The Coordinated Global Operation Behind One Maine Pier
The pier is slick with saltwater and thick with Portland tourists, doing what tourists do at Maine piers — eating lobster rolls, taking pictures of the buoys, tall ships, and the working boats coming into the harbor from the haul. Then, the ceremony begins. Maroon robed men and western nuns around a main Lama, as the pungent Tibetan incense swirls up into the sea breeze, while a small crowd of devoted Western students and curious onlookers watch. The crates of live lobsters purchased that morning were to be ‘blessed’ and lowered back into the sea. So the merit from their liberation would ripple outward and improve the karmic circumstances of everyone involved in the ritual or who had donated to its event, online (Mangala Shri Bhuti Crestone Colorado, 2026).
The tourists loved it. What could be more Buddhist than saving a lobster? It was one of the reasons someone like me, who had always saved bugs instead of stomping on them, had joined this motherlode of all cults, so many years ago. What could be more compassionate than a lama in maroon robes leaning over lobsters and murmuring a prayer? It is tender, photogenic, and makes a story people would take home, with the view that mainstream media reinforces for the last 45 years, that these Tibetan lamas are just humble monks, modeling peace and compassion, unselfishly. Victims of CCP China, instead of their soft power now around the world.
Because what the tourists don’t know — because no one in the small crowd of western devotees, coordinating this event, was going to tell them, is what the doctrinal heavy load underneath this scene is about.
I had spent nearly thirty years inside this tradition, with the same Lamas that produced this ritual out of their teachings, explicitly for Westerners. That Maine’s lobstermen were to be seen through the prism of accumulating very bad karma through their trade, therefore in a future life, would come back as the very lobsters they had trapped. It was a constant the Lamas had been telling us, about lobstermen, and lobsters for three decades.
The release ritual on the pier was not, in its own mysticism, a rescue of lobsters. It was a warning delivered to the men on the boats and the audience: your work is spiritually debased, compassion capsized, and the merit of undoing your “bad livelihood” labor accrues now to us.
The lobsters would be back in traps within the week, because the ecology of economics does not respond to prayers and incantations. While the men on the boats would remain the loudest political opposition to the environmental regulatory apparatus that would, if it succeeded, empty the harbor of these lobstermen permanently. The ritual could not save the lobsters. It was not designed to save the lobsters. It was designed to soften the ground under these men who were protesting the destruction of their livelihoods being replaced by windmills and geopolitical regulations.
I stood on that pier and now understood, with the clarity that only ten years of hindsight can deliver, what my book had tried to convey the first time and why it failed. The book had described a tradition based on the teachings and beliefs of an 8th century religio-political culture. It had also described what the tradition does when it is weaponized and let loose in a country whose 21st century people have no vocabulary for what it is.
I published Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism in 2017.1 It was the account of a woman who had been inside Tibetan Buddhism for nearly thirty years — inside deeply, at the level of tantric initiation, formal practice, community life, and the kind of intimate access to teachers that produces both the loyalty of the true believer, and the eye of the witness. I described the Vajrayana structure the way a systems’ engineer describes a machine. The mindfulness hook. The bodhisattva vows. The samaya vow. The guru at the center. The absolute prohibition against critical thought about the teacher or your “real family” of brothers and sisters, the vajra sangha, sold as required devotion and oaths taken to join a special “club” of the very special people who found and believed that these amazing Lamas were going to save the world and us from samsara; if we obeyed them without question and spread their word. The theological escape hatch of upaya, “skillful means,” which permits a teacher under the Vajrayana dictum to lie, steal, cheat, sexually and physically exploit a student when combined with the “Tantric Law of Inversion” judged to advance the student’s spiritual development — a conviction the teacher is uniquely qualified to make, and the student is, by definition, forever unqualified to question. It is the doctrinal architecture that allows a “graduated” monk or western student in the Vajrayana; the so-called “3rd turning of the Wheel” of Hindutva Tantra — nothing the historical Buddha ever taught — to break every one of his vows and be elevated in the hierarchy, as long as the breach is understood as a teaching that invokes the Lamas’ ability to pour his dharma into a ‘now empty vessel’. There are now thousands of monks that graduate into the Vajrayana and started centers, foundations, and fund-raising websites of their own; devoted to a ritual apparatus that trains a Western or Tibetan mind, over years, to mistake complete submission for insight and maybe enlightenment in this life if they obey without question the Lama in front of them as the “Big Mind” of all the Tibetan Lamas, throughout centuries.
I said, in 2014, on my website extibetanbuddhist.com, that these were not decorative features of an exotic religion. I said they were the operating instructions for a system of global coercive control, and that these structures were being installed inside our governments, academia, and American middle-class minds, one weekend retreat at a time. I said that the abuse stories that were surfacing and resurfacing then — Trungpa’s alcoholism, drug use, and harem of obedient females, Ösel Tenzin, Trungpa’s HIV-spreading late Regent, the whispers around Trungpa’s son, Sakyong Mipham, or circling Sogyal Rinpoche — were not aberrations produced by individually flawed men. They were the predictable output and outcome of the inherent structure of Tantra teachings moving forward, as designed.
I said all of this before Sogyal’s third exposure and cover-up by media since 1994, and final collapse. I said it before Sakyong Mipham’s sadistic and abusive behavior was NY Times front-page news, and later removal. I said it when NXIVM’s Sara Bronfman helped install Keith Raniere in the Dalai Lama’s photographic embrace in Albany in 2009 — a piece of ubiquitous laundering I describe in the book while the Dalai Lama endorsements were still a bragging point in 2017 rather than scandal (Chandler, 2018). I said it before the 17th Karmapa’s Beijing question became a matter of public interest again. I said it before the Vow documentaries and the Frank Report and the Times and Guardian exposés and the resignation letters. I said it while there was still a functioning consensus in polite American life that the Dalai Lama was a saint, that his mindfulness meditation was medicine, and led to a happy life, and that Tibetan Buddhism was the one Asian tradition that had somehow arrived in the West uncorrupted.
The book did not sell well. That was not an accident.
What happened to the book after publication is a story I am only now able to tell with the hard-earned calm of distance. The suppression was both centralized, but under the radar and not dramatic. It was ambient. It was a slow closure of doors — the review outlets that would not touch it, the bookstores that would not stock it, the podcast hosts, here in the United States, who booked me and then quietly cancelled, the once friends inside the community who would be told I was a dangerous ‘heretic’ and to avoid the book, as I had been told in that Sukhavati ceremony audience to not read Stephen Butterfield’s mild exposé on Trungpa’s Regent (Butterfield, 1994). On all platforms whose algorithms seemed to have opinions about certain kinds of titles.
The most instructive piece for this censure to occur was from ICSA, the International Cultic Studies Association, which is the closest thing the English-speaking world has to a scholarly clearinghouse on high-demand groups. ICSA published a review of my book. Its editor-in-chief at the time was Eileen Barker, a British sociologist of religion whose Frankfurt School 2 influence and career-long project has been the destabilization of the word “cult” as an analytic category. Barker has spent decades arguing, in effect, that most groups labeled cults are simply new religious movements that mainstream society misunderstands. Whatever one thinks of that argument in the abstract, it produces a certain kind of book review when applied to a memoir of Tibetan Lamaist institutional cult abuse.
The ICSA review of Enthralled — in its original form, before later revision — described me variously as a Fundamentalist Christian (I am not), as a woman scorned (a phrase whose deployment against female critics of male religious leaders is old enough to have its own body of literature), and as a source better skipped in favor of June Campbell’s Traveller in Space (Campbell, 1996), the far more academic 1996 study of Kalu Rinpoche’s abuses. Campbell’s book is a fine book. It is also, by design, dense enough that it never posed a mass-market threat. Mine did, briefly, and the review industrial complex was calibrated to steer readers toward the safer, older book and away from the one that might reach ordinary Americans. The ICSA review of my book was later revised, softened somewhat, in ways that suggest the initial misinformed calibration had been noticed. But by then, the referral pattern was set and continued.
The blog attacks arrived next. The Artvoice comment threads. The rebuttal posts on Rigpa-adjacent websites. Two of the more sustained critics, Mary Finnigan and a European Buddhism-devotee and watcher I will refer to only by initial, RH, obtained my manuscript and attacked the writing itself — the book was repetitive, it was overwrought, it needed a stronger editor. Some of that critique had a grain of truth. I had written repetitively on purpose, because I was trying to undo forty years of doctrinal encoding in a reader’s mind, and I understood that dissolving a spell of massive public programming and a Nobel Prize, given to the head of what I was dissecting as a coercive cult, required more than a single reading at a time. Particularly, when a critical mass of people was not reading lengthy materials anymore. But the point of this critique was not to improve the book. The point was to give reviewers permission to dismiss it without engaging its substance. When the ad hominem attacks failed — and they did fail, because nothing I had written was disprovable, and my central accusations were all documented or firsthand — the fallback was style when you can’t critique content. She wrote too much. She wrote too plainly. She was not scholarly enough. She was too scholarly. Read the other book instead.
I understand now that this is what censorship looks like in a literate culture. It is not a big bonfire burning, like the Karma Kagyu sect did with Erik Curren’s Buddha’s Not Smiling (Curren, 2005) at a public protest in Gangtok, Sikkim, India in February 2011 (Columns / Washington and Lee, 2011). It is a slow diversion of pedestrian traffic.
Ten years on, the more painful part of the story is not the suppression. It is the roll call of the people who might have sounded the alarm with me and did not.
The oldest example of this now-predictable response is not one of my own contemporaries. Elaine Dewar’s Cloak of Green (Dewar, 1995), published in 1995 — twenty years before Enthralled — was the first serious account of the Globalist network binding the mainstream environmental movement to industrial and political power, with Maurice Strong at its center. I was describing the interfaith spiritual complex Strong, and his wife Hanne had built at Baca-Crestone, Colorado as one of its softer instruments. Dewar’s book described the machinery I was, at that time, still living inside. The response it received was the response mine would receive two decades later. Foundations pulled their cooperation. Fellow environmentalists rejected the account. Reviews steered readers elsewhere. Dewar has continued to write bravely, on other establishment-protected subjects — the pharmaceutical industry, forensic anthropology, most recently the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. But she has not returned, with the same intensity, to the environmental soft-power material she first exposed. That is not a failure of nerve. It is what the mechanism does to the person who has been caught in it once. Cloak of Green was where I first saw the geopolitical shape of what I was inside. Its subsequent absence from the mainstream environmental canon is the pattern’s oldest published example.
The critics who broke Sogyal — the women of What Now? and the journalists who spent years covering Rigpa — did important work. Several of them then went on to attack me and defend the teachers they had trained under, including Namkhai Norbu and the broader Dzogchen lineage, as if the abuse structure they had exposed at Rigpa were somehow specific to Sogyal rather than endemic to the tradition that produced him. The samaya vow that had held Sogyal’s students in place is the same samaya vow that holds their fellow devotees under the thrall of other Lamas, and the Dalai Lama, in place. The theological warning is identical. The willingness to see it in the guru they had exposed and refuse to see it in the guru they had kept is not an inconsistency. It is a symptom of the same structure operating one “degree of separation” away.
The more clinical-psychology and anti-cult community, which had once been a source of allies, went quiet in a different way. Between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s, mindfulness moved from the meditation cushion into the therapist’s office, then into the hospital, then into the insurance code. MBSR became a credential. MBCT became a treatment. Mindfulness-based interventions were folded into the billing structure of American mental health. Colleagues who had once been more than willing to name coercive religious cults, stopped being willing to do so with respect to Tibetan ‘Buddhism’, because the practices they had adopted for their own clinical use had the same source. To name the source was to indict their own credentials. They were in a real moral bind. But after connecting with the amoral Lamaism’s “no good no bad” through the “mindfulness hook,” it wasn’t long before it wasn’t a problem anymore.
The Shambhala scandal and pseudo-reckoning of 2018, which I had waited for, arrived at last — and turned out to be run largely by Shambhala members. The legal actions were framed as accountability but structured as settlements with lawyers’ fees. And no consequences for the perpetrators. The organization survived, its lineage teachings intact, its structural vow apparatus untouched. The names at the top changed. The machine did not. Sakyong Mipham announced a return to teaching within a few years, to a still-loyal core. And the new recruits whose news is now censoring serious investigative journalism, and whose memories are constantly bombarded to fade, let alone remember what happened, almost a decade ago. The reform was not a reform. It was a rebranding, executed by insiders who had every incentive to preserve what remained.
The Buddhist studies academic field, meanwhile, treated each new scandal as a discrete case study rather than as evidence of a system. This was not, in most cases, malice. It was the deep habit of a discipline whose funding, access, and career pipeline run through the very institutions the scandals implicated. A tenured Buddhologist who names the guru-tantra structure as coercive by design closes the door to fieldwork, translation partnerships, and the invitation list. Silence, again, was structurally rewarded.
The mainstream press — the Guardian, the Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker — eventually covered individual scandals but never assembled the cookie-cutter pieces that made up the whole picture. Sogyal was one story. Sakyong Mipham was another. NXIVM was a third. The Dalai Lama’s office suspending and then reinstating Lama Tenzin Dhonden after his affair with Sara Bronfman was a fourth. Each story was reported as a discrete anomaly. The pattern was never named, because the pattern touched too many sources the press depended on for other coverage. And, besides, the Lamas put out the narrative that they were not all one big ‘mafia’ of Lamas, under the Dalai Lama.
This is where the misdirection has been most successful. What appears from the outside as competing Tibetan Buddhist sects — Karma Kagyu, Nyingma, Sakya, Gelug, Shambhala, Rigpa — is, on the ground and behind the scenes, a coordinated single operation. The lineages united in purpose long ago; the apparent decentralization is the cover story. The lobster release on the Portland pier is not a Karma Kagyu event, or a Nyingma event, or a Shambhala event. Karma Kagyu Vajra Vidya devotees of Thrangu Rinpoche stand on that pier alongside Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche’s Nyingma Mangala Shri Bhuti students out of Crestone-Baca, Colorado. Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche — the mid-century Nyingma-and-Bön-adjacent tutor of the current generation of high Lamas across every sect — is the reason they blend. Thrangu Rinpoche himself was the tutor of most of the current Karma Kagyu high Lamas. I studied and went to retreats with all of them. The ‘mafia’ the Lamas deny is real, and I watched it built over thirty years.
The network reaches beyond the sanghas themselves. A cadre of Western and foreign CEOs likes the idea of a more passive, obedient middle- and working class that Buddhist countries can create. Not knowing that this was not Buddhism per se, but a Tantric vast arm that “tamed” their people throughout centuries, in very dramatic ways: cutting out tongues, limbs, and taking children as a tax to serve the monasteries or serve as a sexual consort for some sick old lama to steal her borrowed time from her life essence.
The women’s movement that had, in the same decade, brought down Weinstein and Cosby and Ailes stopped at the door of the meditation cushion. #MeToo did not cross the threshold of the dharma center. It has still not crossed that threshold in any significant and meaningful way. There is a reason for this, and the reason is that the American liberal cultural establishment — the same establishment that had absorbed mindfulness into its clinical practice and its corporate wellness programs and its parenting magazines and Sogyal’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying in Hospice Centers — could not indict guru abuse without indicting its own imported spiritual practice. The reckoning was refused because the reckoning would have cost something the community had already spent.
These are the people who should have sounded the alarm with me. The failure was not that they did not know. The failure was that they knew and had already been compromised by the very thing they would have had to name.
What the last decade has proved, in public, is what I described in 2014 while there was still an audience prepared to consider it disprovable.
Sogyal Rinpoche collapsed in 2017 in exactly the way my earlier blog and the book had predicted collapse would come — a mass letter from senior students describing what everyone inside had known for decades. He died in 2019 without ever standing trial and protected by every Tibetan High Lama and their western propaganda arm had at their immediate disposal. Also described fully in my book that was naming names. I knew them well. Sakyong Mipham was removed from teaching in 2018 following an internal Shambhala report that documented sexual misconduct and violence. But he is back by 2026 teaching as though nothing happened. Just like their bumper stickers ‘nothing happens’ said. Displayed on their cars in every major city in the late ’80s where they took up propaganda recruiting arms. Displayed right next to the Karma Kagyu lineage’s blue and yellow prayer flag. The lineage set up to take the Dalai Lama’s place (Karmapa, 2026).
NXIVM’s Keith Raniere was arrested in 2018, convicted in 2019, and is serving 120 years. Sara Bronfman remains at large; her sister Clare served time. The Dalai Lama’s “personal emissary for peace,” Lama Tenzin Dhonden, was suspended by the Office of His Holiness in October 2017 after his long affair with Sara Bronfman became public, then quietly reinstated in July 2019 by the Trustees of the Dalai Lama Foundation following an internal investigation that found insufficient evidence of the specific financial charges. The exoneration was narrow. The reinstatement was quieter than the suspension had been.
The 2009 Albany visit, which Tenzin arranged and which the Bronfmans partly funded, remains the most consequential piece of NXIVM’s laundering operation. The Dalai Lama placed a white ceremonial scarf on Keith Raniere in front of the cameras. Photographs of that event were circulated around the world, by NXIVM for years afterward, as proof of the group’s acceptability. Vulnerable young people, some of whom later ended up branded in DOS, first walked through the door because of the credential that scarf conferred. This is not conjecture. It is court record.
The 17th Karmapa question — Ogyen Trinley Dorje, recognized by both the Dalai Lama and by Beijing, whose 2000 escape from Tibet was celebrated in the West and questioned by some Tibet-watchers as too easy to be uncoordinated — has now been raised in serious outlets, not only in the Shugden press. The Karma Kagyu lineage’s Western students continue to consolidate under his authority. Whatever the nature of his relationship with the CCP — and it’s documented (Arnaud, 2014) — the operational fact is that a very large piece of Western Tibetan Buddhist devotion now flows through a figure whose loyalties are at minimum ambiguous. Many Bhutanese Lamas considered him a CCP spy but buckled under. They’ve been trained to obey. I was warned of this in 2006 at Crestone-Baca by a Drukpa Kagyu Bhutanese Lama — the Drukpa had held out the longest against the united-lineage push — shortly after Thrangu Rinpoche of Vajra Vidya circulated the letter formalizing the recognition across the Nyingma and Kagyu sects. With the Dalai Lama’s designation, the same will soon be true of the Gelug. Some in India suspected he was the replacement by the Chinese CCP of his more unruly brother. As this one was about 10 years older, as physically documented when he arrived, than the “14-year-old escapee” they reported. A twenty-four-year-old would be more suspicious. The medical documentation exists on record. In April 2000, a five-doctor panel at PGI Chandigarh (Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences) conducted a full physical examination on the newly arrived Karmapa (Batth, 2000). Those records were subpoenaed in a 2003 Indian High Court proceeding — Justice R.C. Chorpa summoned the Dalai Lama, the 17th Karmapa, Tai Situ Rinpoche of Rumtek Monastery, and PGI itself to produce them — after a member of the Karma Kagyu school filed suit alleging the medical records showed him significantly older than the Dalai Lama’s certificate claimed (Phayul, 2003).
The Dalai Lama’s own family history with the CIA — a matter of public record since his elder brother Gyalo Thondup published The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong (Thondup, 2015), in which he laid out the two-decade CIA-funded resistance operations he ran through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s — is still not part of the standard American understanding of “who the Dalai Lama is.” That the leading Western symbol of nonviolent spirituality had a brother who ran armed resistance operations funded by American intelligence is not, in itself, an indictment. It is a piece of the picture whose absence from the picture is the point. The Dalai Lama the American liberal knows is a construction, and much of what has been edited out of that construction is not conjecture. It is bibliography.
The mindfulness industry has become a deep-seated category of the American economy. Headspace, Calm, corporate wellness programs, MBSR clinics in hospital systems, school-district contemplative curricula. The delivery vehicle is now secular. The source code is not. It runs on the same theological medieval occult apparatus that ran through Naropa Institute and Karmé Chöling and Rigpa and Shambhala Institute, minus the maroon robes.
And in the small places, in ordinary American life, the picture I described in 2014 on my website/blog has become ambient in a way that would have been hard to imagine when I first published.
In the town where I live in Maine, I hear ferry passengers casually discussing their guru yoga practice on the commute from the Islands to Portland. I watch homeowners’ associations hire long-time Thrangu Rinpoche devotees (the same group that organize the anti-lobstermen “life-release” rituals) as “conflict resolution” consultants. I read the resumes of local therapists and psychologists — the ones who used to boast about their training and affiliations with Chögyam Trungpa’s Shambhala International (Vajradhatu) lineage, or of one of the Rinpoches living off Trungpa’s early infiltration of New England and Nova Scotia coastlines — and I notice that those credentials have quietly disappeared since 2018. The scrub is nearly universal. The commitments were not renounced. The evidence of them was cleaned up.
I watch the two guru-tantra streams that had once been culturally separate — the Tibetan Vajrayana lineages and the Hindu tantric-adjacent yoga world — begin to share a customer funnel through the yoga studios of Portland and Lewiston. Lamas who had once been visible now teach online, out of view, while their Western students run the retreat centers and the studios and the mindfulness and Tantra certifications. The Regent’s students run a Dzogchen Tantra center in Maine that’s infiltrated into college wellness centers with their mindfulness brand hook. The infrastructure is more diffuse than it was in 2014, and therefore harder to see. The reach is much larger. This is not what withdrawal looks like. This is what winning looks like when warnings are suppressed and reframed as ‘crazy’, ‘too angry’ and ‘off the mark’ by those who are still under a spell they are reinforcing themselves as the cost too heavy to pay of waking up.
This essay is published during the week of the 2026 Maine Lobster Festival at Rockland, where the ritual described in these pages will find its most visible modern parallel — in the anti-lobster-industry protests staged by activist groups whose vocabulary comes from the same soft-power infrastructure this essay documents. What you will see on the Rockland pier this week is not organic environmental conscience. It is the ambient afterlife of thirty years of tantric conditioning, playing out in real time in a Maine harbor.
— Christine Chandler
Works Cited
Batth, Poonam. “Karmapa’s Tests Normal: PGI.” The Tribune (Chandigarh, India), April 12, 2000. https://www.tribuneindia.com/2000/20000412/cth1.htm
Butterfield, Stephen. The Double Mirror: A Skeptical Journey into Buddhist Tantra. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1994.
Campbell, June. Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism. London: Athlone Press, 1996.
Chandler, Christine. “Sex-Branding Cult NXIVM, and Dalai Lama’s $1 Million Endorsement.” Artvoice, April 4, 2018. https://artvoice.com/sex-branding-cult-nxivm-dalai-lamas-1-million-endorsement
Chandler, Christine. Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism. 2nd edition. Portland, ME: Walk Away Publishing, 2019; revised 2021 and 2026 (new preface). Originally published 2017 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, N. Charleston, SC. Copyright © Christine Chandler, all editions.
Curren, Erik D. Buddha’s Not Smiling: Uncovering Corruption at the Heart of Tibetan Buddhism Today. Staunton, VA: Alaya Press, 2005.
Dewar, Elaine. Cloak of Green: The Links Between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1995.
Dotezac, Arnaud. “Buddhist Soft Power, Chinese-Style.” Market magazine, 2014. English translation PDF available at: https://materialien-karmapa-kontroverse.weebly.com/uploads/1/7/3/1/17315424/buddhist_soft_power_30_may_2014__en_final_v4_.pdf
The Karma Kagyu Lineage. Karmapa — The Official Website of the 17th Karmapa. Accessed 2026. https://kagyuoffice.org
Mangala Shri Bhuti (Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche’s center, Crestone, Colorado). Tsetar Life-Release Ritual, 2026. https://mangalashribhuti.org
“HC Issues Summons to Lama, 17th Karmapa.” Phayul News, December 19, 2003. Original URL: http://www.phayul.com/2003/12/19/5694/ (page currently inactive; archived copies available via web.archive.org).
“Book Burning Targets Alumnus.” The Columns (Washington and Lee University), February 2011. https://columns.wlu.edu/book-burning-targets-alumnus/
Thondup, Gyalo, with Anne F. Thurston. The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet. New York: PublicAffairs, 2015.
[1]: Enthralled was first published in 2017 by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (N. Charleston, SC). Book Baby was briefly given distribution rights, which the author later terminated. A second edition was released under the author’s own imprint, Walk Away Publishing (Portland, ME), in 2019, with revisions in 2021. The second edition remains the current edition. Copyright has remained with the author across all editions. Amazon’s system will not accept a revised publication date for the current edition, which contributes to the ongoing suppression by keeping the listing pinned to the earlier date.
[2]: On the Frankfurt School and its influence on the sociology of religion: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Critical Theory (Frankfurt School),” https://iep.utm.edu/critical-theory-frankfurt-school/
About the Author
Christine Chandler is the author of Enthralled: The Guru Cult of Tibetan Buddhism (2017), the first insider account of the coercive theological architecture of Vajrayana Buddhism from a woman who spent nearly thirty years inside the tradition. She writes at extibetanbuddhist.com and is currently preparing a reissued and indexed edition of Enthralled for 2026.
If this essay reached you, please share it. The people who suppressed the original book are still suppressing the reissue. Word of mouth is how the story travels.
