stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

366 STRIPPING THE GURUS
result in far more than seven lifetimes of bad luck (in Bob,
2000).
We’d been told if you leave Poolesville and Jetsunma, you go
to Vajra hell.... You are crushed and burned and chopped up
over and over again, it repeats. You are there for eternity (in
Sherrill, 2000).
The Buddhist hell sounds as vicious as the Christian version
—with torture by molten iron, fire and disembowelment
(Macdonald, 2003).
It is rather shocking to thus discover that Tibetan Buddhism,
for one, has fear-based means of keeping its disciples loyally following
their gurus, which are every bit as harsh as the Bible Belt
visions of hell.
Consider, further, that the Christian view of eternal punishment
has long been viewed by psychologists as leading to a rigidity
in thought and behavior on the part of the relevant believers. It
has also been seen as producing a “missionary zeal,” whereby persons
concerned about their own salvation would project those fears
onto others, and need to convert them in order to allay their own
doubts. If that long-asserted dynamic is valid for the Christian
view, however, it must apply just as well to the Buddhist perspective.
That is, it must produce related behaviors, with “loyalty to the
guru” substituted for “faith in Jesus Christ,” and a pressure on
one’s fellow disciples to maintain their own rigid obedience to the
master then standing in for the Christian attempt to convert “heathens.”
Conversely, if Christian blind belief can create an Inquisition,
so too equally could the standard Buddhist (“Tibetan Catholic”)
teachings. For there, the breaking of the savior-disciple bond, as
with other “sins,” generates punishments to delight the Marquis de
Sade.
Thus, the state of mind apparently evinced by the lama in
charge of the Karmapa’s seat in Tibet, in explaining to Lama Ole
Nydahl what the purported effects of his (Nydahl’s) breaking of the
guru-disciple vow would be, becomes both understandable and
completely predictable:
Although by title a Buddhist teacher, the venerable Drubpoen
Dechen sounded as though he had come straight out of
the Catholic middle ages. He would have also probably felt