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The Structure of Tantric Abuse

mim

In Tibetan tantric Buddhism, the relationship between guru and disciple is said to be sacred, a channel for transmission of enlightenment itself. Yet within that same structure lies a potential for absolute domination. When a guru feels threatened, betrayed, or exposed, the same system that demands devotion can become an instrument of terror.

The tantric logic of punishment

In tantric doctrine, every vow (samaya) between guru and disciple is a metaphysical bond. Breaking it is said to unleash cosmic consequences. Ancient texts speak of wrathful deities and oath-bound protectors who punish those who “slander the guru” or “harm the Dharma.” The idea is not metaphorical. Illness, accidents, or misfortune are interpreted as visible proof that unseen forces are enforcing spiritual law.¹

A guru who believes this, and who claims mastery of the dark ritual practices that command those forces, often teaches others to believe it. That teacher wields enormous psychological power. To label someone a “samaya-breaker” is to mark them as deserving of sickness or death. This is not an internal accusation only; it shapes the views of the community where the guru holds god-like power. It gives the guru a pretext to use ritual methods to harm students whenever he deems it necessary.

Entities that cause disease

Traditional Tibetan cosmology offers a detailed taxonomy of spirits believed to cause physical and mental harm: bdud (demons), gdon (malevolent spirits), btsan (fiery mountain gods), klu (serpent beings of water), and srin po (ogres).² Each category is said to afflict a different organ, emotion, or realm of life. Texts such as René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz’s Oracles and Demons of Tibet describe elaborate systems of offerings and threats designed to control these beings.

Within this worldview, ritual specialists do not invent malevolent forces but redirect them. A demon bound by oath can be petitioned to punish a perceived oath-breaker. Protector deities can be asked to “remove obstacles” by striking enemies with disease or madness. These ideas are deeply embedded in tantric liturgy and methodology, even if modern dharma centers prefer to describe them symbolically.

The internal logic of coercion

When this metaphysical framework meets the authoritarian structure of a retreat or monastic hierarchy, the result can be catastrophic.³ Gurus can claim divine justification for acts that would otherwise be seen as abusive. If a disciple questions orders, refuses sexual advances, or tries to leave, the teacher can declare them in spiritual violation. From that point on, any misfortune that follows can be attributed to supernatural punishment rather than the guru’s actions.

Real world allegations

The potential for that logic to cross into criminal abuse is not theoretical. Adele Tomlin has published a series of testimonies from women who participated in long-term tantric retreats under the auspices of major Tibetan Buddhist organizations in the United Kingdom and Nepal. According to Tomlin’s report, complaints were submitted to trustees of the dharma centers, as well as to resident teachers. Police reports were also made, with at least one woman reportedly informed that criminal acts had occurred.

The list of complaints is substantial: “…sexual harassment, sexual assault/coercion, ‘false imprisonment’ i.e. refusing to allow people to leave the retreat for urgent matters, such as medical diagnosis and treatment or due to psychological breakdowns, emotional bullying, insistence on signing non-disclosure legal agreements, refusal to provide proper aid to those in physical pain or serious sickness. It was reported that women who had requested to leave the retreat for the above reasons were responded to with threats that they would go to hell…and telling them they would have short lives, terrible sicknesses and their family members would die and get sick too.” There are also accounts of tantric rituals being misused “to ‘force’ consorts to engage in ‘subtle body energy’ unions without appropriate consent/devotion or even pre-requisite qualifications of the guru or consort for such a relation,” and reports that participants’ passports were confiscated before entering retreats in Nepal.”³ See Tomlin’s article here.

The psychology of fear

Once a disciple internalizes the idea that disobedience invites divine punishment, ordinary safeguards such as the law, conscience, and community protection lose their power. The guru becomes both the source of danger and the only possible protection from it. Fear of sickness, insanity, or karmic ruin may keep followers silent even when they experience or witness abuse. This is coercive control disguised as spirituality.

Why tantra is uniquely risky

Every hierarchical religion can produce abuse, but tantric systems amplify the risk because they contain dark magical rituals that can be used to secretly harm students who do not show proper obedience. In the Tibetan tantric system, the guru is not just a teacher but the embodiment of enlightenment itself. Vows are said to bind across lifetimes. Breaking them is imagined to destroy spiritual progress and unleash demonic retribution. That belief gives abusive teachers a supernatural mandate to harm and a theological excuse when they do.⁴

Many practitioners are drawn to long-term retreats by tantra’s promise of transformation. But are the risks worth it? Without structural accountability, the same tools can become weapons. When secrecy, charisma, and ritual authority converge, even devoted, sincere, and intelligent students can be trapped in a reality of pain and punishment.

For those who have lived inside such systems, the scars run deeper than physical or sexual trauma. The damage is also ontological: the haunting sense that unseen forces will stalk them forever and that they are cursed beyond escape. Healing begins by reclaiming moral and spiritual agency, by recognizing that no guru, spirit, or protector holds dominion over one’s body, mind, or fate. Yet once that agency has been surrendered to powerful gurus and their invisible minions, recovering it can be very difficult.

Notes

  1. Stanley Mumford, Himalayan Dialogue: Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
  2. René de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons of Tibet (The Hague: Mouton, 1956).
  3. Adele Tomlin sole author of Dakini Translations website: NOT SO “HOLY ISLE”? TRAGIC TALES OF REPORTED (AND ENABLED) BULLYING AND SEXUAL MISCONDUCT TOWARDS WOMEN AT SAMYE LING UK BUDDHIST CENTRES THAT ENDED IN PHYSICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL HARM, ATTEMPTED SUICIDES AND MURDER. Article excerpted with attribution.
  4. Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).

An Encounter with Kali

mim

The descent into Bengal began with a vision. As our plane banked low over the hazy sprawl of Calcutta, I sat in meditation, quietly preparing for a long journey north to Sikkim for a series of tantric empowerments. Then, quite suddenly, a naked dakini appeared before me, dancing and beckoning. She seemed to be greeting me to Calcutta. I knew, or thought I knew, that it was Kali.

We stayed in a modest Baptist guesthouse chosen for its safety and low price, a short walk from Mother Teresa’s compound. It was late October, and the air was warm and humid. Calcutta felt down at heel, yet intellectual and dignified. My companions, all Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, decided to visit Mother Teresa’s place to pay homage. I hung back. They were sincere in their devotion to that famous nun, but something in me pulled in another direction. Although I had been raised Catholic, I felt a faint aversion to anything connected with the Catholic Church. I regarded the religion as problematic at that time. Still, seeing how genuinely excited my friends were, I encouraged them to go.

The next day I hired a taxi and arranged for us to cross the city to the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, the same temple where Ramakrishna had worshipped and experienced his visions of the Divine Mother and became enlightened. “We really must make the effort to see it,” I told the others, although I wasn’t sure why. The journey took nearly an hour through dusty streets and chaotic traffic. I had read that Kali was the patron goddess of Bengal, and that Dakshineswar was one of her most important shrines. The closer we came, the stronger the pull felt.

At the temple, a long line of Indian devotees wound through the courtyard, each waiting to glimpse the goddess and receive her blessing. We appeared to be the only Westerners there. I knew very little about the history of the temple at that point. All I knew was that I had always been intrigued by Ramakrishna among all the Hindu mystics and had always wanted to visit his temple and pay my respects.

The Temple and Its History

The Dakshineswar Kali Temple was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Rani Rashmoni, a wealthy zamindar who, according to legend, dreamt that the goddess Kali commanded her to build a temple on the banks of the Hooghly River rather than journey by boat to Varanasi¹. Rashmoni had been preparing for the pilgrimage for months and had spent a small fortune, but on the night before her departure, Kali appeared in a dream and told her she need not travel at all. Instead, the goddess instructed her to raise a temple and enshrine an image that Kali herself would inhabit, blessing all who came to worship. The temple was completed in 1855 and the complex stands on land said to resemble a tortoise, a form considered especially auspicious in Shakta-Tantra cosmology².

Architecturally, the main temple is built in the navaratna (nine-spired) style typical of Bengal, raised on a high platform overlooking the river³. Surrounding the sanctum are twelve identical Shiva shrines aligned along the Hooghly’s edge, a small Radha-Krishna temple, and bathing ghats for pilgrims⁴.

Inside the sanctum resides Bhavatarini, a fierce aspect of Kali known as “Saviour of the Universe,” depicted with one foot on Shiva’s chest⁵. The mystic Ramakrishna served as the temple’s priest and carried out years of intense spiritual practice within its grounds, transforming the site into one of India’s holiest centers of Shakti worship⁶. The atmosphere is thick with incense, bells, flowers, and the hum of a thousand mantras. Once inside the gate you feel the city’s chaos fall away.

As we stood in line, something unexpected happened. An Indian guard suddenly appeared, motioned to me and a Buddhist friend, and beckoned us forward. Without explanation, we were led past the waiting crowd directly to the inner sanctum. The goddess stood before us, draped in red and gold, eyes alive in the flicker of ghee lamps. When I received prasad, it tasted sweet and delicious, and I felt a surge of a deep, penetrating love. It was so overwhelming that I began to cry.

As a Tibetan Buddhist, I had always regarded Hindu deities as somehow inferior and secondary to the Tibetan ones who were the representations of the ultimate truth. My practice had centered on Vajrayogini and Chakrasamvara, not on Kali. Yet there, when the experience of divine love engulfed me in the Dakshineswar temple, I felt an unmistakable recognition.

Years later, after surviving the catastrophic unraveling of my own tantric path due to the betrayal by male Buddhist teachers, the exposure of their sexual abuses, and the psychic annihilation that followed, I began to study the origins of tantra in earnest. Through the research of Alexis Sanderson and others, I learned what my experience at Dakshineswar had already shown me: that the yoginī tantras of Tibetan Buddhism arose from the same crucible of medieval Hindu Śaiva and Śākta practice⁷. Vajrayoginī, the red goddess of my own initiations, was in essence a Buddhized form of Kali. The goddess in both traditions can give blessings and boons, but she can become, in an instant, a terrifying and destructive demon with her own set of intentions and cosmic laws.

That insight came at great cost. The deeper I studied, the more clearly I saw that tantra, in both Hindu and Buddhist forms, was inseparable from forces of domination, secrecy, and power. The same ecstatic current that once inspired devotion also lurked behind manipulation and abuse. In the West, these darker currents were long dismissed or hidden, until the many scandals of 2017 tore the veil away.

My visit to Kali’s temple remains a paradox. In that moment I felt only grace: the raw, overwhelming presence of the divine feminine. But in hindsight, I experienced Kali as both mother and destroyer, blessing and devourer. She welcomed me to Calcutta with open arms, but in time, in her Buddhist form as Vajrayogini, she stripped me of everything I held dear in order to completely destroy my body, mind, and soul. By the grace of the highest divinity, the eternal Christian God, I survived and am still alive to tell the tale.

Notes

  1. Dakshineswar Kali Temple, Wikipedia, last modified 2025.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.; see also Dakshineswar Kali Temple official site, Places in Dakshineshwar (dakshineswarkalitemple.org).
  5. Dakshineswar Kali Temple, Britannica.
  6. Ibid.; Ramakrishna’s association documented in Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942).
  7. Alexis Sanderson, “The Śaiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism during the Early Medieval Period,” in Genesis and Development of Tantrism, ed. Shingo Einoo (Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 2009), 41–350.

What If the Kundalini Serpent Fire Was Once Angelic?

mim

What if some of the radiant beings that ancient texts call Seraphim, the fiery, serpentine angels who once circled the throne of God, fell from that high order? The Hebrew word saraph itself means both burning one and serpent. In that ambiguity lies a bridge between the flaming spirits of heaven and the serpent powers found in other traditions.

Across the world, in the Sanskrit Purāṇas and yogic literature, there are also serpentine intelligences: the Nāgas, the Kundalinī energy, and the goddess figures who appear surrounded by flames. The sage Patañjali, author of the Yoga Sūtras, is deeply linked with serpent symbolism. In Indian mythology, he is sometimes described as an incarnation (avatāra) of the serpent deity Ādiśeṣa, or Ananta, the cosmic serpent who supports Viṣṇu. Ādiśeṣa is said to have descended to earth to bring knowledge that would relieve human suffering. This connection is why Patañjali is often portrayed with a serpent hood behind his head or a serpent body below the waist. Whether or not serpent spirits literally whispered the Yoga Sūtras to him, serpent imagery pervades yogic and tantric cosmology. The Nāgas are keepers of divine wisdom, and Kundalinī is envisioned as a coiled fiery energy at the base of the spine that awakens through disciplined practice. Over time, these motifs merged into a vision of serpentine power as both the source and the path of revelation. Suppose these mythic beings were echoes of the same order of spirits, glimpsed through another cultural lens. If the Seraphim of the Old Testament were “burning ones,” what would a fallen Seraph look like to those who encountered its power? Perhaps like the Kundalinī Śakti, a current of fire roaring through the body, consuming and transformative, perilous and hideous.

In Tibetan tantric art, figures such as Vajrayoginī blaze with this same imagery. She stands wreathed in flame, hair flying, a garland of human heads around her neck: a being of immense energy and occult knowledge. To her accomplished devotees she is enlightenment embodied, but to others overwhelmed by her force, the experience could resemble an encounter with a terrifying, cosmic intelligence that feels at once divine and frightfully destructive.

In Christian cosmology, the Seraphim stood closest to the divine light, their essence described as pure burning love. If the story of the angelic rebellion is true, the fall of Lucifer and his host might be understood as the perversion of that love for God turned inward toward self-worship. The Seraphs, if any joined that rebellion, would have fallen from the highest heaven to earth yet carried the memory of their incandescent proximity to the Most High. After such a fall, their nature would remain fiery but unmoored, no longer worshipping the divine but seeking vessels in which to become divine objects themselves, demanding reverence rather than giving it. Their rebellion took the form of imitation, of becoming godlike and leading humans away from God through elaborate systems of spiritual artifice. Seen through that lens, the serpent fire that rises in the body could be a vestige of this celestial descent, a remnant of the same luminous essence striving to return upward yet incapable of abiding in heaven because of their grave sin. In mythic terms, these fallen Seraphs might not have become the grotesque demons described by some exorcists but radiant, fallen intelligences deprived of their proper axis.

Catholic exorcists often describe demons as denizens of hell, creatures of stench, mockery, and degradation that feed on blood and fear. Yet if a third of the angels fell, the fallen host was not of one kind alone. Tradition holds that beings from all nine choirs joined the rebellion, from the lowly messengers to the highest Seraphs who once blazed before the throne. After the fall, these spirits lost their divine orientation but not their essential nature: fiery where they had been fiery, clever where they had been wise. In rebellion they became hierarchies of distortion, a dark mirror of heaven. Some manifest as the grotesque forms exorcists encounter; others as subtler intelligences still bearing the trace of their former luminosity. And what of the Nephilim, the offspring of the “sons of God” and human women? When they died, it is said, they became wandering spirits of great malice. “Demon,” then, is not a single species but a spectrum of fallen orders, each expressing what it once was in a corrupted form. As one exorcist observed, each fallen angel is a species unto itself. A fallen Seraph would perhaps appear differently from a fallen Power, Dominion, or Nephilim spirit.

If the Kundalinī or tantric fire represents contact with that residual Seraphic current, it may explain why it bears both a luminous and a destructive face. The energy feels ancient and intelligent. The ecstatic experiences described in yogic ascent mirror, in certain sense, a fallen entity yearning to return to its source. The agony that often accompanies a kundalini awakening—the painful burning, the psychic rupture, and the sense of another will within—could be the friction between that powerful celestial energy and the humble human vessel struggling to contain it. Whether one interprets this as possession or not, the pattern remains: what was once angelic becomes dangerous when severed from its orientation toward God and seeking to inhabit a human host.

Whether understood theologically, psychologically, or experientially, the speculation remains: serpent fire is something that seeks to burn within human beings, hoping to be redeemed and adored rather than condemned.

Spiritual paths that promise transcendence through serpent fire often walk a razor’s edge where illumination meets peril. Tantric Deception seeks to explore that tension, showing how practices that seem to lead toward light may instead open gateways into spiritual posession and darkness. What begins as ascent toward divinity can turn into descent into hell, both in this life and beyond. To approach the serpent fire is to confront both heaven and the echo of its fall, a perilous imitation of grace. One might call it a race to the bottom. The fallen angels made their choice long ago, and according to Christian theology there is no return for them. Those who follow, worship, or seek to become like them will share their fate in the same fire reserved for their fallen gods, a place described in Scripture as the final dwelling of the devil, his angels, and all who reject the true light. There they are said to be cast into a lake of fire that burns without end, cut off forever from the presence of the Most High God, where the torment born of rebellion becomes eternal.

When Tantric Union in Tibetan Buddhism is Invasive and Unwanted

mim

The ideal of tantric union in Vajrayāna Buddhism is described as the merging of wisdom and compassion, form and emptiness, masculine and feminine. In classical Tibetan art this appears as the yab-yum image of male and female deities in embrace.¹ The symbolism points to inner union, yet within the secrecy and hierarchy of tantra this ideal can become distorted. When intimacy, devotion, and power mix, the result can be psychological or sexual harm rather than awakening.

Union beyond the physical

“Union” (las kyi phyag rgya, maithuna) does not always refer to sexual intercourse. Many lineages teach “mental” or “energetic” union, where teacher and student visualize merging through subtle-body channels or shared deity practice.² Scholar Holly Gayley has examined how such “secret consort” (gsang yum) relationships blur lines between spiritual transmission and sexual exploitation.³

Anecdotal reports from practitioners describe non-physical experiences of sexual arousal or even orgasm initiated by the guru, without consent or understanding. For those unprepared, these experiences can feel like psychic invasion and an intrusion into the mind-body field. The ethical question is whether such experiences can ever be consensual in the context of absolute guru devotion.

The mechanism of “mental union”

Tantric theory holds that through visualization, mantra, and subtle-body control, energies (prāṇa, rlung) can be directed between beings. A guru visualized as a deity may “enter” the disciple’s heart or crown chakra, merging mindstreams in blessing.⁴ In positive settings this symbolizes transmission of realization. Yet in cases of coercion the same mechanism becomes violation: the student’s energetic body is penetrated without consent.

Ritual texts sometimes describe the guru entering the disciple’s central channel (tsa uma) through gaze or mantra, symbolic of energetic or spiritual transmission.⁵ Within Hindu Tantra, similar accounts exist of masters manipulating the disciple’s kundalinī or chakras.⁶ These ideas frame the possibility of non-physical sexualized experiences as part of spiritual union. When combined with secrecy and unequal power, the result may feel like mental rape rather than initiation.

Power, secrecy, and consent

The Vajrayāna guru is regarded as embodiment of the awakened state itself.⁷ Devotion to such a figure can override ordinary ethical boundaries. In Western contexts, where students lack cultural preparation, the potential for abuse rises sharply. Alexander Berzin warns that Western practitioners often misunderstand the traditional checks on guru authority and therefore submit to unhealthy relationships.⁸

Secrecy deepens the problem. The samaya vow forbids disclosure of tantric practices, even to peers. Gayley observes that this secrecy “can be used to reinforce sexual violence and silence abuse.”³

Real-world allegations

At Kagyu Samye Ling monastery and its retreat centre on Holy Isle in Scotland, multiple allegations have surfaced over the past decade. Reports describe bullying and psychological pressure during advanced retreats. Recently it was reported that a British woman may have died by suicide after a four-month retreat there. While there is no public evidence of sexual misconduct toward her, other survivors have alleged earlier incidents of “energy access” by the same teacher. Allegations included the use of “subtle body rape/sexual energy invasion,” according to an article by Adele Tomlin on the Dakini Translations website.⁹

The under-discussed nature of subtle-body abuse

Such cases remain largely invisible because tantric language itself obscures boundaries between metaphor and reality. A teacher’s claim of “mind-union” or “blessing” can mask non-consensual psychic intrusion. Students are often told that doubt equals spiritual failure, and that refusal breaks samaya. Without transparent ethics, the very tools meant to free the mind become weapons of domination.

Moving forward

Ethical tantric practice requires explicit, informed consent at every level: physical, psychological, and energetic. Teachers must articulate clearly what practices entail, and students must retain the right to refuse and leave. The spiritual promise of union cannot excuse the violation of personal autonomy. However, this kind of transparency is unheard of. Proper review structures and support for survivors are practically non-existent in most Tibetan Buddhist centers. The allegations surrounding Samye Ling and Holy Isle highlight what scholars such as Gayley describe as tantra’s “shadow”: the ease with which power can transform spiritual intimacy into a form of manipulation and abuse.

References

  1. Buddha Weekly, “What’s a Consort Union in Tantric Buddhism?” https://buddhaweekly.com/whats-consort-union-tantric-buddhism-no-not-sexual-fantasies-psychology-yab-yum-consorts-union-wisdom-compassion/
  2. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, “Tantra and the Tantric Traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism.” 2016.
  3. Gayley, Holly. “Revisiting the ‘Secret Consort’ (gsang yum) in Tibetan Buddhism.” Religions 9 (2018).
  4. Snellgrove, David. The Hevajra Tantra: A Critical Study. Oxford University Press, 1959.
  5. Wedemeyer, Christian K. Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions of Buddhist Tantra. Columbia University Press, 2013, esp. chap. 3–4, on symbolic initiation and tantric ritual language.
  6. White, David Gordon. Kiss of the Yoginī: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
  7. “The Guru Question: The Crisis of Western Buddhism and Global Future.” Info-Buddhism.com.
  8. Berzin, Alexander. Relating to a Spiritual Teacher: Building a Healthy Relationship. Snow Lion, 2000.
  9. Dakini Translations, “Suicide of Woman Reported in ‘Survivors of Samye Ling Support Group,’” by Adele Tomlin, the sole author of that site. https://dakinitranslations.com/2025/10/28/suicide-of-woman-reported-in-survivors-of-samye-ling-support-group-alleged-bullying-by-drupon-khen-karma-lhabu-teacher-misuse-tantra/
  10. Buddhistdoor Global, “Maithuna: Reflections on the Sacred Tantric Union of Masculine and Feminine.” https://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/maithuna-reflections-on-the-sacred-tantric-union-of-masculine-and-feminine/

The Moral Logic of Ritual Killing in the Wrathful Practices of Tibetan Buddhism

mim

This piece follows up on my previous essay, “Tantric Deception: Black Magic and Power in Tibetan Buddhism,” which explored Solomon FitzHerbert’s study of tantric statecraft and the normalization of ritual violence in seventeenth-century Tibet. In this post, I turn to an even more revealing feature of FitzHerbert’s findings: the Fifth Dalai Lama’s own moral reasoning about ritual killing.

In his autobiography, the Fifth Dalai Lama confronts the criticism that tantric rituals of destruction should not be directed “against ordinary people.” His response is stunning in its candor: “We do not need to be ashamed of this,” he writes, “as it is taught in the Tantras.”¹ He goes further, citing the eight kinds of spirits who “fiercely execute the punishment” on behalf of the enlightened adept.²

Here the Great Fifth is not apologizing for violence; he is codifying it. FitzHerbert explains that the Dalai Lama invokes a moral category known as the ten fields of liberation (sgrol ba’i zhing bcu), a rubric for identifying the kinds of people whose killing can be ritually justified in tantric Buddhism.³ These include those who “cause harm to the Buddhist religion,” “bring dishonour to the Three Jewels,” “endanger the life of the guru,” “slander the Mahāyāna,” “sow discord among the vajra community,” “prevent others from attaining siddhi,” or “pervert views concerning karma and its retribution.”⁴

In other words, violence against the enemies of the dharma was not merely tolerated; it was systematized. The moral categories of Buddhist tantra aligned precisely with the ideological boundaries of religious loyalty. To kill an “enemy of the faith” was to enact liberation through wrathful compassion, a punitive act performed in the name of spiritual duty. In this context, the term liberation does not refer to enlightenment but serves as tantric code for killing.

The crucial question, then, is this: who decides who counts as an enemy of the dharma? It is the guru, a figure endowed with godlike authority, who makes that determination and authorizes the strike, much as a mafia boss sanctions a hit within his own organization.

Such ideas did not remain abstract. As FitzHerbert shows elsewhere, the Dalai Lama’s government ritualized the deployment of these doctrines in warfare and political suppression.⁵ What we see in these passages is the theological backbone of that policy: a cosmological logic that made violence both righteous and karmically justified.

When the “Fields of Liberation” Become Personal

The ethical implications of this doctrine extend far beyond the seventeenth century. Its structure, dividing the world between defenders and destroyers of the dharma, still echoes in the tantric imagination today. Within closed guru/disciple networks, where authority is absolute and ritual power is personalized, this logic can turn inwards toward vulnerable disciples.

When a teacher is accused of abuse–sexual, financial, or psychological–some may interpret criticism of that teacher as slander of the Mahāyāna or harm to the guru, two of the very offenses listed in the ten fields of liberation. Under this view, the accuser becomes a threat to the vajra community itself. The rhetoric of “vajra hell,” karmic downfall, or spiritual ruin can be mobilized as a form of punishment.

Even when no public or obvious ritual of destruction is performed, the doctrinal framework legitimizing wrathful retribution remains intact and the teacher may privately extract revenge. A teacher who sees himself as an accomplished tantric adept may claim to act from “enlightened wrath.” Certainly he convinces himself that is the case. He may claim his retribution is not from malice but from a compassion that destroys obscurations and seeks to protect his community from dissenters. In this way, spiritual authority can blur into coercion, and the old metaphysics of tantric punishment can be redeployed against dissenting students.

Thus, the problem is not simply historical. It lies in a theological grammar that still allows destructive acts to be reframed as enlightened means. When criticism is recast as “slander of the dharma,” and when the guru’s person is identified with the deity itself, retaliation can be justified as upholding the sacred order.

Facing the Doctrine Honestly

When Western seekers encounter Tibetan Buddhism, we are often presented with an image of serene compassion, untainted by coercion or cruelty. Yet the Fifth Dalai Lama himself dismantles that illusion. He writes without hesitation that violent tantric rites are legitimate instruments of enlightened rule. The “theatre state” of seventeenth-century Tibet was the political expression of doctrines like the ten fields of liberation.

If the tradition is to be understood honestly, these passages should be part of an open and very public conversation. The Fifth Dalai Lama’s own words make clear that within tantric ethics, destruction is allowed, and killing can be framed as an act of perverted compassion. The challenge for modern practitioners and scholars alike is to recognize how this same moral architecture can exist whenever authority claims transcendence from accountability.

Footnotes

  1. Solomon G. FitzHerbert, “The Fifth Dalai Lama and the Tantric Politics of State Formation in Seventeenth-Century Tibet,” Arts Asiatiques 27 (2018): 88.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 89.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid., 74–83.

Tantric Deception: Black Magic and Power in Tibetan Buddhism

mim

I am amazed that the PR for Tibetan Buddhism in the West managed for so long to conceal the extent of black magic practiced by lamas in Tibet historically and even to the present day. This concealment, aided and abetted by the squeamishness and obliviousness of some scholars, has to stop. In the dharma centers I was involved in, anything dark in Tibetan lore was relegated to the Bön religion, and the implication was that once Buddhism took hold in Tibet, any kind of evil acts such as harming or killing sentient beings was completely off the table. The truth is that black magic is in the lexicon of the highest lamas in the lineage as well as ngakpas and others. I believe these techniques are used liberally and current scholarship is finally exposing it.

Solomon G. FitzHerbert’s study of the mid-seventeenth century makes the core point plainly. He argues that tantric ritual and the rhetoric of ritual violence were central to how the Ganden Phodrang state established and legitimated power, not a peripheral curiosity. He writes that Tibetan sources “more than compensate” for the lack of hard military data with abundant materials about the “legitimation and maintenance of authority” through ritual technologies and narratives.¹

Before the rise of the Fifth Dalai Lama, Tibet’s Tsang rulers were already forging political alliances through tantric warfare. FitzHerbert shows that the Tsang kings deliberately patronized lamas famed for their mastery of wrathful and repelling rites. The most favored were the hierarchs of the Karma Kagyu, the “black hat” Karmapa and the “red hat” Zhamarpa, along with the Jonang scholar Taranatha, who was also enjoined to perform repelling rituals on behalf of his patrons.² Their alliances were explicitly religious and martial: an “ecumenical alliance in the name of defending religion and Tibet from foreign armies.”³

Among the Tsang rulers’ most celebrated ritual specialists was the Nyingma master Sokdokpa Lodrö Gyeltsen (1552–1624), self-styled “Repeller of Mongols.”⁴ A disciple of Zhikpo Lingpa, Sokdokpa was the main heir to the revealed cycle Twenty-Five Ways of Repelling Armies (Dmag zlog nyi shu rtsa lnga).⁵ His Mongol-repelling rites were widely famed, and he worked directly with the Tsang ruler Phuntsok Namgyel. One elaborate rite performed in 1605 to coincide with a Tsang military offensive involved producing “some 150,000 paper effigies of enemy soldiers.”⁶ These were ritually destroyed to annihilate the opposing force, with Bonpo specialists also enlisted for their expertise in magical harm.⁷

According to FitzHerbert, Phüntsok Namgyel successfully forged a broad anti-Geluk alliance using tantric technologies of protection and destruction.⁸ After his death, “reputedly at the hands of offensive magic being hurled at him by the Shabdrung Nawang Namgyal (Zhabsdrung Ngag dbang rnam rgyal) (1594–1651), founder of the state of Bhutan,”⁹ his son Karma Tenkyong (1604–1642) inherited a weakened position. The Shabdrung’s tantric assault, still treated in Bhutanese and Tibetan sources as a historical fact, thus became the legendary moment when a ruler famed for weaponizing ritual power was himself undone by it. It is one of the rare episodes where the logic of esoteric warfare entered the realm of accepted political history.

This is where the Fifth Dalai Lama comes into focus. FitzHerbert shows that in the 17th century the Great Fifth cultivated and systematized an official repertoire of destructive and protective rites in service of government aims. In his words, the Dalai Lama showed a “lifelong concern with learning, authoring and instituting an armory of defensive and offensive rituals for the mobilization of unseen forces” for the state.¹⁰ That program contributed to the Ganden Phodrang’s reputation for “magical power,” and helped stage what FitzHerbert calls the grandest “theatre state” in Tibetan Buddhist history.¹¹

FitzHerbert details three overlapping strategies. First, the new government suppressed, marginalized, or co-opted rival traditions of war magic associated with other schools, including Karma Kagyu and strands within Nyingma, while appropriating selective cycles that could be redeployed under Geluk authority.¹² Second, it rebuilt Nyingma institutions such as Dorjé Drak and Mindröling under Ganden Phodrang patronage, folding their esoteric prestige into the state project.¹³ Third, it sponsored new state rituals based on the Dalai Lama’s own visionary experiences, further centralizing ritual power in Lhasa.¹⁴

The rhetoric was not merely devotional. Lamas and ritual specialists acted as “bodyguards” whose professional task was destructive magic on behalf of patrons.¹⁵ Chroniclers attributed battlefield outcomes to the rites of powerful tantrikas. FitzHerbert highlights Chökyi Drakpa, famed for the Yamantaka cycle known as the “Ultra-Repelling Fiery Razor,” which centered on rites of “protecting, repelling and killing.”¹⁶ In one report, after deploying these rites against a Tümed encampment, “nothing was left behind but a name.”¹⁷

To grasp how such violence could be framed as meritorious, FitzHerbert shows the tantric logic that recasts killing as an enlightened “action” when performed by an empowered adept. The adept receives empowerment, performs extensive propitiation to forge identification with the deity, and then “incite[s]” and “dispatch[es]” oath-bound spirits to defend the dharma. By manipulating the five elements and the “public non-reality” of appearances, the practitioner can pacify, increase, control, or destroy, including against human enemies.¹⁸ The moral frame is clear in the sources he cites and translates. Killing is made licit because it is tantric, ritually purified and redirected as enlightened activity.¹⁹

FitzHerbert also situates Tibetan practices within a longer Indo-Buddhist lineage of war magic. He surveys Indian materials that speak of sainyastambha or army-repelling rites, and notes that the Hevajra states that “black magic for paralyzing armies,” is part of its “manifold purpose” and that the Kālacakra includes descriptions of war machines and siege methods such as “catapults, traps, siege towers, and so on,” alongside esoteric harm and protection.²⁰ He further notes the use of human effigies and effigy destruction in offensive rites against enemies, a hallmark of Tibetan ritual repertoires that drew on wider South Asian and even Indo-European precedents.²¹

Western idealization of Tibetan Buddhism has depended on ignoring this record. The lamas who administered and celebrated these rites were not outliers. They were the architects of a political order that fused charisma, ritual terror, and doctrinal justifications into a program of power. State-sponsored ritual violence was normalized in chronicles and hagiographies as enlightened means. The fact pattern is no longer obscure. It is all in the sources, and FitzHerbert has laid them out.

Although FitzHerbert’s focus is on state-sponsored ritual violence, similar technologies of harm have long been used by individual lamas against perceived enemies including, at times, their own disciples. The anthropologist Geoffrey Samuel has noted that the ritual power claimed by tantric masters can be turned inward, weaponizing spiritual authority to punish dissent or enforce obedience.²² In one well-documented episode from the nineteenth century, the treasure-revealer (tertön) Dorje Lingpa was said to have struck down a rival practitioner through wrathful ritual means, his death interpreted locally as a karmic consequence of opposing the lama’s command.²³ Such stories attest to a cultural logic in which ritual, psychic, or physical violence by enlightened masters could be valorized as the just expression of awakened power. I have personally been a victim of this deluded violent ritual power by Tibetan masters.

If Tibetan Buddhism is to be understood honestly outside Tibet, this history needs to be taught in dharma centers and discussed in scholarship without euphemism. The tradition’s own categories allow for destructive ritual and sanctified killing under certain conditions. Pretending otherwise does not protect the innocent devotees who arrive at dharma centers with open hearts seeking methods for developing compassion and loving kindness in service of enlightenment. Indeed, one must ask what kind of enlightenment tradition could allow, even glorify such violence.

Notes

  1. FitzHerbert, Rituals as War Propaganda, 91. FitzHerbert, Solomon G. “Rituals as War Propaganda in the Establishment of the Tibetan Ganden Phodrang State in the Mid-17th Century.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 27 (2018): 49–119: https://www.persee.fr/doc/asie_0766-1177_2018_num_27_1_1508. (I first came across FitzHerbert’s article via a post on Adele Tomlin’s website http://www.dakinitranslations.com.)
  2. Ibid., 95–96.
  3. Ibid., 95.
  4. Ibid., 96.
  5. Ibid., 96.
  6. Ibid., 97.
  7. Ibid., 97.
  8. Ibid., 101.
  9. Ibid., 102–103.
  10. Ibid., 94.
  11. Ibid., 95.
  12. Ibid., 96.
  13. Ibid., 97.
  14. Ibid., 98.
  15. Ibid., 93.
  16. Ibid., 100.
  17. Ibid., 101.
  18. Ibid., 71.
  19. Ibid., 72.
  20. Ibid., 98–99.
  21. Ibid., 99.
  22. Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), pp. 429–432.
  23. Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer, “Representations of wrathful deities in treasure literature,” in Tantric Revisionings: New Understandings of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 131–133.

The Squeamishness of Scholarship: Cameron Bailey’s Critique of Sam van Schaik’s book on Buddhist Magic

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Sam van Schaik’s Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages (2020) attends to the often-overlooked domain of spells, incantations, divination, healing rituals, and what one might call “magic” in Buddhist traditions. The book offers, among other things, a translation of a Tibetan spell-book from the Dunhuang corpus and situates it in a broad historical trajectory of Buddhist ritual technologies. Yet in his 2021 review for H-Net, Cameron Bailey argues that the book suffers from significant omissions, conceptual limitations, and a subtle apologetic tone toward the more aggressive, violent, and transgressive forms of magic found in tantric Buddhism.¹ Bailey suggests that this tone is not simply stylistic but stems from deeper disciplinary biases about what “real” Buddhism is and what kinds of ritual power are acceptable to the scholarly gaze.

For readers of Tantric Deception, which is concerned with hidden ritual power, subversive techniques, and coercive practices in the “shadow” side of tantra, Bailey’s critique is especially pertinent. The benign, therapeutic, protective aspects of magic are only half the story; the aggressive, destructive, boundary-breaking elements are equally constitutive. Here the critique unfolds on three levels: (1) Bailey’s reading of Chapter 3 of van Schaik’s book (on the Ba ri be’u ’bum); (2) his broader objections to how van Schaik defines “magic” and frames the field; and (3) implications for the study of tantric magic and deception.

Bailey’s Critique of Chapter 3: “A Tibetan Book of Spells”

Bailey looks at Chapter 3, which discusses the Tibetan spell-book known as the Ba ri be’u ’bum, compiled by Ba ri Lotsāwa in the eleventh century.² Van Schaik concludes the chapter by pointing to the presence of violent magical ritual, what might be called “black magic,” in Buddhist spell-books and tantric scriptures such as the Vajrabhairava Tantra.³

Bailey’s critique is threefold:

  1. Understatement of prevalence. Van Schaik, he argues, seriously understates how widespread aggressive or destructive ritual practices are in tantric sources: “He could also have discussed the army-repelling magic in the Hevajra Tantra, the legendary violent magical exploits of the great tantric sorcerer Rwa Lotsāwa, or Nyingma Mahayoga scriptures, which are often positively brimming with black magic.”⁴
  2. Authorial discomfort. Bailey detects an obvious unease with “aggressive” magic and with rituals that use human remains as ingredients, suggesting van Schaik takes an apologetic tone when discussing them.⁵
  3. Scholarly bias. He links this tone to the longstanding tendency of Buddhist studies to privilege an idealized, pacifist Buddhism: “This kind of squeamishness … unconsciously replicates the biases of past generations of Buddhist scholars …. It is ultimately an artifact of Western observers thinking they know more about what should constitute normative Buddhism than their sources do …”⁶

For Bailey, this is not simply an omission but a rhetorical framing that soft-pedals the destructive dimensions of tantric magic.

Defining “Magic”: Bailey’s Broader Critique

Bailey extends his criticism to van Schaik’s opening chapters, where the author defines his working category of “Buddhist magic.” Van Schaik adopts a “family-resemblance” approach, noting that no direct equivalent of the Western word magic exists in Sanskrit or Tibetan.⁷ He describes magical practices as “focused on worldly ends, including healing, protection, divination, manipulation of emotions, and sometimes killing. The effects of these techniques are either immediate or come into effect in a defined, short-term period. The techniques themselves are usually brief, with clear instructions that do not need much interpretation, and are gathered together in books of spells.”⁸

Bailey objects that this framing:

  • Over-narrows the field by confining magic to short-term, worldly ends, thereby excluding tantric practices that are long, soteriological, and embedded in complex ritual technologies.⁹
  • Privileges text and literacy, focusing on manuals and specialists while sidelining oral, embodied, and popular forms of practice.¹⁰
  • Sanitizes the topic by foregrounding healing and protection while downplaying cursing, corpse-magic, and enemy destruction.¹¹

He concludes: “The way he defines and explains ‘magic,’ and describes how magical practices have traditionally been used by Buddhists across Asia, ends up inadvertently reinforcing many of the historical scholarly prejudices against magic that he ostensibly is trying to correct.”¹²

Van Schaik’s framework thus risks reproducing the very boundaries it seeks to challenge.

A Wider Blind Spot: Aggressive Magic and the Tantric World

Bailey argues that van Schaik should have engaged more fully with texts such as the Hevajra Tantra (with its army-repelling spells), the violent exploits of Rwa Lotsāwa, and the Nyingma Mahayoga scriptures filled with wrathful deities, corpse-magic, and enemy-destruction rites.¹³ By not doing so, or by treating such material as peripheral, van Schaik, he claims, sanitizes Tibetan Buddhism. “Van Schaik displays an obvious discomfort with the presence of ‘aggressive’ magic … and takes an apologetic tone when discussing them.”¹⁴

For scholars of tantra, this omission matters because tantric systems operate through extremes such as creation and annihilation, compassion and wrath, life-force and death. To highlight only healing and protection produces a partial picture of ritual power, one aligned with modern therapeutic Buddhism but detached from the coercive, political, and martial realities of historical tantric practice.

Bailey notes that while van Schaik does acknowledge violent spells (for example, in the Dunhuang materials), he does not trace how these recur and become canonical in later tantric systems.¹⁵ The result is a book that opens the field but keeps its most provocative elements at the margins.

Implications for the Study of Tantric Magic and Deception

Bailey’s critique has clear implications for the study of tantric ritual power:

  • Broaden the definition of magic. Magic in Buddhist contexts is not confined to short spells. It includes deity-yoga, state-sponsored rituals, corpse-assemblage, body technologies, and institutions of ritual power.
  • Recognize multiple aims. Magic serves soteriological as well as worldly purposes such awakening, subjugation, and mediation between spirits and humans.
  • Acknowledge popular practice. Lay and non-monastic forms of magic interpenetrate elite traditions. Focusing solely on literate specialists truncates the field.¹⁶

Examining the Aggressive and Transgressive

To understand tantric magic fully, scholarship must confront its aggressive, destructive, and taboo aspects such as spells to kill or incapacitate, invocations of wrathful deities, rituals using human remains, and forms of mystical violence justified through tantric cosmology. When these are treated as aberrations, the study of tantric sovereignty, ethics, and power becomes impoverished.

Deception, Hidden Power, and Normativity

Bailey’s review also raises a methodological issue: the scholar’s discomfort can itself become a form of concealment. Reluctance to confront violent or transgressive material filters what is studied and what remains hidden. Bailey argues that van Schaik’s apologetic tone mirrors earlier generations of scholarship that preferred a morally “respectable” Buddhism.¹⁷

For research into deception, secrecy, and power in tantra, this is crucial. Reflexivity is required: how much of what we present as Buddhism is sanitized by our own unease with its violent, ambiguous realities?

Conclusion

Cameron Bailey’s critique of Buddhist Magic is more than a review. It is a reminder that scholarly framing shapes what becomes visible and what remains unseen in the study of ritual power. Van Schaik’s work makes an important contribution by bringing spells and enchantments to the center of Buddhist studies. Yet, as Bailey insists, by downplaying the aggressive and coercive sides of tantric magic, it perpetuates a pacified image of [Tibetan] Buddhism.

For those exploring tantra, deception, and hidden power, the shadow side of magic demands attention. Spells of domination and annihilation, corpse-magic, and state-sorcery are part of the story. Scholarly discomfort cannot determine what counts as legitimate tantric Buddhism. True understanding must include the violent and transgressive alongside the healing and protective.

Van Schaik opened the door; Bailey challenges us to step through. In tantra, concealment is not accidental, it is a method and a weapon. So too must scholarship have the courage to unmask it.

Notes

  1. Cameron Bailey, “Review of Sam van Schaik, Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages,” H-Buddhism (H-Net Reviews), July 2021. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56639.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid., p. 3.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Ibid., p. 4.
  7. Van Schaik, Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2020), pp. 6–8; Bailey, review.
  8. Quoted in “Think Again Before You Dismiss Magic,” Lions Roar, April 2020.
  9. Bailey, review, p. 3.
  10. Ibid.
  11. Ibid.
  12. Ibid., p. 2.
  13. Ibid., p. 3.
  14. Ibid.
  15. Ibid.
  16. Ibid.
  17. Ibid., p. 4.

References

Bailey, Cameron. “Review of Sam van Schaik, Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages.” H-Buddhism (H-Net Reviews), 2021. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56639.
Van Schaik, Sam. Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages. Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2020.
“Think Again Before You Dismiss Magic.” Lions Roar, April 2020.

The “Civilized” Shaman: Geoffrey Samuel and the Tension at the Heart of the Tibetan Religion

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In Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, Geoffrey Samuel offers a sweeping anthropology of Tibetan religion that refuses to take Tibetan Buddhism at face value. He finds a living tradition shaped by older and more unruly forces beneath the polished scholastic surface of the monasteries. What emerges is a civilization of monks and magicians, of disciplined philosophers and ecstatic ritualists. His argument is simple but radical: Tibetan Buddhism is the result of Indian Buddhist ethics and philosophy meeting the shamanic substratum of the high plateau.¹

Two orientations: clerical and shamanic

Samuel organizes Tibetan religion around two poles. The first, the clerical or monastic orientation, descends from Indian Buddhism with its monasteries, ethical codes, and scholastic systems of thought. It values restraint, karmic causality, and the gradual cultivation of enlightenment. The second, the shamanic orientation, grows from indigenous Tibetan practices centered on ritual efficacy, spirit interaction, and the manipulation of unseen forces. This orientation values power (dbang) more than purity and treats ritual specialists not as moral exemplars but as technicians of spiritual power.²

These two strands were never simply reconciled. Tibetan civilization attempted to domesticate the shaman. The ecstatic healer and spirit-fighter was refashioned into a lama, wrapped in robes and scriptures yet still capable of commanding spirits, averting misfortune, or destroying an enemy through ritual means. The civilized shaman is not a metaphor. It is a social type, the institutionalized magician of a literate Buddhist society.³

Dark rituals and the question of subjugation

The most uncomfortable continuity between these worlds lies in the domain of ritual violence, what Tibetan sources call drag-po or wrathful rites. These practices are directed not toward enlightenment but toward control: the binding, subduing, or annihilation of obstructing forces, whether demonic, psychic, or human.⁴

Samuel interprets these rites not as moral aberrations but as necessary expressions of the shamanic orientation within a Buddhist frame. Indian Buddhism had long flirted with magical power but kept it at the margins of monastic life. In Tibet, ritual mastery became central. The same lama who taught compassion might also perform a subjugation rite, using effigies, mantras, and visualizations of wrathful deities to annihilate obstacles, whether spiritual or human. Such practices, found in the Nyingma and Kagyu tantric cycles and institutionalized in monastic ritual manuals, embody a logic foreign to classical Indian soteriology yet native to shamanic cosmology, the idea that power must be met with power.⁵

What makes these rites “civilized” is not their ethical domestication but their integration into a bureaucratic religion. The Tibetan monastery became a regulated arena for managing violence and transforming it into ritual performance. The monastic code that forbade killing also licensed symbolic destruction: paper effigies burned, dough figures pierced, and demons tamed through mantras.⁶ This was how a society of monks could still believe in, and even engage in, acts of ritual aggression.

Power and legitimacy

Samuel’s analysis is more about social structure than theology. The clerical orientation secured legitimacy through moral authority and learning, while the shamanic orientation maintained relevance through immediate and pragmatic results. The former built monasteries; the latter kept communities going amid famine, disease, and invasion. Tibetan Buddhism’s durability, he argues, comes from this uneasy synthesis. The scholar-monk and the ritual adept needed each other: the first to lend doctrine and order, the second to command the spirits that haunted every valley and household.⁷

In this light, the dark rituals of subjugation are not aberrations but instruments of governance. They discipline the chaotic powers of the landscape just as the monastery disciplines the passions of the mind. To them, the wrathful deity is not a contradiction of compassion but its shadow: compassion armed.

Rethinking the “Buddhist” in Tibetan Buddhism

Samuel’s greatest contribution may be to unsettle what we think “Buddhist” means. By treating Tibetan religion as a field of interacting orientations rather than a single orthodoxy, he exposes the limits of modern, idealized Buddhism. The vision of Tibet as a purely pacific, philosophical culture depends on forgetting the tantric rites that promise to destroy human enemies or subjugate spirits.⁸ Samuel does not moralize about this tension; he historicizes it. The so-called civilized shaman is a figure born of necessity, mediating between an imported moral system and an indigenous world of volatile gods.⁹

A note on tantra as the mediating field

Samuel does not treat Hindu tantra as a third, independent strand within Tibetan Buddhism. Rather, he presents tantric practice as the meeting ground of the clerical and shamanic orientations. By the time tantra reached Tibet, Indian Buddhism had already absorbed many Śaiva and Śākta elements. What Tibet inherited, therefore, was a fully developed tantric Buddhism rather than a simple blend of Buddhist and Hindu ideas. In Samuel’s account, tantra provided the channel through which shamanic power could operate within a clerical framework. It was the mechanism that allowed ecstatic and ritual techniques to coexist with the disciplines of monastic scholarship.

He also describes tantric Buddhism in Tibet as a two-way exchange. The imported Indian systems of Hevajra, Guhyasamāja, Cakrasaṃvara, and others were reinterpreted through local cosmologies of mountain gods, territorial spirits, and ancestral deities. The result was what he calls “tantricized shamanism” or “shamanized Buddhism.” While Hindu tantra was one historical source, the Tibetan tantric complex became a hybrid formation that expressed shamanic cosmology through Buddhist doctrine.¹⁰

The afterlife of the civilized shaman

Civilized Shamans was published in 1993, before the wave of globalized Tibetan Buddhism tried to reframe lamas as psychologists or humanitarians. Yet its insight remains vital. Beneath every system of enlightenment lies a system of control. The Tibetan synthesis worked precisely because it did not abolish the shamanic element. It incorporated it, turning ecstatic violence into liturgy and spirit warfare into cosmology.¹¹

For those interested in understanding tantric practice, especially the darker currents of subjugation and protection, Samuel’s anthropology is a cautionary mirror. It reminds us that ritual power is never purely symbolic. Even when intellectualized, it retains the logic of coercion: to bind, to summon, to annihilate. Tibet’s civilization was built on mastering such forces. The tension Samuel describes is not an accident of history but a model of how Tibetan religion evolved. Civilized shamans appear wherever doctrine meets magic, wherever ethics must coexist with power. Tibet made that paradox explicit.¹²

Notes

  1. Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 11–13.
  2. Samuel, Civilized Shamans, 11–12, 134–136.
  3. Ibid., 478–480.
  4. Ibid., 238–240.
  5. Ibid., 259–262.
  6. Ibid., 468–471.
  7. Ibid., 465–469.
  8. Ibid., 244–246, 478.
  9. Ibid., 479–482.
  10. Ibid., 66–74, 242–243, 476–478, 480–481.
  11. Ibid., 476–479.
  12. Ibid., 481–482.

Saint Bartolo Longo: From Darkness to Light

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Saint Bartolo Longo was canonized by Pope Leo XIV on October 19, 2025, during a solemn Mass in St. Peter’s Square that elevated seven new saints to the altars of the Catholic Church. The Vatican’s announcement confirmed what many had long anticipated: that the once wayward lawyer who fell into occultism but found redemption would at last be formally recognized among the saints.

Before his story begins, it is worth repeating the Church’s timeless warning about the dangers of all occult practices and the spiritual counterfeits that appear holy but lead astray. The New Age fascination with séances, channeling, tarot, reiki, and yoga is not new. It is a repetition of the same deceit that misled Bartolo himself. Likewise Tibetan Buddhism, which hides black magic and sorcery behind the peaceful facade of Buddhism, should be closely examined. Bartolo Longo’s life shows something deeply consoling: no matter how far one strays into darkness, there is always a way back through repentance, confession, and devotion to Christ and His Mother.

Bartolo Longo was born in Latiano, a small southern Italian village, on February 10, 1841. His family were respected townspeople and lived comfortably with servants. Bartolo had an older sister and a younger brother, and his father worked as a physician. As a boy, Bartolo was lively and mischievous; he was quick-witted, theatrical, and often irreverent. His mother, however, formed him in devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Rosary.

When he was six, Bartolo was sent to a priest-run boarding school. He thrived there, making friends, studying hard, and developing a gift for music and fireworks. His temper, though, remained fiery. At ten, his father died, and his mother later remarried a lawyer. That stepfather’s profession drew Bartolo’s interest, and he resolved to study law.

By the 1860s, while the anti-Catholic movement was reshaping Italy, Bartolo and his brother moved to Naples for their studies. The intellectual climate was hostile to the Church. Professors openly mocked the Pope and religious orders. The young student’s faith eroded in that atmosphere. He became fascinated by the new philosophies of reason and freedom that dismissed religion as superstition.

In this environment, spiritualism was fashionable among students, and Bartolo, hungry for meaning, began attending séances. These gatherings promised secret knowledge and communion with spirits. For a time, he believed he had found truth in these occult practices. But the spirits he invoked deceived him. Gradually, curiosity gave way to obsession. He became involved with a group of spiritualists and, eventually, a full satanic sect that ordained him a “priest.” During his initiation, thunder roared, and blasphemous cries filled the air. Bartolo later recalled the terror of that night, when he felt the presence of something utterly dark take hold of him.

In the months that followed, Bartolo lived in dread. He sensed an invisible companion, an “angel of darkness,” whispering to him. He felt trapped between delusion and madness. Yet even in that state, he completed his law degree and continued public attacks against the Church. His family, horrified, prayed constantly for his conversion.

Among the few faithful Catholics left at the university was Professor Vincenzo Pepe. When Bartolo confessed that he believed he had heard his dead father’s voice, Pepe warned him that the spirits were lying and that his practices would destroy both his mind and his soul. The professor begged him to repent and return to the Church. Remarkably, Bartolo agreed. Pepe gathered others to pray for him, including Caterina Volpicelli, a devout woman who led a Rosary group dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Through their prayers, Bartolo met Father Alberto Radente, a Dominican friar. For a full month, Father Radente counseled and exorcised him daily. Finally, on June 23, 1865, the Feast of the Sacred Heart, Bartolo made his confession and received absolution. He was reconciled to the Church and freed from the darkness that had enslaved him.

Overwhelmed with gratitude, Bartolo vowed to save others from the same deception. He attended one last séance, not to participate, but to renounce it. In the midst of the meeting, he stood up, raised a medal of the Virgin, and publicly proclaimed that spiritualism was a web of falsehood. From that moment, he dedicated his life to Christ and to Mary.

With the guidance of his spiritual directors, Bartolo discerned that his vocation was not to marry or become a priest but to serve God as a lay Dominican. On October 7, 1871 on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, he entered the Third Order of St. Dominic, taking the name Brother Rosario. He studied diligently, prayed the Rosary daily, and worked among the sick and poor.

When he traveled to Pompeii to manage property for a widow, the Countess Marianna de Fusco, Bartolo found the people living in ignorance and superstition. The local church was in ruins. Remembering his own past, he resolved to restore both the building and the people’s faith. During a time of despair, haunted by thoughts of damnation, he heard an interior voice say: “If you seek salvation, propagate the Rosary. Whoever spreads the Rosary will be saved.” At that instant, peace filled his soul, and he understood his mission.

Bartolo restored the church, began teaching the Rosary, and organized an annual Feast of the Rosary in 1873. He brought to Pompeii a worn painting of Our Lady of the Rosary, later associated with miracles that drew pilgrims from across Italy. Encouraged by the Bishop of Nola, he began building a grander church, whose cornerstone was laid on May 8, 1876. Fifteen years later, it was consecrated by Cardinal Raffaele Monaco La Valletta, representing Pope Leo XIII. Today, the Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompeii welcomes tens of thousands of pilgrims daily.

His mission expanded beyond the basilica. Bartolo founded schools, orphanages, and homes for the children of prisoners. He started a magazine and wrote extensively about the Rosary, the saints, and Christian life. To avoid scandal from his close collaboration with Countess de Fusco, Pope Leo XIII advised them to marry. They wed on April 7, 1885, living chastely as brother and sister while continuing their charitable work.

Bartolo died peacefully on October 5, 1926, after receiving Holy Communion and praying the Rosary surrounded by orphans. His last words were, “My only desire is to see Mary, who has saved me and who will save me from the clutches of Satan.” Pope John Paul II beatified him on October 26, 1980, calling him “a man of the Rosary.” On October 19, 2025, Pope Leo XIV canonized him as Saint Bartolo Longo, Apostle of the Rosary.

Bartolo’s life remains a witness for every age: no matter how lost or deceived, a soul that turns back to God can be saved. His feast day is October 5.

Credit:
Summary inspired by Bartolo Longo by Mary’s Dowry Productions (2017), available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OQLRndbHIM. Used under fair use for educational and religious commentary.

Christianity in Tibet: The Legacy of Jesuit Priest Ippolito Desideri

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For centuries, Tibet has been a land that captures the imagination of the West: a high, remote world where spiritual and philosophical traditions intertwine with the stark beauty of the Himalayas. Among the earliest Westerners to truly engage with Tibetan thought was Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit priest from Tuscany whose intellect, linguistic mastery, and deep curiosity made him one of the most remarkable missionaries of the early modern era. His work in the early 18th century stands as the first sustained encounter between Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, marked not by confrontation but by a rare spirit of dialogue.

Early life and mission

Born in Pistoia in 1684, Desideri joined the Society of Jesus and quickly established himself as a scholar and teacher. His ambition was missionary work, and in 1712 he left Europe for India under the Jesuit Province of Goa. After years of difficult travel through Delhi, Kashmir, and Ladakh, he entered Lhasa on March 18, 1716. The Mongol ruler Lhasang Khan granted him permission to reside and study, marking the beginning of one of the most extraordinary intellectual encounters in religious history.¹

Tibet and the Capuchin dispute

Unknown to Desideri at the time, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith had already granted the Capuchin order exclusive rights over the Tibetan mission in 1703. This bureaucratic decision set the stage for a long jurisdictional dispute that would eventually cut short his work. In 1718, Propaganda Fide reaffirmed its assignment to the Capuchins and ordered the Jesuits to withdraw. After years of correspondence and litigation in Rome, a final decree in 1732 confirmed the Capuchins’ claim to Tibet.²

Immersion in Tibetan learning

In Lhasa, Desideri did what few missionaries before or since have attempted: he learned Tibetan thoroughly, studied Buddhist philosophy at Sera Monastery, and debated with monks in their own scholastic format. When the Dzungar invasion disrupted the capital in late 1717, he moved to Dakpo, where he continued to write and teach until his departure in 1721.³

Desideri’s approach was remarkable for its intellectual humility and rigor. He sought not to denounce Buddhism from ignorance but to understand it from within. By studying logic, metaphysics, and the Abhidharma, he entered into dialogue with the most sophisticated thinkers of his day in Tibet.

The Tibetan writings

Between 1718 and 1721 Desideri composed several original works in Tibetan. These writings, preserved in manuscripts now held in Rome and elsewhere, represent the earliest sustained Christian philosophical literature written in the Tibetan language.

  1. Tho rangs (“The Dawn”). An introductory dialogue presenting Christianity as the light that dispels ignorance and prepares the reader for deeper argumentation.⁴
  2. Lo snying po (“Essence of the Doctrine”). A concise catechism that sets out the essentials of Christian theology in the format of a Tibetan scholastic summary.⁵
  3. ’Byun k’uns (“Origin of Living Beings and of All Things”). A detailed critique of Buddhist cosmology and rebirth, arguing for a First Cause and a created order.⁶
  4. Nes legs (“The Supreme Good and Final End”). A philosophical exploration of the highest good, contrasting Christian teleology with Buddhist conceptions of nirvana.⁷

These works reveal a unique attempt to translate Thomistic metaphysics into the conceptual world of Tibetan Buddhism. Desideri employed debate forms familiar to the Geluk school and structured his reasoning through syllogisms recognizable to monastic scholars.⁸

His arguments against rebirth and emptiness

Desideri’s philosophical engagement centered on two main critiques of Buddhist doctrine: the cycle of rebirth and the concept of emptiness.

He argued that the karmic theory of rebirth fails to explain the origin of the first sentient beings, since it presupposes an infinite regress of prior lives without an initial cause. The moral and causal order of the universe, he wrote, points instead to an intelligent Creator who is both the origin and sustainer of being.⁹

Regarding emptiness (śūnyatā), Desideri contended that the very notion of dependent origination implies the existence of something independent. If everything is contingent and conditioned, reason demands an unconditioned ground. For Desideri, that ground is God, the necessary and self-subsistent cause of all things.¹⁰ He thus turned Tibetan logic toward a Christian conclusion, using the same tools his interlocutors used to defend their own tradition.

Conflict with the Capuchins and departure

While Desideri’s intellectual project flourished, his position within the Catholic hierarchy collapsed. The Capuchins, already active in Lhasa, viewed the Jesuits as intruders and appealed to Rome. After Propaganda Fide confirmed their authority, Desideri was ordered to leave Tibet in 1721. He made his way through India and returned to Europe in 1728, where he spent years defending the Jesuits’ case before ultimately submitting to the Vatican’s ruling.¹¹

The great narrative: Notizie istoriche del Tibet

Back in Rome, Desideri composed Notizie istoriche del Tibet (“Historical Notices of Tibet”), an extraordinary blend of ethnography, travel narrative, and theological reflection. In it, he described Tibetan geography, society, and religion with unprecedented detail and sympathy. Modern readers can access this work in the English translation Mission to Tibet by Michael Sweet and Leonard Zwilling, as well as in Donald Lopez and Thupten Jinpa’s Dispelling the Darkness.¹²

Legacy

Desideri died in 1733, only a year after the final Vatican ruling. His Tibetan manuscripts remained largely unknown until rediscovered in the 19th century. Today, he is recognized not only as a pioneering missionary but as a scholar who took the intellectual and spiritual life of Tibet seriously. His work stands as an early model of interreligious understanding, where dialogue was pursued through reason, language, and genuine respect.

Modern scholars such as Trent Pomplun, Donald Lopez, Thupten Jinpa, and Guido Stucco have shown that Desideri’s project anticipated later comparative philosophy by centuries. His writings remain a testimony to a unique moment when a European Jesuit and Tibetan monks met across the boundaries of faith to ask the same ultimate questions about being, purpose, and salvation.¹³

Footnotes

  1. Wikipedia, “Ippolito Desideri.”
  2. Michael J. Sweet, “Desperately Seeking Capuchins,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu.
  3. Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa, Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet.
  4. Guido Stucco, When Thomas Aquinas Met Nāgārjuna (includes translation of The Dawn).
  5. Elaine M. Robson, “A Christian Catechism in Tibetan,” University of Bristol thesis.
  6. Guido Stucco, When Thomas Aquinas Met Nāgārjuna (translation of The Origin of Living Beings).
  7. Opere tibetane di Ippolito Desideri, S.J., vol. IV (Toscano, ed.).
  8. Trent Pomplun, Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Encounter with Tibetan Buddhism.
  9. Guido Stucco, When Thomas Aquinas Met Nāgārjuna, commentary section.
  10. Lopez and Jinpa, Dispelling the Darkness, analysis of Desideri’s argument on emptiness.
  11. Sweet, “Desperately Seeking Capuchins.”
  12. Ippolito Desideri, Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account, trans. Sweet, ed. Zwilling.
  13. Pomplun, Jesuit on the Roof of the World.