Like many people, I became involved with the LBC after being attracted and impressed by the teachers, range of classes and the initial kindness of those I initially came in contact with.
At first all those I met were kind and welcoming, they could not do enough to encourage me to “get involved”. This is how it starts, with a great effort to present an attractive “front” to get you in the door and committed and to encourage you to start “helping out”, ie working in one of the centre’s businesses, doing admin work, mailshots, cleaning, selling the FWBOs literature, doing fund-raising door-to-door or making tea at the meditation classes. As long as you are compliant, give your time, don’t ask any difficult questions and treat the “ordained” with great deference everything is OK.
Thankfully, this first phase soon gives way for many people. They either start to get a sense of what lies beyond the elaborately staged and inviting “front”, get fed up giving their time for free or getting less than the minimum wage working full-time in one of the LBCs businesses or just get generally fed up being treated like a second-class citizen (while the “ordained” give the orders).
It is about this time that many people realise that there are a huge number of disaffected and angry people on the fringes of the LBC who are mostly sucked into the cult-like atmosphere, are addicted to the sense of belonging, yet angry at the way they have been treated and the hierarchical and abusive behaviour of those running the LBC. It is also about this time that people start searching the web and find the various websites which brand the LBC / FWBO a cult. eg…
Quote from this site: “it seems incredible to me that I was able to hear and see so many things wrong with the FWBO without realizing it is a cult – plain and simple”
Quote from this site: “Senior Buddhists (non-FWBO) have been worried about the FWBO for many years … they had feared … and believe that (the FWBO’s) interpretation of Buddhism can be used to licence sexual and psychological abuse.”
http://dialogueireland.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/analysisofcriticisms.pdf
Quote from this site: “The process of abuse in the FWBO was facilitated by familiarising adherents with a thought process, purportedly Buddhist, (though not locatable in any of the orthodox Buddhist traditions), which gradually leads adherents to break away from extant social mores and subsequently conform to behavioural patterns peculiar to the FWBO.”
http://www.westernchanfellowship.org/dangers-in-devotion.html
Quote from the above site: “many of us to see the FWBO more as a cult than as a Buddhist institution or school in accordance with tradition”
“The FWBO has created an institution which .. has proven to be creative in spawning businesses and charitable enterprises of several kinds … with its increasing authoritarianism and social biases …. it therefore also has the form of a ‘cult’ independent from other forms of traditional Buddhism … charismatic gurus become the focus of a personal cult of devotional practice … but not all gurus are free from the many forms of ethical corruption. How do such ‘cults’ arise? The psychology of such processes has become clear in recent years. Individual identity requires the formation of key values for which social approval is given and without which an individual experiences painful alienation. Once a ‘way’ is chosen it becomes an area of profound psychological investment so that anything that threatens it also threatens the self. On accepting an institutionalised value system personal identity is largely replaced by social identity – that is the individual identifies with the social norms of the group … anything that threatens their credibility thus comes also to threaten the person. When the fount of wisdom is a particular individual, an unthinking devotion may develop which in worst-case scenarios leads to the establishment of an accepted tyranny. When an individual finally rumbles what is happening and attempts to break away into independence … the reaction of other believers is apt to be intense.”
