Buddhist Leader Heeds Advice, Extends Leave

The largest U.S. Tibetan Buddhist sect, faced with widespread defection if its scandal-blemished spiritual regent carried out his intent to resume leadership, is breathing easier after learning he will remain on retreat in La Jolla for the rest of the year.

Osel Tendzin, the U.S.-born spiritual leader of the Vajradhatu network of 35 meditation centers in North America and Europe, is reportedly infected with the AIDS virus and is believed by many sect officials to have endangered others for three years through his known homosexual activity.

Tendzin, defying the request of the sect’s board that he take indefinite leave, said early this year he planned to conduct an important ceremony in May and teach a summer seminar. But he recently backed down on the advice of a prominent Tibetan teacher in Asia.

“A lot of people were going to quit” if Tendzin had ended his retreat next month, said Robin Kornman, a Princeton graduate student and a senior teacher in the movement. “Now we have a breather for a year.”

The situation “was becoming extremely divisive,” said another Buddhist close to sect leaders.

Tibetan teacher Khyentse Rinpoche, who lives in Bhutan and Nepal, advised Tendzin that “powerful obstacles and dangers” loomed if Tendzin returned to ceremonial and administrative duties, according to Kornman and other sources in the movement.

“I will follow his command,” wrote Tendzin in a subsequent letter, Kornman said.

Reports that Tendzin was infected with the acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus, and that at least one close follower was similarly infected, first spread last December as Tendzin held closed-door meetings with followers in Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Moreover, Tendzin was said to have known since 1985 that he had tested positive for the AIDS virus, which can lead to the fatal disease--a disclosure that was “nothing less than horrific,” Liza Goldblatt, coordinator of the sect’s Portland study group, wrote in a Dec. 31 letter to the Vajradhatu board, based in Halifax, Canada.

The board has repeatedly declined to comment publicly on the situation, declaring the matter to be internal.

The board also prohibited news about Tendzin and the sect’s dilemma to be printed in its newspaper, one read widely in U.S. Buddhist circles, prompting editor Rick Fields of Boulder, Colo., to resign, even as he was being fired for wanting to publish the story.

“I felt my integrity and that of the paper demanded this step,” said Fields, author of a popular history of Buddhism in America.

Fields said he was told that he was fired during a March 15 telephone conversation with board member Karl Springer, a leading figure in organized U.S. Buddhism and a delegate to last November’s World Fellowship of Buddhists conference in Hacienda Heights. Springer was with Tendzin in La Jolla at the time and conveyed the regent’s demand that no news or comment on the situation be published, Fields said.

Fields said he then submitted a letter of resignation to the board, saying that the cause of Buddhist teaching in the West “would be best served in the long run by openness and honesty, painful as that may be.”

Kornman, like Fields, was a student of the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of the sect in America, who died in 1987. Before his death, Trungpa named Tendzin, who is now 45, as his spiritual successor.

While some followers have left the organization, Kornman said that the most noticeable trend is a shift in donations to the local meditation centers rather than to the sect headquarters.

“Some people are voting with their bucks,” he said.