Probably the most prolific critic and active Western campaigner against the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), who in recent years has taken to criticizing many other Mahayana Buddhist traditions as well, is an ex-NKT monk called Tenzin Peljor. (Aka Kelsang Tashi, KT66, and Michael Jackel.)
Tenzin Peljor’s involvement with the NKT
Tenzin Peljor is an East German who was originally ordained as a monk (Kelsang Tashi) by Ven. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso. However, his allegiance was not to Geshe Kelsang but to a self-styled Lama called Dechen/Carola in Germany, who broke away from Ven. Geshe Kelsang and the NKT and started a personality cult. Ven Geshe Kelsang said in 2001:
Last year for example, Dipankara Centre had fourteen ordained Sangha, all ordained by me, including the Teacher herself. It showed a strong aspect or interest. They believed the main teacher, so they left me. … When we separated Dipankara Centre from Carola, all the Sangha went with her… I don’t remember any single point when I caused them any upset. The only thing is when Carola asked me to recognize her as a tulku. I couldn’t do this because people are not stupid! I fulfilled all her other wishes. This was the only wish I could not fulfil. Last year she said at least three Tibetan Lamas had recognized her as a tulku, and said ‘You are my Spiritual Guide, Geshe-la, so please now recognize me as a tulku, and get the NKT to accept.’ I replied ‘You shouldn’t say this to me. This is impossible. According to the Tibetan tradition there is no single tulku who is recognized at the age of 40 or 50!” … Now we understand that her real aim was to take all the resources of the centre, including the castle, from me and the NKT.
Kelsang Tashi/Tenzin Peljor was Carola’s right-hand man, who helped her remove the center and its assets (a castle) in Berlin from the NKT. Geshe Kelsang continued:
Recently I checked with Gangchen Lama, Kundaling Lama, and Tritrul Rinpoche. In the letter he faxed, Gangchen Rinpoche said, ‘I did not recognize Carola as a tulku — never. There is no evidence to prove this. I advised her “You must rely on Geshe-la, as he is your Spiritual Guide. Without Geshe-la’s acceptance, you must never do this.’” Kundaling Rinpoche also from his side did not recognize Carola – never. Later I asked Tonglam, who speaks Chinese, to telephone Tritrul Rinpoche, and ask him my question ‘Did you recognize Carola as a tulku or Lama?’ He replied, ‘Never. I never supported her. I told her many times “You should go on a long purification retreat and make confession to Geshe-la because he is your Vajra Tantric Spiritual Guide. She requested me to give her a special paper with a stamp to show that she was a tulku, but I did not accept this.”‘
She has harmed herself and her students. Recently her new centre — Dharmakaya — printed new sadhanas for sale. All these sadhanas are mostly copied from our sadhanas. Some horrible things have happened because of her motivation. Due to obstacles, this can happen to even a person who is normally good, so you therefore need these Internal Rules.
A lengthy legal case followed and was found by a German court in favor of the NKT. However, the decision was unenforceable in German charity law so Carola and Tashi/Tenzin’s organization kept the castle for a while. Finally, due to them going bankrupt, the castle was returned back to the NKT and is called Tharpaland Kadampa Meditationszentrum.
A few years after leaving with Carola, Tashi finally got disillusioned, left Carola, re-ordained as Tenzin Peljor with the Dalai Lama, and joined the FPMT for a while.
Tenzin Peljor’s activities
As for Tenzin Peljor’s activities, he used to be very active on the New Kadampa Survivors’ site. He helps to moderate E-Sangha and has a long history of posts against the NKT. He runs his own websites and blogs against the NKT and Dorje Shugden practitioners. His Flickr account was shut down for going against their terms of service by storing defamatory material.
On Wikipedia he was the dominant editor for years, responsible for the bias against the NKT on the articles: New Kadampa Tradition, Kelsang Gyatso, and Dorje Shugden. As kt66, he weaved his point of view throughout the article largely through spinning a supposed “neutral third-party source”, a Lancaster university thesis by David Kay (who briefly attended NKT meditation classes in Lancaster), making Kay into the judge and jury of the NKT. These articles spread a lot of disinformation and pain while he was still their main editor. Many people have said they lost faith and many more have not tried out NKT meditation classes in the first place as a result of reading his version of Wikipedia and believing that, because it is an encyclopedia, Wikipedia must be neutral. Due to the introduction of more reliable sources and facts, those articles have gradually become more neutral and balanced, but kt66 still tries to use Wikipedia to push his own point of view. As can be seen on his own anti-Shugden websites and on various blogs (his own and others), Tenzin Peljor has an extremely negative view of the NKT. His hostile views, though less strident, often appear in Wikipedia, Amazon book reviews, and elsewhere.
He wrote repeatedly to the BBC website and encouraged others to do so too, sending them old articles (e.g. the Guardian article from 1996) and telling them to include the word “cult” on their website. Eventually in one place they did add it even though there is no explanation of how or why the NKT is a cult, and the rest of their description is fair and would seem to suggest the opposite, that the NKT is a time-honored Mahayana Buddhism tradition.
He let it be widely known that INFORM (an organization in Britain that tracks New Religious Movements [NRMs]) was writing a report against the NKT thanks to him getting people to write to them with their stories. He said he planned on posting this report all over the Internet. However, after INFORM contacted the NKT they reflected a more balanced viewpoint, saying they had received reports but there was nothing to suggest that the NKT is an NRM (or a cult). Nevertheless, to this day Tenzin Peljor still brings up INFORM in his interviews. See also Why do some people say that the New Kadampa Tradition is a New Religious Movement?
In recent years, Tenzin Peljor has turned his attention more to criticizing other Mahayana Buddhist teachers, including his former teachers in the FPMT; but he uses the same NKT origin story in his interviews. In his exaggerations, distortions, falsehoods, and relentless campaign to discredit the New Kadampa Tradition, Tenzin Peljor has caused untold damage.
I apologize if this is not helpful, but you asked for comments and I know Tenzin Peljor and may have some ideas, if not excuses, for why he does what he does to harm Buddhist organizations. I am one of his early friends, a German monk in the Nyingma tradition.
Actually he’s a very poor guy grown up in an orphan house and probably his main troubles just arose from projecting his very personal childhood problems on his first teacher. I suppose he had been better advised to do a good therapy instead of terrorizing the whole Tibetan Buddhist scene with his problems. All his present Gurus as to mention Ringu Tulku, Dagyab Rinpoche and others advised him very clearly to stop slandering on his previous teachers but he doesn’t listen to them. When he was offered to do a proper monastic education in India by one of his masters he rejected it as it is more comfortable for him to spend his time in denigrating others on the cost of some naive donators. Just recently I heard from a friend that he believes our monastery doing Pujas against him. But I fear I am the only one who even knows him from our monastery and I have definitely better things to do let alone that we do usually pujas for persons and not against. I could gossip a little more about him but I don’t want to grab too deeply into the dirt box.
I am a very critical and skeptical person with many doubts. I first attended the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT) in 2004, and initially, I thought it might be a Buddhist cult. This is because I read some of Tenzin Peljor’s articles on his websites, which raised many doubts. Fortunately, I relied on my own experiences and my understanding of people. I asked numerous questions, and I never felt that anyone encouraged me to develop blind faith or tried to brainwash me – quite the opposite. From the beginning, I was encouraged to think for myself and ‘develop my own wisdom’
When I read critical articles, it saddens me because most of the things written are simply not correct. Over the years, I have observed some issues within this tradition, and, of course, as someone in a leadership role, I’ve made mistakes myself. However, what I consistently experienced was a genuine desire to learn and improve, along with a strong sense of humility.
More recently, I came across an article on the internet where a chief editor of a Buddhist magazine refused to engage in open dialogue or debate with someone who he claimed might have been influenced by NKT. His argument was that the person’s viewpoint was deemed uncritical due to being brainwashed and lacking an objective perspective on the matter. No open discussion was possible. I hope that this website helps to clarify many things and gives people an opportunity to hear the other side.
Thank you for sharing this.
I’ve been practising Kadampa Buddhism for a long time and have had a very similar personal experience of NKT over the years to Palden’s above. As such I was very saddened to read some of Tenzin’s many, many posts and comments on the internet and for a brief period some years ago I engaged in a fair bit of debate with him. I hoped that, as fellow practitioners with some experience of Buddhist logic and practice, I might be able to understand his position better and help him to realize that his own ideas were not very well founded or reasonable. I also wanted to offer potential readers some balance by reading a counter to his many baseless attacks.
I quite quickly realised that I wasn’t getting anywhere; I probably naïvely kept going for a while longer than I should! But I felt like there was some connection between us – perhaps even some mutual respect. In the end though I realised that no amount of reason was going to sway him from his position. Tenzin has a not-very-well disguised hatred for Geshe Kelsang and a zealot’s focus on destroying the NKT, as well as now, it seems, other Buddhist groups. He has learned how to write like a “neutral, third party academic” to try to give his articles, comments and Wikipedia edits a veneer of respectability, but scratch below the surface and it’s very obvious that he has a highly personal agenda. It’s a shame that some of his writing persists on the internet and still causes people to doubt their spiritual refuge.
i wish him peace, my old debating sparring partner.
Astonishingly, none of the – respectable – German media outlets who to this day bring him in for interviews and features seem to pick up on the contradiction between his humble behavior and his well built out infrastructure of self-promoting and self-referencing online presence.
Now, some people pointed out that the NKT and its followers also have a well built out self-promoting and self-referencing online presence – and may even refer to this very website… but hopefully people eventually recognize that (a) every organization dedicated to public service puts effort into their online presence to the best of their abillity because they believe they have something valuable to contribute to the world; and (b) this website is set up by practitioners in response to circumstances, not to proactively and relentlessly propagate a negative view about any organization or person.