Secrets of Shambhala: In Pema Chodron's Shadow

Secret lodges, ceremonial oaths, ancient bloodlines, heavenly kings, dragon magic, prophecies...It sounds like Game of Thrones but it's the strange Buddhist sect Pema Chodron's guru founded.

Be Scofield is a prominent cult reporter whose work is cited by the NY Times, Rolling Stone, People, Netflix, and more. She exposed the Love Has Won cult which led to the hit HBO series. Be is the author of Hunting Lucifer: One Reporter's Search for Cults and Demons.

By BE SCOFIELD

August 29th, 2024

"My personal teacher did not keep ethical norms and my devotion to him is unshakable...My teachers have always been the wild ones and I love them. I’m bored by the good ones. " - Pema Chodron

It was 1990 and Fred Coulson was sitting with his teacher Pema Chodron at her monastery Gampo Abbey. "She was giving me a teaching on how serious devotion is," he told me. "She then told me that if she were shown photos of her guru Chogyam Trungpa molesting children her devotion would be the same." He said he tried to rationalize the jarring statement in his mind.

"This was before Pema was famous," he told me. "I remember just sitting in her office hanging out while she was doing paperwork." He described her as "difficult to live with" and said she had an "abrasive personality." There are unconfirmed claims she would yell at nuns but he did hear Chodron engage in "angry exchanges" behind her office door.

Most know of Pema Chodron from her book When Things Fall Apart which would be published six years later in 1996. Her several appearances on Oprah have also made her a household name amongst spiritual seekers. Her public image is that of a soft-spoken and wise Buddhist nun who provides life-changing advice for difficult times. Along with other new age gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson, Chodron has been a pillar of modern spirituality for decades.

The guru to whom Chodron pledges her "undying devotion," Chogyam Trungpa, is no saint, however. The Shambhala tradition which he created around 1970 functioned as more of a Buddhist-military styled sex cult that was steeped in strange esoteric practices and insular beliefs. For decades Chodron has been indoctrinated into the bizarre creation of an abusive, cocaine-using alcoholic who had seven "sexual consort" wives and slept with countless students.

In 2018 it was revealed Chodron was complicit in covering up sexual abuse. It turned out suppressing abuse was a structural feature of her tradition. In 2019 the Denver Post found that, "Shambhala and its leaders had a decades-long history of suppressing abuse allegations, including child molestation and clerical abuse, through the organization’s own internal processes."

When a female student came to her and told her she was raped and impregnated by her Shambhala center's leader, Chodron dismissed her claims. "I don't believe you," Chodron scoffed. Later, she told her, "If it's true, I suspect you were into it." Chodron publicly apologized when the story surfaced in 2018 and was later asked by Oprah about her statements.

"After I experienced terrible abuse from a person in the sangha, abuse that put me into serious therapy and caused me much loss, I went to her to get help making sense of it," a woman who studied under Chodron for years writes. "She basically ripped me apart and said I wasn't being compassionate enough toward my abuser, and if I didn't like it I should leave Buddhism." She described Chodron's response as "beyond harsh at a time where I was still experiencing uncontrollable crying."

One of Trungpa's students began asking others their thoughts on him sleeping with students. "Pema was told that I was asking around and she told EVERYONE that I was a gossip and would never be enlightened," they write. "So when I decided to leave the community...there was already quite the disapproval of me." 

"Pema has long misunderstood how to support women who have suffered abuse," writes Fionna Bright. She studied with Trungpa directly and considers him a Buddha. "There are a number of people (I’m one) she retraumatized with her responses to requests for help. What she did to me was devastating. Her approach has been to deny and scold, to blame the victim."

Chodron was steeped in a culture of denial, codependency and obfuscation. When asked about women who come to her with issues with male teachers she replied, "Blaming others never heals anything." Chodron's responses were no mistake. She had been trained to be fiercely loyal to Trungpa and his mystical Shambhala Kingdom.

The Cult of Shambhala

“Trungpa was basically the king of the universe, and any contact with him was a blessing that was going to guarantee your enlightenment and eternal salvation.” - Former devotee

"We were taught to regard ourselves as members of Trungpa's family," Fred Coulson told me. "Literally. We called ourselves Clan Mukpo, in the style of the Scottish highlander use of 'clan' where the chief is the patriarch of a large kinship group."

This wasn't your Thich Nhat Hanh garden variety Buddhism that Pema Chodron found herself in. Trungpa's "family" consisted of a government, military, "ministers of the realm," a foreign service, councils, a court, servants and more. There were ranks like warrior and major, titles, flags, pins, uniforms, rituals and secret oaths. He often spoke of "conquering" to establish his Shambhala Kingdom. And his entire kingdom was being aided by magical sky deities called the Rigden Fathers.

Trungpa propped himself up as a divine Buddha who had come to save the world in its darkest hour. He referred to himself as the Sakyong, a "celestially or heavenly appointed" king who "joins heaven and earth together in establishing enlightened human society." He once proclaimed to his followers, "As the heavenly appointed one and as a very worthy person, I feel tremendous responsibility."

"He taught that we are at the end of a dark age and there will be a massive holy war between good and evil in 500 years," Coulson said. He used the classic Tibetan mythology of Shambhala but he placed himself at the center of it. "Trungpa said he'd come back as king and lead his Shambhala forces to victory. He imagined himself as a descendent of a warlord and saw himself as royalty."

Coulson described the founding myth of the texts of the tradition. "According to the mythos that we were taught in Shambhala, Padmasambhava planted the four Shambhala termas or verses in the mind‐stream of one of his students, and they lay dormant over many lifetimes until at last they emerged in the conscious mind of the Eleventh Trungpa tulku, Chogyam Trunpga. They are alleged to be the exact correct teachings that Padmasambhava prepared for us barbaric North Americans living in the present dark age. Trungpa, it is believed, did not compose them, he merely 'channelled' them."

Top secret texts and manuals obtained by The Guru Magazine shed insight into Pema Chodron's Buddhist tradition. "This book is the property of the Kalapa Court, and must be surrendered upon demand," The Court Vision and Practice says on the first page. "This material is available for a limited publication only, and no general publication is made or intended."

The Decorum Manual works as a method of behavioral control. Trungpa mapped out specific instructions on how to hold knives and forks, what to wear in different settings, what wines go with each meal, and how to write proper letters. It gives details on how to properly eat Italian, Indian and Chinese food. It seems like a guide for high etiquette. "Using your fingers, pick up the stalk of asparagus at its base. Dip the head in the sauce and bit off the tip," it states.

It was as if Trungpa adopted English colonialism when he studied in London. "How to conquer the world is very much connected with how to speak properly--as much as how to dress properly, how to comb one's hair properly, how to wear proper makeup, and how to choose the appropriate ties or shoes," he said.

The Court Vision and Practice lays out the elaborate hierarchy of different branches of his kingdom. He explains the roles such as the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Command Protector, the ministers, the military branch, the "subjects" which were the followers, ranks like "Warrior of the Order of the Dragon of Shambhala" and servants and masters. "The servant must be 100% certain that the master can do no wrong," it states. Pema Chodron would eventually be in the role of director of the Gampo Abbey monastery when it opened in 1985.

Chogyam Trungpa's Kalapa Assembly talks from 1978-1984 reveal a clear effort to build a cult of personality around himself. Some of the language he and his followers used is reminiscent of cult leader Jim Jones or Charles Manson. There is good reason Shambhala does not want these texts public.

"From my point of view, you have become my children," he told his devotees in a talk. "Lady Diana and myself could be regarded as your parents," Trungpa proclaimed. "You have to remember that from this time onward you remain my subjects. And I have power over you." He told them to "take pride in being a subject," and said "good subjects" are more "glowing," "dynamic," and "beautiful."

Trungpa convinced his followers that by deepening their relationship to him, i.e. worshipping him, they were saving the world. "Each time we work together our relationship is further deepened and that is how we are sharing the Great Eastern Sun world altogether," he told them. "This bond is unique and extraordinary. Certainly our working together will benefit hundreds of millions of people in the future. Thank you for being together. I love you all a lot."

Spiritual teachers may talk about lofty visions of planetary transformation. It's different, however, when the teacher claims a relationship with him is the key to that change and then exploits it to have sex with students or exploits their labor as Trungpa did with countless followers.

A talk from 1981 could easily be confused with something Jim Jones said. "This is a week of understanding why we have to create such an emergency situation, " Trungpa warned his followers. "The world is running out of any sanity; it is our duty to provide sanity in this world." He warned they may be "annihilated when we realize our profundity" and that the "more profound" their insights the "the more profound the attacks" will be. "Ladies and gentlemen, we hold the threshold of the future of the world in our hands, on our path. Maybe we are the only hope for the future dark age."

The language of Trungpa's acolytes also reveals the cult-like nature of the group. "On behalf of my children of Shambhala, I ask the Father Sakyong to present the profound, brilliant, just, powerful, all-victorious dharma of Shambhala," Trungpa's wife "Lady Diana" introduced him with. One devotee signed a letter to Trungpa with, "Your Majesty's most humble and obedient servant." When students at a talk addressed him by saying "Good morning, sir," he replied, "It would be better to say, 'Good morning, my lord.'"

An introduction of Trungpa by the "regent" Tom Rich is steeped in an alarming cult-like devotion and worship of him as a god-like figure. This type of language was commonplace for devotees.

Profound, brilliant, just, powerful, all victorious, heavenly appointed Dorje Dradul of Mukpo, heir to the glorious lineage of Kagyu and to the ancient lineage of Nyingma, you are the Dharmaraja. Heart son of the Rigdens, the one who shows the way of the Great Eastern Sun, you are truly the Sakyong. Chakravartin, Universal Monarch possessing all good qualities, you awaken the Ashe in our hearts. Please lead us and inspire us so that the way of the warrior may be realized and so that the Kingdom of Shambhala may flourish. Inspired by the Sakyong Wangmo, on behalf of your loyal students, I request that you teach us so that the darkness of the setting sun may be dispelled and so that we may realize the genuine vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Please conduct this fourth grand Kalapa Assembly for the benefit of those who are gathered here and for the benefit of all beings.

"I am the servant and he is the master," his attendant "Major" John Perks wrote. "I am intensely proud of my master...I help His Majesty up the narrow stairs and we play the falling-down-stairs game. The subject of this game is for him to crush me beneath his weight by falling on top of me – the greater the height of the fall, the better."

In most all cases, if many followers believe their spiritual teacher is enlightened, divine, or free from ego, that has been encouraged and instilled by the teacher. "It is my opinion that he was a Buddha," long-term student Fred Meyer stated of Trungpa. "The Vidyadhara [Trungpa] was unquestionably enlightened," he wrote. "He was enlightened, full stop." He goes on to say that he knows Trungpa's mind and that it is bigger than any of his centers, practices or traditions. Meyer urges that Trungpa's "mind must not be permitted to leave this earth." Fionna Bright studied with Trungpa and shares Meyer's view. "The reality is that [Trungpa] was a Buddha," she writes.

"As the heavenly appointed one and as a very worthy person, I feel tremendous responsibility."

Trungpa did work to create the ethos that portrayed him as a divinely special being. Selling himself as the Sakyong, he said he is "never subject to the sickness or sleepiness of egohood at all." He also claimed to be "awake" and "without confusion" and to have arisen from the "ultimate." His mind was "synchronized with that of the Rigden Fathers," which were kings of the celestial realms. He also repeatedly portrayed his teachings as "brilliant" and "profound."

Trungpa masterfully created an in-group and out-group, one of the most classic characteristics of a cult. The "setting sun" was the term Trungpa used for the out-group i.e. the world that is filled with "pain and misery." He spoke of the "curse of the setting sun," "the setting sun evil," and "setting sun problems" which needed to be cleansed. "Tonight we will be doing a lhasang in order to purify any setting sun situations," he told his followers. "We have more to recover from: the entire rest of our lives in the setting sun." He said it is, "wonderful that we can actually do this in the midst of the completely, utterly degraded world we have around us."

"You have to be purified before you enter the Shambhala world."

In contrast with the "utterly degraded world" was that of the Great Eastern Sun vision which he spoke of extensively. "The notion of sacred world is that when the Great Eastern Sun dawns in every aspect of society, life and the phenomenal world, you begin to experience basic goodness reflected everywhere," Trungpa said. "We can actually hold the Great Eastern Sun in our hand, in our head, and in our heart," he told his followers. "It’s a tremendously moving experience."

Advanced students like Pema Chodron were in what's called the Shambhala Lodge, a secretive fraternity-like group. A photo of Chodron at the marriage ceremony of one of Trungpa's wives confirms her role. Only lodge members were allowed to participate. In order to join, followers had to take oaths. "You are taking an oath tonight, which means that you are being included in the power of the Rigdens and the Sakyong," Trungpa stated to the new Lodge members. "When you received the ink on your tongue in the form of an Ashe, you committed yourself to the Shambhala world. Unless you cut out your tongue, you cannot get rid of that Ashe."

In the Ashe ceremony Trungpa would incorporate a large amount of his saliva into the ink. "Then the assembled students would line up, chanting KI KI SO SO ASHE LHA GYEL LO over and over, and one by one approach Trungpa, who would dab a spot of the ink+spit mixture on your tongue with his brush," Coulson told me.

"Taking this oath means that you will keep this information to yourselves and not publicize it," Trungpa warned. "If you violate the situation you will be punished at the level of hell." A senior teacher chimed in. "This submission or oath also has to do with how to sustain the secret quality, the confidentiality of what we know by virtue of being Assembly graduates."

"Maybe we are the only hope for the future dark age."

"I would suggest that you wear the pin in order to help distinguish between lodge members and non-lodge members," Trungpa told his devotees. "Wearing this pin will actually help you. In some sense it provides magical protection. You will be protected from any attacks of the setting sun...it contains the basic Shambhala vision and the Shambhala magic of Tiger Lion Garuda Dragon...It is not superstition, but it is real."

Coulson told me the Shambhala Lodge group would do something like rent a hotel for six weeks. There'd be no outside staff allowed, only those of the Kalapa Assembly. "Everyone would dress up in gowns and tuxedos, meditate, and have lessons in how to be lords and ladies," he said. They'd be trained in etiquette. The texts reveal he tried to get his followers to speak with a British accent.

"I have been granted permission by the Rigden fathers to discuss further," Trungpa would often say. "The Rigdens are the kings of the celestial realm," Coulson told me. "Trungpa talked about having these trances where he’d go off to Shambhala and the Rigdens would show him pictures of women and say, 'you should marry this one,' they give him advice on what to wear, what uniform, what shoes."

Trungpa told followers the Rigdens were supporting them as well. "If you are completely in contact with the vision of the Kingdom of Shambhala, you will have no problems in setting up your own affairs...I can assure you of that in the name of the Rigden Fathers."

Trungpa also told his students terrible things would happen if they left the group, one of the hallmark signs of a cult. He once told a woman who said she was going to leave Shambhala, "The lions will come to devour you." In a seminary talk, Trungpa said, "If you decide to abandon the vajrayana, you will be roasted alive, unable to die on the spot." "Trungpa told us that if we ever tried to leave we would suffer unbearable anguish, and disasters would pursue us like furies," a former student named Stephen Butterfield writes in his book The Double Mirror.

"What we are doing is dangerous, as the Sakyong has said here," warned a Shambhala leader at the beginning of a talk by Trungpa. "It can be dangerous for all of us. In particular it can be dangerous for the Sakyong. Each individual person here does have the power to cut off the life of the Sakyong and the Vajra Master and the kingdom. So please bear that in mind." Trungpa warned his devotees, "Shambhala can be destroyed by insiders."

Chogyam Trungpa checks off most of the boxes for a cult leader by any measurable standard: Claiming to be "heavenly sent" on a "dangerous" mission, creating an in-group/out-group with a sick/degraded external world, telling followers terrible things will happen if they leave, implementing secret oath ceremonies, claiming to be the "only hope for the future dark age," demanding god-like devotion and loyalty, claiming to be free of ego, using "revealed" texts, controlling behavior, instilling fear and paranoia, demanding purity, purchasing isolated property for the "Kingdom," sleeping with countless students and physical and sexual abuse.

-> Hunting Lucifer is the new book by journalist Be Scofield about hunting cults and dangerous gurus as a nomad. "A real-life epic and hero's journey."

Warrior of the Light

Pema Chodron recently taught at a month-long Shambhala retreat called the Three Yana's at Drala Mountain Center. She paid for 20 participants to attend and paid for the entire teaching staff according to several participants at the retreat who had seen emails. The retreat was organized by those, “who have trained extensively with Trungpa Rinpoche, or his senior students,” according to the website. The goal of the retreat was to “make Trungpa Rinpoche’s approach to deep study and practice available to future generations of practitioners.”

Drala filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and is one of the many centers within Shambhala that is struggling or that has closed. Chodron bailed Drala out to the tune of a $500,000 donation but their future is uncertain. Plagued by sexual abuse scandals, the pandemic, and waning interest, the tradition has been on the decline for years.

I recorded members marching and chanting in military-like fashion at the retreat. They were the last remnants of Trungpa's Kasung or military branch. In its prime there were hundreds of members who'd dress in uniforms and wear pins showing their rank. A woman named "Erin" who lived and worked at Drala for many years told me she's seen them in recent years dressed in full uniform. "They'd be drilling and marching," she said.

Undercover video shows Shambhala members marching and drilling in August, 2024 at the Three Yana's retreat at Drala Mountain Center

"The Kasung are the general military body which acts as the national defense force to protect the Kingdom from attacks from the air, water and ground," Trungpa wrote. Members who violate certain policies "will be publicly flogged and placed in a situation of re-educative hard labour or imprisonment," the Court Vision states. "Depending on the degree of his crime, he will be made into a street cleaner, impressed into manual labor, or exiled, and/or he will be required ceremonially to cut off his own right thumb in public."

Even the updated 2015 Shambhala Kasung manual describes how members should dress, contains elaborate hand signals to communicate with, and details the rankings and pins members should wear. It states to contact the "Dorje Kasung Sergeant-Major" with any questions.

In Trunpga's day the Kasung often acted as a force to police and remove critics, troublemakers who didn't follow orders, or anyone who stepped out of line.

Trungpa had plans to "conquer" Nova Scotia, Canada where he had purchased remote and isolated land. "In order to rule even small provinces like Nova Scotia we need all of you as government personnel," he told his followers. "You all will have your spot in our kingdom. In order to run our country, more people besides you will be invited." He also spoke of it as an invasion. "Infiltrating peoples’ minds and their businesses and their real estate, their economy, and their government is very dangerous. We should all share the danger that exists there, as well. From a practical point of view, as long as we are prepared, we can do it."

"Altogether, the rest of the world could be influenced, affected, by the vision and power of Shambhala – economically, socially, educationally, scientifically," Trungpa proclaimed. "Such a situation could take place. You yourselves will be the pioneers who will work and influence. Conquering comes first, which shouldn’t be problematic but it might be so."

Given Trungpa's talk of the coming dark age, proclaiming to be a savior and his erratic behavior, it's plausible Nova Scotia could have been a doomsday-exit scenario had Trunpga not died.

Devoted to a Madman

"He said to me, 'I'm on the verge of becoming enlightened and when people get to this point they either go crazy or they attain realization." - Diana Mukpo

"He didn't hide the drinking or his sexuality," Pema Chodron says in the documentary Crazy Wisdom about her long-term guru Chogyam Trungpa. "There have been so many teachers who have been brought down by what's called sexual misconduct but that's not what caused them to come down, it's that the students felt deceived and lied to."

Chodron's claim is shattered by the next scene in the documentary, however. It cuts to Trungpa's first wife Diana. "The first time he slept with somebody after I married him I was completely freaked out," she says. "I sat on the floor of the bathroom and just cried all night. The next day I told him that I was completely destroyed and that I couldn't believe that he just married me and now maybe I had to divorce him because he was sleeping around."

The back-to-back placement of these segments brilliantly exposes the myth of Chogyam Trungpa's openness. He "deceived and lied to" his wife and it caused tremendous pain and suffering. There was no pretense of him having multiple sexual partners when they married. Ironically, it was the devastation caused by her husband cheating on her that led Chodron to find Trungpa and take him as a teacher.

By glowingly saying Trungpa "didn't hide the drinking or his sexuality," and that the real problem was a guru's deception of students, she tacitly endorses the guru-student sexual relationship. It's fine for a spiritual teacher have sex with many of his students as long as he's public about it. It's fine for a guru to be an out-of-control alcoholic as long as he's public about it. "It isn’t really the sex or even the teachers that are the problem," Chodron said. "It’s the duplicity, because it’s so hard to handle lies. It’s important to create a situation where people aren’t lying."

Trungpa started dating his first wife when she was 15 and he was 30. Diana had read his book Born in Tibet and began attending his lectures in England. "Over the course of the following year [Diana] snuck out of her boarding school to spend weekends with Trungpa," says Alexander Gardner. "She recalled that the two had sex for the first time in October 1969, shortly after she turned sixteen, the legal age of consent in Britain." The relationship led to scandalous news headlines and they fled to America.

"Her mother, on learning that Diana had married a Tibetan guru nearly twice her age, fainted," reported The Guardian. She also hired private investigators to keep an eye on him.

The story Trungpa sold to an impressionable teenager was that she was the "one" he had fallen in love with. Instead, she was the first to be inducted into what became a military-themed Buddhist sex cult.

Trungpa's deception was foundational to the formation of his Shambhala Buddhist tradition. He'd soon have seven sexual consort "wives" and he remained highly promiscuous, all of which was rationalized by spiritual means. One of his wives, Leslie Hays, recounts him "demanding women and girls at all hours of the day and night, some of them teenagers." It's also reported Trungpa was "known to proposition young women for sex."

"Ciel first slept with [Trungpa] when she was very young, 13 or 14 years old," Hays says of one of Trungpa's wives Ciel Turzanski. "She told me herself." They married when Turzanski was barely 18.

She recounts him "demanding women and girls at all hours of the day and night, some of them teenagers."

Chodron told Fred Coulson that even if she saw photos of Trungpa molesting children her devotion would be the same. There are no photos but there is a first hand account of him "passionately" making out with a 13-yr-old girl in front of staff and other teens.

Una Morera witnessed it happen. She was a teenager at the time. "I realized I was now watching Trungpa passionately kissing Sarah, like tongue deep kissing her," she says of the 13-yr-old girl. "Then I looked up at the adults who were standing up and surrounding us...I saw them watching Trungpa kissing Sarah too, where there was no concern for her. Amongst the other teenagers, I found alarm in their faces. Their eyes were zigzagging all over the place, searching for one another's, but as the kiss continued, they didn't make a move or do anything."

Una Morera describes watching Trungpa "passionately" making out with a 13-yr-old girl in front of staff and teens

Shambhala's own Child Protection Policy from 2022 indicates Trungpa would be guilty of several violations. "Sexual activity in the context of any activity associated with Shambhala between a person 18 years of age or older and a person under the age of 18 is prohibited regardless of the age of majority or consent locally," it states (emphasis added).

The Walrus reported the bizarre and abusive way Hays ended up with Trungpa.

Trungpa lavished attention on Hays, then showed up at her employer’s house the next day to propose that they marry. Hays was baffled, so he invited her to his home for a get-to-know-you date. Guards ushered her into his bedroom, where he was waiting for her, naked. That same night, he asked her to marry him again. Stunned, she agreed, believing it to be an honor, and for a while, there was a honeymoon-like feeling between them. But, after the first week, Hays told me, things started to go wrong. In the bedroom, Hays says, he would use a vibrator until she screamed out in pain. Then Trungpa started to punch and kick her.

Former student Liz Craig told The Walrus that what Trungpa did, “was create an environment for emotional and sexual harm in which nobody was accountable for their actions.”

At a Halloween party in 1975 Trungpa had a couple forcibly stripped naked in front of a large crowd. After violently subduing them, Trungpa's guards brought them downstairs:

“Someone call the police,” she says. Nobody intervenes. Nobody moves. All watch. Then Trungpa tells his guards to strip [Naone]. She struggles. One of the guards hesitates. Trungpa insists that he continue. The guard proceeds. Now a solitary male witness tries to intervene, to stop it. He is quickly overpowered by the guards, then moved out of the way. Finally both [Merwin] and [Naone] are naked. Trungpa seems satisfied.

Trungpa also bit a female student at this event. "One student, Brigid Meier, recounted how when Trungpa arrived he asked for a kiss, and when she moved in close he twisted her arm and bit her lip, drawing blood. Keeping his hold on her, he then bit her cheek, making marks that lasted for a week."

A woman who had followed Trungpa said, "he pinched me to the point of leaving dark bruises." She also "knows of several women Trungpa physically assaulted besides her." "Trungpa was accused of physically beating and sexually assaulting women and girls, having sex with his students and abusing substances including alcohol, tobacco and cocaine," Boulder's Daily Camera reported in 2024.

Trungpa's wife Diana Mukpo describes a violent drunken incident in her book Dragon Thunder. "Just before the donors arrived, while Akong was downstairs waiting to greet them, Rinpoche went into Akong's bedroom upstairs and completely destroyed Akong's personal shrine with his walking stick. Then he went and urinated all over the top of the stairwell, after which he lay down and passed out at the top of the stairs." She also says he tried to slap her. “When we were first married, Rinpoche told me that it was normal for Tibetan men to beat their wives.”

It was widely known that Trungpa was a severe alcoholic. He'd often be so drunk he'd have to be carried off the stage. His ex-wife Leslie Hays also says Trungpa, "did copious amounts of cocaine and alcohol every day." He died from cirrhosis of the liver in 1987.

"I served Rinpoche big glasses of gin first thing in the morning," one student of Trungpa's said. "Mike and I had to carry Rinpoche down the stairs because he was quite drunk and seemed to be unconscious," his butler John Perks said. "I brought Rinpoche a full bottle [of sake] and he drank it down as if it were water...Rinpoche was drinking almost continuously. In fact, it became difficult to obtain saké in Halifax because we had drunk most of it. Rinpoche got up one night and vomited blood in the sink."  

"Although his drinking and sexual exploits were never kept secret, his staggering coke habit was well concealed from his students," writes Nancy Steinbeck in her book The Other Side of Eden that she co-wrote with her husband John Steinbeck IV. They spent time studying with Trungpa in the 1970s. "The truth leaked out about his $40,000-a-year coke habit and an addiction to Seconol." They said he would do cocaine all night long. "Women were trained as consorts. That meant they knew what to do when he threw up, shit in the bed, snorted coke till dawn, turned his attention to other women, and maybe even got in the mood for a threesome."

Trungpa once ordered that candles be put on either side of a dog's head while blindfolded. He then smacked it with a potato and when the dog moved its ear would catch on fire. His butler John Perks describes what happened.

One night after supper Rinpoche said, "Get Myson and bring him in here." I dragged the shaking dog into the kitchen and following Rinpoche's instructions I sat him on the floor and covered his eyes with a blindfold. I set up stands with lighted candles by either side of his head. Myson couldn't move his head without being burned. Rinpoche took a potato and hit Myson on the head with it. When the dog moved, the fur on his ear would catch on fire. I put out the flames. Now and then Rinpoche would scrape his chair across the tiled floor and whack him again on the head with a potato.

"Sir," I began hesitantly, trying to stop him.

"Shut up," snapped Rinpoche, "and hand me another potato."

Finally, the scraping chair and the potato throwing stopped and we released the shaking dog, who ran upstairs to Max's empty room.

"That's how you train students,", Rinpoche calmly stated to me.

His ex-wife Leslie Hays describes how Trungpa once instructed his guards to put a noose around a cat's neck and tie it to a table. He then threw logs at it.

Rinpoche picked up a log and hurled it at the cat, who jumped off the table and hung from the noose. He was making a terrible gurgling sound-and he finally got some footing on the edge of the deck and made it back onto the porch. Rinpoche hurled another log-making contact and the cat let out a horrible scream as the air was knocked out of him.

He continued to torture the poor animal and I was crying and begging him to stop. I said: "I gave you the cat, please...stop it!" And I'll never forget his response-he looked at me and said: "You are responsible to for this karma." and he giggled. I got up to try and stop him and he firmly told me to sit down. One of the guards stepped closer to me and stood in a threatening manner to keep me in my place.

The torture went on for what seemed like hours, until finally the poor cat made a run for his life with the patio table bouncing after him. It was clear he had a broken back leg. I'm sure that cat died. 

A Crisis of Identity

In a 1993 interview with Tricycle magazine Pema Chodron was asked about Trungpa's "sexual exploits and his drinking." She said she originally believed, "I felt everything he did was to help others." But then her views evolved to a "deeper" understanding. "I don't know what he was doing," she told them. "I know he changed my life," she told the magazine. "I know I love him. But I don’t know who he was. And maybe he wasn’t doing things to help everyone, but he sure helped me. I learned something from him." The interviewer asked Chodron if his "sexual encounters have ever upset" her. "No," she replied.

When asked how she could follow someone like Trungpa, she replied, "I do not know." She said she can't "buy a party line where they say it was a sacred activity" or "come up with ground or a fixed idea to make it not okay." She continues. "I’m left in that I don’t know. I can’t answer the relative questions because he defied being able to answer them."

Chodron formed a "profound connection" with Trungpa who became her "root guru" in the early 1970s at the beginning of his reign. “Pema never would criticize Trungpa," Coulson said. "It's impossible for her. You view the guru as the Buddha in person. That's how you become enlightened."

When responding to whether or not she'd recommend Trungpa to women, she remarkably said yes. "I would have said, 'You know he loves women, he’s very passionate, and has a lot of relationships with women, and that might be part of it if you get involved with him." She would encourage them to "read all his books, go to all his talks, and actually see if you can get close to him. And you should do that knowing you might get an invitation to sleep with him."

Chodron explicitly knowing a woman might get an invitation to sleep with Trungpa and still recommending him as a spiritual teacher also violates Shambhala's code of conduct. It prohibits, "People holding positions of authority to initiate or consent to an intimate relationship with any participant or program staff subject to that authority in that context."

"My undying devotion to Trungpa Rinpoche comes from his teaching me in every way he could that you can never make things right or wrong," she said. "The closer I got to him, the more my trust in him grew."

Trungpa appointed as his successor the "Regent" named Tom Rich or Osel Tendzin. Two Shambhala board members and Trungpa knew he was infected with AIDS and having sex without protection. One of Rich's students died from catching AIDS from him. Trungpa told Rich his spiritual devotion to him would prevent him from transmitting the disease. Rich also was accused of other abuses. News coverage forced Rich into exile. "Program attendance and membership donations plummeted," The Walrus reports. "The legal entities that held Shambhala’s assets were dissolved to avoid liability."

In 1992 Chodron was enlisted to help Mipham teach at his first-ever seminary. She was asked about Tom Rich's behavior by a student. "He was a very tough teacher," Chodron said of Rich. "He was an impatient teacher and wrathful. But once you put yourself in his jaws, his only intention was to wake you up. When the controversy occurred, from my point of view, if you put yourself in that particular crocodile's jaws, it didn't really matter how it went. There is no sense of betrayal; there's a sense of letting it pop you out of your habitual, neurotic style."

"Somehow I can't reconcile the idea of somebody having to get AIDS to pop them out of samsara, you know?" the questioner asks Chodron. "Well, for me personally, it's been the koan of my life," she said. "I grew up a lot. It popped me out more than anything that ever happened before that."

Around the late 1990s Chodron picked a new Tibetan Buddhist guru, Dzigar Kongtrul, whom many Shambhala students would also come to study under. “There was this longing that I had since Trungpa Rinpoche died—to have someone to ask my questions of,” she said in an interview.

Kongtrul married his first-ever Western student Elizabeth Mattis. “I had a lot of deeper questions about my life,” Mattis said after hearing of Kongtrul's monastery. “We started to become close, and I studied with him and we married." He then cheated on her with a mistress which her brother said was kept very secretive until it could no longer be. "My sister kept it secret until everyone started seeing them sleep in the same bed together," her brother wrote. "The affair with Jennifer was not so secret," Leslie Hays told me. The brother also claims Dzigar Kongtrul presided over Jennifer's marriage only to then convince her to go on a three-year retreat with him as her teacher. Dzigar then had an affair with her while they were both married and she left her husband. The brother claims she gave large amounts of money and stopped relating with her family.

The irony is that what brought Chodron to become a Buddhist nun was devastation around her husband having an affair. Her three main teachers, Chogyam Trungpa, Saykyong Mipham, and Dzigar Kongtrul all cheated on their wives. Trungpa and his son Mipham were alcoholics embroiled in sexual and physical abuse scandals. The secrecy, lies, and abuses in Shambhala are all reminiscent of alcoholic families. Much of what Chodron praises as "awakened" is actual dysfunctional. "I’m bored by the good ones," Chodron says of spiritual teachers.

"Pema came to explore her spirituality as an attempt to cope with the emotional trauma of her failed marriages," writes Lion's Roar. "She cites the moment her husband revealed his affair to her as a genuine spiritual experience — a moment where time truly stood still."

Amidst the despair, she saw an article called "Working with Negativity" by Trungpa in a magazine called Garuda. The article is now a chapter in his book The Myth of Freedom which Chodron wrote the forward to. "Negativity is not bad per se, but something living and precise, connected with reality," the first paragraph of Trungpa's article reads.

Chodron left her job as a school teacher and essentially abandoned her teenage children to pursue the spiritual questions that had arisen. Her 15 yr-old daughter "took it as quite a rejection," Chodron told Oprah. "My passion and attention went from family toward this." Chodron split her time between London and the U.S. for years and then became the director of Gampo Abbey monastery in 1985.

The Bloodline Must Survive

In 2020 the Washington Post reported Pema Chodron was "stepping down as a Shambhala teacher." She did give up her acharya title but has still been deeply involved in Shambhala ever since. Trungpa's son Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche had stepped away as the leader of Shambhala in 2018 over several sexual assault and physical abuse allegations. Despite this, many Shambhala devotees wanted him back. He "had been approved by the group’s board to lead an initiation ceremony in Europe in June," the Post wrote.

“I was dumbfounded,” Chodron said in her 2020 acharya resignation letter. "The seemingly very clear message that we are returning to business as usual distresses me deeply."

A biography of Pema Chodron from an archived version of her website states that she, "currently studies under Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche." For at least some period of time Mipham was Chodron's teacher.

Why did the crazy wisdom of Trungpa and Tom Rich "pop" people out of their "habitual, neurotic style," but not Mipham's crazy wisdom? How can Chodron publicly condemn Mipham when she continues to publicly support Trungpa whose indiscretions were worse? If she had truly wisened up about teacher abuse it wouldn't only apply to Mipham.

In her Tricycle interview Chodron pushed back against ethical guidelines for teachers. In the least she shouldn't be surprised that many Shambhala students adopt the same position on Mipham that she has for decades about her abusive guru. "I know that these guidelines are being created out of good motivation, but they’re simultaneously coming from bad motivation, righteous indignation that “they” are doing something wrong," she states. "I like the saying 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.' You can’t make it right, can’t make it wrong." Pema made the Mipham situation "wrong" when she condemned Shambhala for continuing to work with him, however. What changed?

The allegations against Mipham include: "Groping one female attendant, then asking her for oral sex so that he could get to sleep; Hitting and biting others, including his students and attendants; Demanding that a group of students strip naked during a drunken party; Sexually harassing and belittling female attendants; Pursuing sexual relationships with new students and married students; Binge drinking; Exorbitant spending on items like luxury vacations and skin-care products."

After one woman refused to have sex with Mipham, "he pushed her face toward his penis and said, 'You might as well finish this.'”

Mipham's departure has divided the Shambhala community. Many students have taken Samaya vows under him. They believe he is the rightful lineage holder to the "Shambhala Kingdom." Many defenders of this Shambhala lineage are high profile teachers like Judy Lief, Judith Simmer-Brown and Fleet Maul.

"They should just bring him back as the leader," a man at the Three Yana's retreat told me. "How many others here feel that way?" I asked. "Many," he replied. "The other night a teacher said to us that we didn't break away from Mipham, he broke away from us."

Former Drala staff member "Erin" told me many of the staff and leaders are still loyal to Mipham. “This song is for my teacher Sakyong Mipham,” she said the Drala director Dhi Good proclaimed during an event in 2023. She told me some residents would say things like, "I'll defend the Sakyong until the end!"

One of Shambhala's primary retreat centers, Karme Choling, is still in business with Mipham. In July 2023 Karme Choling provided the food and accommodations for his three in-person retreats in Vermont and promoted his event. It is believed they hosted his students in 2024 as well. They're also hosting a 6-month online lecture series that is, in part, about the "continuity of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche's Sangha." It's called Sons & Daughters of Noble Family and runs through October, 2024. Sam Bercholz, co-founder of Shambhala Publications, is among the speakers.

"Shambhala doesn't exist without lineage," senior teacher Suzanne Duquette wrote. "If we take away the Sakyong, we are removing the Shambhala lineage."

When the interim Shambhala board took office in 2018 in the midst of the Mipham scandal they had to swear allegiance to Mipham, Trungpa and the Sakyong lineage. They had to "vow to propagate the vision and culture of Shambhala as proclaimed by the Druk Sakyong, Trungpa Rinpoche, and Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche," it states. "I pledge my commitment to the Shambhala lineage of Sakyongs and the society of my fellow Shambhala Warriors. Should I turn my mind from this oath, may I be liberated from my position."

Mipham is publicly disgraced and Shambhala International has largely kept him away. There is hope to unify followers around the bloodline, however. Her name is Jetsun Drukmo and she is the daughter of Mipham. In April 2023, at the age of 12, she received the Sakyong empowerment, the same empowerment that Mipham and Trungpa received. “There could be a reunification of the old guard and the new guard,” Coulson told me. "She is the legitimate heir of Chogyam Trungpa."