
course of recent speculation and gossip may now be
withdrawn.”

Venturing out on his own, Lingwood developed his own,

highly interpretative brand of Buddhism, drawing on
elements of Nietzsche and Freud. Critics would accuse him of
a pushing a “semi-intellectual potpourri of Buddhism” but he
shrugged off the attacks, claiming he was helping the religion
find new followers in the west.

Many of his ideas were unorthodox. Lingwood encouraged

heterosexual followers to experiment with homosexuality as
a means of expanding their minds; he was deeply critical of
the nuclear family and of mixed-sex communities in general;
he encouraged young men to break away from their families.

“I think the son has to cut free and maybe not have much to
do with his parents for a year or two,” he once explained.

His thinking struck a chord.

“There was something anarchic and anti-establishment
about it,” one man who has been a member since the late 80s
told the Observer. “I’d seen the rows my parents had, how
they’d tried to amass money and it hadn’t helped them. I
decided that the nuclear family didn’t work for me. I didn’t
want the get-married-get-a job narrative. I was looking for
something different and what it offered helped me.”

Sangharakshita, born Dennis Lingwood, teaching at the Hampstead

Buddhist Temple in 1966. Photograph: John Twine/Rex

As a growing number of predominantly young men flocked to

Triratna, then called the Friends of the Western Buddhist
Order (FWBO), it expanded dramatically. Today it has more
than 30 centres in the UK alone and operates in 26 countries.

Thousands mourned Lingwood when his funeral was

broadcast at Triratna centres around the world. His obituary
in the Times suggested that he had arguably done “more than
any other person to popularise Buddhism in the west”.

But fissures within the community he founded are now

becoming major fault lines. An internal report by nine
disaffected members, who call themselves the Interkula,
makes troubling reading about the order’s historical
safeguarding policies and the duty of care it had to its
followers.

Its incendiary findings have hitherto gone unpublicised: a

current member explained that it was not the Triratna way to
share internal criticisms with the outside world. But they
were drawn to the Observer’s attention by a former member
who claims he was manipulated into having sex with
Lingwood.

Of 423 respondents to a survey featured in the report, of

whom two-thirds are order members and a quarter are
“Mitras” – followers who may aspire to become order
members – 55, around 13%, said that either they themselves,
or someone they knew, had “experienced sexual misconduct
by either Sangharakshita or other Triratna order members, in
past and recent times”.

The report, which acknowledges that “some good progress”

has been made in responding to the allegations, an approach
the order describes as a “restorative process”, states: “While
many respondents described misconduct between a more
experienced male OM [order member] and less experienced
male Mitra, as has been described many times in the past,
other types of misconduct were also reported, including male
order members becoming sexually involved with very
vulnerable women … and inappropriate behaviour by a
female order member.”

Some of the comments in the report are damning. One order

member of more than 15 years said: “I know of several cases
and the details are awful. They include alleged intervention
on the part of one of the most high-profile OMs to try and
encourage a victim not to testify to the police if questioned.”

Another said: “Yes, I know three OMs personally who

experienced sexual misconduct by other OMs and have not
been invited to participate in the restorative process.”

A third said: “I was sexually abused by older order members.”

A fourth added: “I know of four people who this describes.

Only one of these was in the UK. I worry that this type of
behaviour was much more widespread than generally
believed.”

“I have friends who were sexually assaulted by senior OMs in

recent times,” another said. “They reported it to other senior
OMs. Nothing happened.”

It was not just men who were targeted.

“I know of a couple of women ‘friends of the movement’ who
were pursued by male order members … both very
vulnerable women – one ex-prison[er] pursued and one
severe mental health problems – entered into sexual
relationship with.”

Some of those who completed the survey questioned

Triratna’s appetite for investigating the abuse.

“I think there is a large denial factor … I’m up for selling

assets and making amends as part of us moving on and
acknowledging our ignorance of the abuse,” one said.

If it came to that, and several law firms have floated the idea
of bringing claims against Triratna, it would certainly have
assets to sell. The latest accounts of its charitable arm, the
Triratna Preceptors’ College Trust, reveal that in 2017, the
most recent figures available, it alone was sitting on net
assets worth more than £3.3m. It bought Adhisthana several
years ago for a rumoured £5m.

But this is only part of the picture. The accounts explain that
the trust acts as a hub for dozens of charities that operate in
the UK and overseas. One member told the Observer that, in
Cambridge alone, Triratna had eight or nine properties worth
between £700,000 and £2m each. Another member
suggested that its entire property empire was worth more
than £100m.

It helps that the order is a charity and enjoys tax perks. And
the fact that its members are often happy to work in its
bookshops or cafes for very little helps keep its cost base low.

Today, much of the trust’s income comes from donations and

organising spiritual retreats and meditation courses. Its
position at the vanguard of the fashionable mindfulness
movement was cemented four years ago when several of its
leading members helped a cross-party group of MPs produce
their influential Mindful Nation UK report, which extolled the
benefits of the new psychological approach in treating
mental health problems such as depression.
 Mark Dunlop, now 69, was a victim at the Triratna Buddhist community.
Photograph: Rosa Furneaux/The Observer

Mark Dunlop left the order in 1985 after many years working
for it. A heterosexual man, he felt compelled to have sexual
relations with Lingwood over a four-year period. “He didn’t
have any charisma,” Dunlop said. “He was a slightly weird
guy, in a way that worked in his favour because I thought:
‘I’m not being swayed by his charisma.’

“One theory about narcissists is that they have experienced

some kind of trauma in their childhood so they don’t have
any confidence in themselves, and they create this whole
world as a compensation and manipulate other people to
build up their own ego.

“That fits with how Lingwood behaved. He built up this

fantasy of himself as a spiritual teacher, someone on a higher
plane of understanding, but I always sensed he wasn’t a
happy bunny. There was a sense of dissatisfaction lying
underneath. I felt sorry for him, in a way. That’s one of the
reasons I wanted to help him bring Buddhism to the west.”

It now seems that Lingwood’s behaviour provided a template

that was copied by others who exploited the order’s
hierarchy. Many who came to it seeking enlightenment
aspired to become members. But this made them vulnerable
to coercion by those in senior positions.

“There was a general feeling around at the time that you were
‘blocked’ if you had an aversion to gay sex,” one former
member recalled in an online forum.
One Triratna retreat, in Norfolk, where Lingwood was
resident for much of the 80s, was described by the member
as “more reminiscent of a San Francisco gay bath-house than
a Buddhist retreat”.

A current member told the Observer that in the early 90s a 17-
year-old boy with obvious mental health problems ended up
in a sexual relationship with an order member in his 40s
when residing at a centre in the south-east.

Five years ago, an order member at another centre in London

was caught exposing himself to a young child in a
supermarket. After being found to have committed several
similar offences, he was suspended indefinitely.

Misconduct has also been reported at centres overseas. One

woman who attended an FWBO centre in New Zealand in the
90s said: “There was one ordained member when I was there
who seemed to treat the centre as his own personal Tinder
app, hooking up with one woman after another, using his
position as guru to great advantage.”

Concerns were first raised about the order in a BBC news

report in the early 90s, and then again in 1997 when the
Guardian revealed sexual misconduct at one of its centres, in
Croydon, south London. That exposé prompted the
resignation of one member of the order.

In response to the Guardian’s report, one of the order’s senior

members, Kulananda, wrote to the paper stressing that the
abuse was confined to one centre and one individual. But in a
blog posting 20 years later, Kulananda confirmed hehad been
in a sexual relationship with Lingwood and that he had come
to see that the guru’s behaviour towards others had
engendered a “cultish-ness at the heart of things that, I
believe, will ultimately be our downfall”.

The FWBO Files website contains a vast and growing

repository of allegations from ex-members expressing similar
views.

Towards the end of his life, Lingwood appears to have

acknowledged the damage he had unleashed, expressing
“deep regret for all the occasions on which I have hurt,
harmed or upset fellow Buddhists”. But, even today, the
order seems unwilling to confront its past head on: Triratna
now describes Lingwood’s behaviour as “unskilful”, a key
Buddhist term, but one which, to outsiders, seems to
underplay the consequences of his predatory actions.

The order’s safeguarding officer, who goes by the spiritual

name Munisha, insisted the order had learned lessons from
past mistakes and said every Triratna centre in the UK now
has a safeguarding officer.

“I’m extremely sorry if misconduct reported to any member

of the order was not properly addressed at the time,” she
said. “The Interkula’s survey includes accounts of
misconduct which we would be keen to address. However,
some of these are references to misconduct experienced by
unnamed others, and we can only address a case where a
named complainant is willing to tell us their story first hand.

“It is the policy of Triratna’s central safeguarding team that

anything reported to us of a criminal – or even potentially
criminal – nature is reported to the police, without
exception.”

She confirmed that one of the order’s most senior members,

Suvajra, who some had seen as a potential successor to
Sangharakshita, had been “suspended in December 2018
after a rigorous internal disciplinary panel process found on a
balance of probabilities that serious ethical misconduct had
taken place.” She declined to explain the nature of the alleged
misconduct.

Lingwood, of course, escaped such censure in his lifetime,

enjoying the tranquillity of his final years cosseted away in
the idyillic setting of Coddington Court, feted by his
followers. Perhaps, though, in the twilight of his life, he
anticipated that a higher judgment awaited him. His
translation of a Buddhist text – Verses that Protect the Truth –
was read out at his funeral.

One verse must have given him pause for thought: “Lead a
righteous life, not one that is corrupt. The righteous live
happily, both in this world and the next.”
 Sangharakshita interviewed in 2009. Photograph: Vimeo

‘Leaving mother’: the group credo

Key extracts from Leaving Mother and Initiation into

Manhood, a document written by a senior member of the
Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in the 1970s and
shared down the years within the order. The document
reflects and helped shape the order’s thinking and confirms
that much of Lingwood’s more controversial teachings were
embraced and promoted by others.

“An initiation into manhood, then, is an experiential

situation in which the false man dies in order that the true
men may be born. The young man has to realise that he must
submit and become totally passive to that which will liberate
him from the domination of his mother.”

“Having abandoned the world of mother and all that it

implies, the young man can now begin to realise that his
assertiveness is natural to him and that it is no longer an act
that he has to put on.”

“Many ‘mummy’s boys’ have a fear of passivity in a

homosexual relationship even though that is what they may
naturally want.”

“I would even go so far as to suggest that taking the passive

role in a homosexual relationship could, for some men,
constitute an initiation into manhood as (a) the man is
surrendering his own pseudo-assertive side and therefore
undergoing a sort of symbolic death, and (b) is experiencing
his sexuality in a situation that is free from women and all
their associations (ie, emotional dependency).”

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