A SURVIVOR’S TESTIMONY: New website section

42 thoughts on “A SURVIVOR’S TESTIMONY: New website section”

1. Dear Adele, as expected they start banning you fr. teachings and visiting India. Thanks for making public what needs to be made public. Unfortuneately you are playing a high prize for your honestly. Wish you calm and serene mind despite all shit thrown at you. Solidarity and strength. Klaus

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2. Deeply necessary documentation, Adele. This report shines a much-needed light on how deeply entrenched these patterns of social exclusion and bullying really are across European and Indian Dharma centers. Thank you for your continued courage in bringing the objective truth and the facts to light.

   This is an invaluable update that directly corroborates what many insiders have witnessed with Damien Jampa and his cult-like group of sycophantic enablers for many years. By directly naming the individuals responsible for these defamation and bullying campaigns, you are stripping away the institutional anonymity that has shielded the behavior of the ‘Syndicate’ going back to at least 2010, if not earlier in Bir. Dharamsala, and later, internationally.

   It is truly heartening to see this culture of silence and complicity broken in the public spotlight, ensuring that the broader Tibetan and Buddhist communities finally see the full scope of how these unethical actions are coordinated by abusive, misleading, and corrupt figures such as Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley (NT), as well as their uncritical followers or complicit associates. These include NT’s submissive older brother, Helios Hildt along with his wife Dani Vargas, Justin Kirkwood, Sean Griffin, Eugene Romaniuk, Evan Yerburgh, James Bradwell, Matthias Staber, and the other self-righteous, radicalized pseudo-intellectuals who emerged from the extremely dysfunctional and clannish Sherab Ling/Esukhia scene in the 2010s.

   This is a critical development that proves the harmful behavioral patterns first seen during the ‘Esukhia Era’ in the 2010s, and afterwards until at least 2024, were never just isolated workplace disputes. They are part of an ongoing, systemic playbook of gatekeeping, defamation, and social intimidation designed to control access to resources and protect their self-appointed status. This group behavior appears to be ultimately rooted in Damien and NT’s pathological, obsessive status-positioning, fragile and insecure egotism, and bureaucratic authoritarianism.

   Documenting these specific instances of bullying at European and Indian centers is vital for ensuring that these networks can no longer weaponize their proximity to powerful institutions in order to exclude and demean those who don’t “kiss the ring”.

   These highly questionable individuals have systematically undermined the human dignity of numerous practitioners, students, and scholars for many years, and breaking this culture of silence and complicity now ensures that total public accountability is finally catching up with them.

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   1. Hello, thank you for your input and interest. I have no idea what you say is true.

      However, I do know from my own experience that Damien Jampa (together with Titi Dolma, real name Neneng Setiawati) were both the mains diriving forces behind the bullying, harassment, gossip and exaggerated incidents etc that persistently disrupted the teachings in Vietnam and Europe 2025, and led to a severe and unnecessary destruction and ruin of a new Vajrayana connection and precious genuine connection between myself and Gyalton Rinpoche. The disruption was caused also by Damien Jampa’s derogatory and dismissive view of my work as a Buddhist scholar-translator which he exposed himself at the start of the Vietnamese Hanoi course, when he spoke about my work and introduced me to someone else. Considering Damien himself does not have independent book publications, postgraduate degrees nor is invited as a scholar to international conferences etc, or built up an entire website/translations project resource by himself from scratch, his dimissive comments seemed to come from a place of jealousy, competitiveness and resentment. The fact that he defended the Vietnamese oral translator’s refusal to answer a simple friendly question over the dining table as to what her “Dharma background” was, yet openly dismissed mine as if it were nothing, shows the level of hostility even then he had towards me and my efforts and studies.

      However, in relation to the online defamation, bullying, smear campaign etc. that was carried out (particularly during 2019-2020) by the named individuals in the website section, but also by Sangye Nyenpa, his family members like sister in law, monks at Benchen monastery. So I do believe that much of it came from Sangye Nyenpa or those connected to him, and not Damien Jampa so much, although I may be wrong about that.

      The creepiest thing is that Sangye Nyenpa himself seemed to be creating pseudonyms on FB and contacting me on them, before and after I reported the dishonesty, emotional bullying, and misconduct.

      That is why the identity of the author of the Github and the Youtube channel started in April 2025 also needs to be clearly identified. That will be very revealing.

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      1. That dining-table incident perfectly encapsulates the institutional double standard that has defined Damien’s playbook since 2010. It was never about objective standards or credentials; it was always about compliance and gatekeeping. If someone is part of the approved ‘in-group,’ they get an automatic free pass and total protection. But the moment an independent scholar or translator steps in, someone with actual drive and independent output who doesn’t beg for their stamp of approval or is part of their inner circle, they are immediately viewed as a threat, insulted, and dismissed. Meanwhile, if someone is part of the approved ‘in-group’—like Justin Kirkwood or Matthias Staber, who were given total free passes and absolute career support as translators/interpreters early on, regardless of their relative experience at the time—they get automatic protection.

         Seeing him pull the exact same hypocritical stunt in Hanoi in 2025 proves that this insular, provincial defense mechanism hasn’t changed a single bit in sixteen years. The guy is a total hypocrite and yes, obviously operates from a place of deep insecurity, fragile ego, and laughable double-standards.

         The really scary thing is how much his toxic, perverse, and self-serving attitude spread to the rest of the ‘Syndicate’, beginning with Ngawang Trinley (NT) and eventually infecting the rest of their close associates in turn.

         Their bad influence should not be underestimated. Because Damien, NT, and their ‘Syndicate’ captured early digital infrastructure and language-learning projects, starting with Esukhia back in 2011-12, they managed to position themselves as indispensable middlemen for several key institutions and numerous sincere students, practitioners, and scholars. Instead of using these resources to genuinely foster and support Buddhist scholarship and spiritual transmission, they weaponized them as political leverage: gatekeeping access, policing independent paths, and filtering out anyone they couldn’t directly control. The tragedy is that a field meant to preserve a profound tradition was instead subjected to the small-minded, territorial tyranny of petty bureaucrats who care infinitely more about their own unearned status than the actual integrity of the Dharma, translation and interpretation work, or authentic study and practice, despite their self-important claims.

         It makes you wonder how many others have been bullied, abused, gatekept, discouraged, defamed, and sidelined by these insecure, provincial French sociopathic maniacs and the pathetic, brown-nosing cartel of sycophantic enablers they managed to build around themselves over the years. Probably quite a few, all things considered.

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      2. Yes, the “dining table” incident on the second day of the course, was a “red flag” of things to come. In fact, I did not return the following morning because of it. But as I had started the course, I felt magnetised to return by Gyalton Rinpoche’s presence.

         And yes, the Vietnamese translator’s hostile and exaggerated reaction to my asking a simple (and very normal) question on the second day of the course, when they both came down to sit at a dining table I was already sitting at, was also exacerbated and exaggerated by Damien Jampa. I had never met or spoken to the interpreter before either, but her hostility seemed excessive, so it may be that Damien had primed her. Or Titi Dolma was already working behind the scenes to ensure people their regarded me with hostility and suspicion too.

         I have never heard or seen any independent scholarship, study of the Vietnamese woman, and she did not speak or read Tibetan, and yet Damien Jamapa was rude and dismissive when he introduced me to her and other people there.

         In fact, I had just come from the International VESAK day conference in Ho CHih Minh City, as an invited guest speaker, flown there and put up in 5 star hotel by the organisers. So Damien’s rudeness and disrespect about my academic and translation achievements, seemed even more inappropriate and reeking of some kind of male jealousy, resentment and competitiveness. The refusal of the female interpreter to answer such a simplay question, and look at me like it was the most offensive thing I could have asked a translator, was bizarre and suggested she either already formed an opinion about me and my work (via Damian Jampa or herself) or she was majorly on the defensive about her lack or prior studies at a formal level in Tibetan, and whose English was OK, but certainly not someone I would call fluent in spoken English.

         Damien capitalised on that incident, and my asking him to ensure people did not take photos of me and put them on social media, nor take them of me during empowerments or meditations, as a green light to basically then bully, gossip, mock and target me with the Vietnamese male photographers, a few other Vietnamese women and create a situation where I started feeling bullied, and the invasive photography became worse, with the male photographers coming up right next to and behind me, which they had not done before I asked.

         As for my sitting in the wrong seat allocated to monks, there were laypeople like the translator and others sitting in those seats, so I have no idea why they had such strong objections to that either. It’s not a major crime and all it required was a polite, friendly chat to explain the seating arrangements. Instead Damien (and Titi Dolma) both went into the hyper offensive and all of a sudden, despite my sitting at the side and not speaking to anyone during breaks and after the course and being low-ket, I became a source of amusement, bullying and focus, when they all should have been focusing on their meditation. This was due to the disruption and gossip of Titi Dolma and Damien Jampa who encouraged others to act in these ways.

         In addition, I requested to sing a short song of a mantra I had recorded and composed previously on Youtube as an offering at the end for Gyalton Rinpoche, but was told by Damien (after he had consulted with Titi and a couple of other women) that would not be possible. Yet there was ample time for a 5 minute Buddhist song. I let that go too though, and accepted their decisions without complaint.

         However, after the course finished, unbeknown to me at the time, Damien and Titi took matters into their own hands again, and decided not to send me any of the links to the class recordings, or the online review classes. So I was excluded and discriminated against from the Buddha Within I course, right from the start without any explanation, discussion or due process with the person they were discriminating against, myself.

         This decision was later swiftly revoked by the Sherab Ling administration in India in September 2025, when they returned there. Damien then just sent me the online links without any apology about what he and Titi had done. So a total lack of humility and acknowledgement of their discrimination and wrong doing, even after Sherab Ling had clearly indicated that was a “wrong decision” on their part.

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3. To clarify and add a crucial piece of nuance to the discussion on credentials: while Damien Jampa does actually have a few French translations out there through outlets like Dharma Ebooks (such as Tilopa’s Mahamudra of the Ganges / Le Mahamoudra du Gange and a few Kagyu practice liturgies), and of course he did complete the full monastic shedra curriculum at Sherab Ling, your broader point about the stark lack of real scholarly credentials and accomplishments across this circle is entirely accurate.

   First, when you look past the self-important titles at the academic and postgraduate realities of this entire group, the landscape is incredibly bare. Riffing on their total lack of formal postgraduate background exposes the ultimate, laughable irony of the ‘Septic Syndicate’:

   1. The Myth of Formal Authority and the “Naked Emperors”

   They have spent over a decade and a half acting like an elite, authoritative review board, policing who is allowed to be taken seriously in the field and who is a “a qualified translator” in their eyes (incidentally, no one actually cares about their self-serving opinion on these matters). Yet, if you look at their actual CVs, almost none of them have a single semester of formal, postgraduate academic training in Buddhist or Tibetan Studies. They didn’t earn their gatekeeping status through rigorous peer review, deep philological research, or advanced academic coursework; they earned it by capturing a niche digital pipeline early on and crowning themselves the arbiters of “standards”.

   2. The Illusion of Prolific Expertise and the Stark Reality of a Declining “Boys Club”

   Aside from Justin Kirkwood and Matthias Staber, who later managed to produce significant translation and interpretation work under the protection of institutional umbrellas (while still remaining firmly tethered to the toxic ideology of the Syndicate and the bullying mechanisms of its social hierarchy), the actual output from the rest of that crowd, both online and offline, is surprisingly thin. They talk and act like they are leading a massive, highly productive renaissance of Tibetan Buddhist scholarship. But when you strip away the administrative titles and look for published books, peer-reviewed monographs, volume of commissioned or independent translations, or scholarly works in general, there is barely anything there.

   Even Ngawang Trinley (NT), their “golden boy” and “grand visionary”, has produced almost nothing of intellectual substance outside of his digital humanities scaffolding and software infrastructure tech-work. This also applies to his perpetually submissive older brother and partner in crime, Helios Hildt, along with Helios’ cunningly opportunistic and brutally cutthroat wife, Dani Vargas, both of whom appear to operate under the very same type of delusional grandiosity, unjustified arrogance, and shocking sense of unearned entitlement as Damien, NT, and the rest of the Syndicate. Helios has a few short translations on Lotsawa House, and that’s about it. Dani, as you know, “somehow” managed to get high-level administrative positions in various institutions despite almost no qualifications or relevant experience; although it appears both of them have been completely removed from Khyentse Foundation after the fallout of NT’s illegal data-scraping practices, along with the systematic exploitation, abuse and neglect of his wife Jennifer Yo and their two children.

   This makes Evan’s sudden, pathetic “comeback” via Ngawang Trinley’s recent vanity setups—such as OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, and a few other related peripheral projects—all the more ridiculous. It is a completely transparent, desperate maneuver on both sides: a failing attempt by NT to salvage his own dwindling career and utterly ruined reputation by spinning up new technical infrastructure and squeezing out a few breadcrumb grants to hire yet another criminally underpaid mass of overworked Tibetan staff, and a sad attempt by Evan to claw his way back into the scene after a full decade of total inactivity in the field, likely as a desperate bid to escape the domestic realities and demands of his personal situation in Thailand. The utter absurdity of this alliance is that Evan isn’t returning as an equal or valued scholar; he is basically being treated like a compliant digital slave completely subservient to NT’s unhinged ego and desperate need to look relevant.

   As for Sean Griffin, James Bradwell, Eugene Romaniuk, and until recently, Evan Yerburgh, they are essentially total dropouts from the field who retreated into intense social isolation, conspiracy theories, religious fundamentalism, and PTSD-style groupthink, while never producing anything of note (with the minor exception of Evan’s ‘Treasury of Lives’ biographical entries from 2014-15). This unfortunate turn of events was likely due to their deeply damaging involvement with the sheer malignant narcissism of the Damien/NT Syndicate, which in all likelihood discouraged them from pursuing their paths and careers, while leaving them psychologically devastated and a mere shell of their former selves.

   3. A Cultish Culture of Mediocre Middlemen

   This is exactly why exposing their lack of credentials hits so hard. This group is essentially an administrative cartel based on nepotism, clannish insulation, obsessive status-positioning, and institutional capture—not a spiritual or intellectual fellowship, let alone a legitimate scholarly committee. Because they lack the baseline credentials or real field-tested expertise to stand on their own merits in the wider world, they rely entirely on trading favors, shielding one another’s mediocrity, and aggressively freezing out external talent to maintain their fragile positions.

   They are petty bureaucratic middlemen who have spent many years using their proximity to powerful, trusting traditional institutions to pass off incompetent, power-tripping administrative mismanagement as genuine traditional or academic authority. By weaponizing early digital access and masking their deep-seated insecurities behind a veneer of institutional gatekeeping, they transformed what should have been an open, transparent effort to preserve and disseminate a profound spiritual tradition into a sterile, territorial corporate fiefdom of petty rivalries and scarcity-mindset barbarism. When you strip away the unearned titles, the self-serving review boards, and the brittle infrastructure, you are left with nothing but the classic pathology of small-minded tyrants desperately trying to protect a monopoly that they never had the qualifications to run in the first place.

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4. Some independent observations:
   ” 500 metre boundary order? How would you know if someone is a ten minute walk away?” Seems like they think you have supranatural clairvoyant powers that they clearly DO NOT have. If so, they should be prostrating to you as their teacher.”

   “Seems like the “hanger-on, pick-me” white European woman, out of covert jealousy and to gain short-lived attention, chose ( on two separate occasions) to bully and harass you, an esteemed and prolific female Buddhist scholar-translator-practitioner, delusionally stated that the monastery guesthouse premises was “her home” and that she had the right to pressure and dictate to monk staff, and others staying there, who was permitted to stay or not. This was according to her personal wishes and dislikes (and that of a few of her friends in Europe), yet she also delusionally stated she was speaking on behalf of ALL followers of the teacher. It is possible the woman may need some psychological therapy, but at least should have received a verbal or written warning by monastic staff to refrain from such unlawful and aggressive conduct towards another permitted guest on monastery grounds.”

   “Since when has a man/person hiding/shielded behind a team of well-paid lawyers and his “nameless” associates, all “employed” to persecute, restrict, control, defame and harass a lone woman ever been a fair “fight”, just or brave? It’s a classic example of misogyny and cowardice. And is that really a beneficial or appropriate use of religious devotees donations? No. Small men, small minds. Chungpo by name and chungpo by nature.”

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5. Organizational Overview of the ‘Septic Syndicate’

   1. Damien Jampa
   Damien Jampa serves as the primary administrative strategist, political enforcer, and covert operator within the Syndicate’s broader organizational architecture. Positioned within monastic frameworks and European Buddhist administrative bodies, he operates as the non-technical counterpart to Ngawang Trinley, supplying ecclesiastical legitimacy, access to monastic leadership, and organizational muscle to back the Syndicate’s initiatives.

   His administrative strategy is defined by the systematic avoidance of open scholarly discourse, direct peer accountability, or transparent dispute resolution. Instead, he relies on backroom political maneuvering, whisper campaigns, and legal leverage to maintain institutional control and neutralize perceived dissent. Within regional bodies such as the European Buddhist Union (EBU), as well as through covert legal mechanisms—including proxy lawsuits filed in the Delhi High Court—his methods prioritize administrative coercion over open governance. These hidden, behind-the-scenes plots and backroom campaigns have been consistently deployed to suppress independent scholars, dedicated translators, former staff members, and critics who refuse to align with the Syndicate’s authoritarian administrative directives, self-serving organizational playbook, and extreme fundamentalist stances.

   This dependence on covert pressure creates a fundamental vulnerability within his public standing. While presenting himself publicly as a dedicated monastic figure, scholar of Buddhist philosophy, and institutional builder, his operational record reveals a consistent pattern of administrative bullying, factional warfare, and character assassination, often executed through intermediary proxies. His efforts to manage organizational crises from distant bases in Europe and Asia have increasingly exposed his reliance on hidden administrative machinery to maintain power.

   The primary vulnerability facing his position lies in the comprehensive, cross-verified documentation of his sixteen-year operational history (since at least 2010, although the behavioral patterns were evident as early as 2008). As detailed timelines, email records, and court filings documenting his role in internal excommunications, legal harassment, and board manipulation become accessible to international Buddhist organizations, grant-making foundations, and European oversight committees, the narrative of high-minded monastic service collapses. The contrast between his public spiritual posture and his documented record as an aggressively territorial backroom political enforcer represents an irreconcilable structural weakness, rendering his institutional authority increasingly fragile as peer networks and oversight boards review the historical evidence.

   2. Ngawang Trinley (NT)
   Ngawang Trinley functions as the central architect and technical coordinator of a multi-entity non-profit apparatus. His operational model relies on a distinct leverage mechanism: exceptional native-level fluency in spoken Tibetan, combined with modern digital humanities terminology. This oral fluency creates a persuasive halo effect among Western grant-making organizations and Tibetan communities, masking an underlying business model characterized by high-volume, low-wage text-processing operations (the “Tibetan sweatshop model”), chronic institutional and interpersonal instability, and systemic project churn.

   The structural trajectory of his initiatives exhibits a repetitive, cyclical pattern. Beginning with the initial operational phase of Esukhia (which is, by the way, a horrifically misspelled and grossly mispronounced Greek philosophical term, Hesychia ἡσυχία, meaning “stillness”), a language institute in Dharamshala, continuing through its functional demise in 2020 after Esukhia collapsed under the weight of financial corruption, neglect and mismanagement by Damien and NT, and extending into his recent, desperate, multi-pronged re-branding efforts—including Arapatsa, OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org, and Dharmaduta. Here, the underlying mechanism remains constant. Each entity is launched with ambitious claims regarding digital text preservation, optical character recognition (OCR), or artificial intelligence, designed to capture institutional funding and non-profit grants. However, as projects reach the delivery stage, datasets regularly display significant error rates and fail rigorous philological audit standards, and there is ample evidence of illegal data-scraping, copyright infringement, and intellectual property theft. When funding streams dry up or institutional oversight intensifies, the primary entity is abandoned or reduced to a static web portal, and a new branded initiative is launched to reset the grant cycle and capture fresh overhead funding.

   To maintain high data volume at minimal cost, the operational infrastructure relies heavily on underpaid, non-contract Tibetan labor, including young monks, refugees, and university graduates stationed in regional hubs such as Dharamsala and Pune. These workers are subjected to demanding production quotas for repetitive tasks like OCR proofreading, image segmentation, and data labeling. This low-wage, high-turnover “sweatshop” model generates severe structural vulnerabilities: skilled scholars and competent software developers quickly exit the exploitative ecosystem, resulting in sloppy, unvetted baseline training data that compromises the long-term utility of the resulting software tools.

   Crucially, the broader institutional landscape has increasingly adjusted to this pattern. Over recent years, long-standing associations with premier Tibetan resource centers and digital humanities projects—most notably the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC), Monlam AI, and the Kumarajiva Project—have systematically fractured or quietly severed ties with NT. The loss of BDRC and Monlam AI deprives the operation of its core text pipelines and scholarly legitimacy. The quiet removal of NT from Monlam AI, presumably due to concerns about his illegal practices, is particularly noteworthy given that he was one of the original co-founders. In response to these severed relationships and the loss of physical operational bases, recent funding acquisitions—such as a $22,000 backend-channeled grant from the Khyentse Foundation for OpenPecha, as recorded on GitHub—function primarily as financial triage. These modest funds allow the operation to retain prestigious foundation logos on pitch decks and maintain the illusion of ongoing institutional backing.

   Concurrently, his personal and administrative separation from key long-term partners who historically provided operational grounding, such as Jennifer Yo his wife (or seemingly ex-wife) in Taiwan and director of the Kumarajiva Project, has left him managing a complex network of overlapping, virtual non-profit shells largely single-handedly. As public awareness of his GitHub code repositories, meeting logs, data-scraping practices, and sixteen-year operational record of grant-hoarding spreads across academic and digital humanities networks, the ability to rely solely on Tibetan language fluency and backend tech literacy to secure new institutional hosts has reached a terminal bottleneck, and it seems that his position is now more fragile than ever, despite the glossy PR campaigns for his new projects in Pune.

   3. Helios Hildt
   Helios Hildt functions as a local coordinator, administrative enforcer, and operational asset manager, working directly within the family-managed tier of the non-profit network. Operating primarily out of regional hubs such as Portugal and France, his role centers on maintaining coding infrastructure and acting as a subservient loyalist on behalf of his younger brother, Ngawang Trinley.

   His professional standing and access to non-profit funding remain derivative of and entirely dependent upon NT’s central apparatus. While exercising limited local authority over regional facilities and projects, his operations lack independent scholarly or institutional backing. When external entities or major funding bodies—such as the Khyentse Foundation—conduct formal performance audits, evaluate financial allocations, or demand verified project deliverables, initiatives under his direct management consistently face operational delays, resource withdrawal, or cancellation, as demonstrated by his removal from major foundation-backed projects in recent years, most notably Dharma Sagar, the failed Tibetan translation training program for Spanish and Portuguese speakers managed by he and his wife Dani, which has been entirely scrubbed from all Khyentse Foundation websites.

   His position within the network is defined by deep structural dependency and growing internal tension. While he and his wife Dani Vargas privately express frustration regarding NT’s overbearing management style, manipulative institutional positioning, and cold, transactional operational methods, Helios seems to remain fully integrated into the family business model, acting as the immediate shadowy muscle required to protect the network’s local assets and public image. Consequently, his long-term professional viability is entirely bound to the survival of NT’s primary non-profit entities, leaving him highly exposed as those entities lose institutional hosts, face public scrutiny, and experience financial contraction.

   4. Dani Vargas
   Dani Vargas manages local organizational assets, administrative operations, and public-facing community initiatives within the Syndicate’s European footprint, operating alongside her husband, Helios Hildt. Her public posture blends wellness, environmentalism, and Dharma-focused community engagement, projecting an image of ethical, conscious non-profit leadership.

   Despite this public orientation, her functional role within the apparatus is that of an active participant in its administrative control mechanisms and resource allocation. While expressing private criticism regarding NT’s management style, interpersonal narcissism, and financial control behind closed doors, she continues to utilize the Syndicate’s organizational infrastructure to maintain her professional standing and local authority in Portugal. Her private grievances have stood in stark contrast to her ongoing public role in legitimizing, housing, and executing the Syndicate’s brutal operational policies.

   Her vulnerability lies in the clear contradiction between her public ethos and her functional complicity in the Syndicate’s long-standing practices of labor exploitation, social exclusion, and administrative opacity. As the operational history of Esukhia, OpenPecha, WeBuddhist and its affiliated family entities becomes more widely understood, her role as an administrative beneficiary and local enforcer undermines her public presentation as an independent, ethically driven non-profit director, binding her professional reputation directly to the Syndicate’s broader decline.

   5. Evan Yerburgh
   Evan Yerburgh currently acts as a forum administrator, community moderator, and technical clerk within the OpenPecha digital ecosystem. Following an early departure from active participation in Dharamshala and the Tibetan Studies field as a whole around 2015, he spent roughly a decade residing in Thailand, remaining largely inactive in independent academic or digital humanities development.

   His re-engagement with NT’s network between 2024 and 2026 represents a reliance on past group ties rather than an independent career path. Driven by a frozen, nostalgic idealization of the early 2012–2014 Esukhia start-up phase, he has stepped back into an active operational role long after the Syndicate’s major institutional partnerships had fractured and its labor practices had been documented, following the cascading exposure and downfall of NT. By accepting a public administrative role on OpenPecha systems, he provides operational cover and administrative labor for an organization facing severe scrutiny regarding its data standards and treatment of staff.

   His position highlights a transition from passive early affiliate to active manager within a compromised infrastructure. By serving as an administrative frontman and moderator for NT’s current re-branding efforts, he has tied his personal standing to a rapidly declining apparatus, operating as a compliant asset for an effectively neo-colonialist leadership that historically views technical staff as low-cost and replaceable, now employed as a compliant digital slave for NT’s unhinged ego.

   6. Eugene Romaniuk
   Eugene Romaniuk was an early participant in the Dharamshala operations during the initial Esukhia period (2010-14) who disengaged from active participation in 2014 to reside permanently in Thailand or elsewhere in Southeast Asia. His primary significance within the group’s history lies in his early adoption of total interpersonal excommunication tactics and a disturbing level of cultish groupthink.

   In 2014, Eugene began executing the Syndicate’s first complete blocking and ghosting maneuvers against peers, following minor interpersonal friction surrounding internal conflicts with James Bradwell and Justin Kirkwood. Driven by intense ideological alignment with the Septic Syndicate’s leadership (in particular NT) and the group as a whole, his reaction established the procedural precedent for the syndicate’s subsequent use of systematic excommunication and social freeze-outs against anyone raising questions about internal dynamics or mutual accountability.

   Unlike affiliates who later re-engaged with the machinery, Eugene maintained complete, long-term isolation in Southeast Asia, choosing permanent withdrawal over conflict resolution, open dialogue, or critical engagement. His record remains that of an early enforcer of rigid ideological conformity whose immediate reliance on excommunication tactics demonstrated the high-control conditioning embedded within the group’s early operational environment.

   7. Justin Kirkwood
   Justin Kirkwood occupied a central middle-management role during the initial development of Esukhia, utilizing his administrative positioning as a former monk at Sherab Ling to launch his career within the field of Tibetan translation and academic research.

   During early organizational conflicts—specifically those involving James Bradwell and peer complaints regarding management by Damien and NT at Esukhia—Justin functioned as the primary administrative gaslighter and two-faced informant. Rather than addressing structural blind spots, unequal opportunities, or personal flaws objectively, his instinct was to protect the brand of what was essentially a largely toxic and disingenuous Boys Club. He employed manipulation, deflection, and minimization to convince complaining peers that their perceptions were invalid or that they were at fault, attempting to enforce silence and compliance to preserve the Syndicate’s public image.

   His translation and teaching career was launched on the foundation of early institutional favoritism, ruthless sidelining of his longtime friends, and the suppression of internal dissent. By acting as the intellectual shield for the leadership’s operational flaws, he enforced compliance while maintaining a public posture of high-minded, neutral scholarship. His record documents a middle-management strategy that prioritized institutional self-interest and career advancement over transparency, fairness, and professional ethics.

   8. Sean Griffin
   Sean Griffin was an early affiliate during the Esukhia period who adopted the group’s social freeze-out, harassment, and bullying tactics against those deemed not in the ‘inner circle’.

   His trajectory illustrates the passive compliance characteristic of the Syndicate’s secondary tier. Lacking the proactive, enforcer mentality of others, Sean nevertheless consistently aligned with the group’s core directives, executing aggressive attacks when social pressure mounted. Despite his significantly older age (born in 1963), thus making him an elder by 13 to 23 years to everyone associated with the group, his utter lack of spiritual maturity was confirmed when he refused to produce any formal acknowledgment, apology, or resolution regarding the prior ostracization tactics or the deeply problematic behaviors he had previously supported.

   His posture represents a pattern of conflict avoidance and social conformity. By prioritizing alignment with the group’s hierarchy over personal integrity, he has demonstrated an ongoing inability to offer independent accountability, leaving him positioned as a passive participant who repeatedly deferred to the Syndicate’s internal authority structure.

   9. James Bradwell
   James Bradwell was an early Syndicate member whose well-known interpersonal conflicts, volatile disputes, and performative religious fundamentalism served as one of the primary catalysts for the initial internal splits within Esukhia during the c. 2014 period.

   Occupying a somewhat favored position within the inner circle via his standing as a former Sherab Ling monk, James was systematically shielded from standard accountability, particularly by Justin Kirkwood and top leadership. When peers raised legitimate concerns regarding his frequent antagonism and adversarial behaviors, the organization responded by deflecting criticism onto the accusers, utilizing structural gaslighting and social excommunication to isolate those who questioned his obviously unstable and damaging conduct.

   His surprisingly vital role in the Syndicate’s history, despite his near-total lack of substantial output, highlights its foundational policy of protecting favored insiders at the expense of staff cohesion and objective standards. The institutional effort required to cover up his operational friction established the early mechanisms of internal suppression, gaslighting, and excommunication that ultimately defined the syndicate’s long-term administrative model.

   10. Matthias Staber
   Matthias Staber is an independent translator who maintained long-term professional associations, translation contacts, and project alignments with the Syndicate throughout its various operational transformations.

   His strategy was defined by calculated silence and diplomatic compliance regarding the group’s exploitative labor practices, social toxicity, and interpersonal fallouts. Aware of the internal conflicts, labor conditions in India, and the operational methods of NT and Damien Jampa, as well as the escalating bullying of James, Eugene, Justin, Sean and others, he chose quiet cooperation to ensure a steady pipeline of backing for his own career, despite not being overtly reliant on them.

   His record exemplifies academic bystander complicity. While maintaining a public image of scholarly neutrality and detached professionalism, his long-term cooperation implicit endorsement to an abusive social and administrative apparatus, demonstrating a sustained prioritization of career security and funding access over professional ethics and basic accountability.

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6. Mediocre Fiefdoms vs. Independent Scholarship: An Analysis of the Institutional Collapse of Centralized Cartels in Tibetan Studies

   The psychological, philosophical, and professional chasm separating the “Septic Syndicate”—led and sustained by figures such as Ngawang Trinley (NT), Damien Jampa, Evan Yerburgh, Eugene Romaniuk, Justin Kirkwood, Matthias Staber, Dani Vargas, Helios Hildt, James Bradwell, and Sean Griffin—from genuinely distinguished and unfettered scholarship cuts to the heart of the issue. A meticulous and objective analysis of this divergence demonstrates why centralized, nepotistic cartels ultimately succumb to structural decline, whereas rigorous, comprehensive expertise creates a foundation that only strengthens over time. This study anatomizes institutional decay within Tibetan studies, examining how centralized gatekeeping fosters mediocrity while an independent path leads instead toward genuine academic and professional sustainability.

   By contrasting authentic, hard-earned skillsets with the corporate fiefdom of the Syndicate, this analysis exposes the mechanisms of dependency, scarcity, conformity, and stagnation that sustain manufactured bureaucratic power. It unmasks these “naked emperors”—in particular Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley (NT)—by revealing how intellectual mediocrity is rationalized within Western Buddhist cult-like cliques, showing what lies beyond the gatekeepers and how genuine excellence can dismantle an artificial monopoly.

   Ultimately, it explores the deeper divide between scarcity-driven insecurity and a polymathic philosophy of scholarship, explaining why centralized cartels erode while uncompromised scholars continue to accumulate domain expertise, cultural fluency, and lasting authority.

   Institutional Dependency vs. Autonomous Enterprise (Background & Career)

   The Syndicate’s Architecture of Reliance: The professional trajectory of the Septic Syndicate was fundamentally marked by an early state of financial desperation, misguided careerism, and structural codependency, beginning in the early 2010s. Whether entering the Himalayan scene as rootless Western spiritual seekers or young idealists looking for an identity, individuals like Justin Kirkwood, James Bradwell, Evan Yerburgh, Eugene Romaniuk, and Matthias Staber needed an institutional shield—such as Esukhia or major funding foundations—to project their public image of mastery. They relied on proximity to powerful, trusting traditional institutions such as Sherab Ling, BRDC, or the Khyentse Foundation to legitimize the corporate-style, heavy-handed bureaucratic management centered in Bir and McLeod Ganj. Operating under the manufactured authority of Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley (NT), they disingenuously tried to pass this bureaucratic hierarchy off as well-established credibility or traditional lineage authority. Because these figures lacked the capacity to survive on their own resources in the open market, they relied entirely on an insular network of trading favors, shielding one another’s professional and intellectual shortcomings, and securing unearned titles to protect their fragile sense of control.

   The Autonomous Scholar Path: Conversely, a truly rigorous scholar operates through sovereign professional freedom. Such a path is forged from the ground up by building an organic client base, establishing a stable business infrastructure, and working directly with the Tibetan tradition. In this way, they never need to bend the knee to an insular, pseudo-intellectual cartel run by self-appointed experts such as Damien Jampa or Ngawang Trinley (NT), nor do they need to rely exclusively on transient non-profit grants or insider favoritism to validate their professional standing. Their trajectory is secure simply because it is built on a foundation of indisputable merit.

   Deep Philological Literacy vs. Technical Scaffolding (Intelligence & Literacy)

   The Syndicate’s Scaffolding of Mediocrity: The collective intelligence of the Septic Syndicate is primarily managerial, technical and bureaucratic, rather than deeply intellectual, analytical, or philological. Their “grand vision” relies on building a flashy presentation around digital humanities terminology and tech buzzwords, combined with rapid text-processing, subpar pedagogical methods, and simplistic data entry. Despite the pretentious posturing of figures like Damien Jampa, Ngawang Trinley (NT), Eugene Romaniuk, Justin Kirkwood, or Sean Griffin daring to act as an elite review board capable of judging who is “qualified” to be taken seriously as translators or scholars, their actual output of substantial intellectual work, published translations, academic papers, or original field research is surprisingly thin, and in many cases non-existent. When their work reaches the delivery stage, they regularly display massive error rates, failing to pass basic linguistic audit standards because the baseline data was generated through a low-wage, high-turnover model, reliant on hollow administrative oversight.

   The Rigorous Scholar’s Literacy: A true scholar’s intellectual approach is deeply multidisciplinary, analytical, and critical. This path requires an intense, dual mastery of both highly sophisticated Classical and Literary Tibetan and fluent Modern Spoken dialects. Such literacy is investigative and rigorous, ideally resulting in an immense, visible output of hundreds of finished translations, satisfied clients, and active lexicons. Rather than hiding behind branding or self-created administrative titles like the members of the Septic Syndicate, an authentic scholar’s authority is validated by the precision of their prose, their deep critical frameworks, their cultural and historical literacy, and their active contribution to global scholarly fields.

   Integrated Scholar-Practitioner vs. Lineage Chauvinism (Approach to Buddhism)

   The Syndicate’s Sectarian Fiefdom: The Septic Syndicate’s approach to the Buddhist tradition is heavily defined by sectarian lineage chauvinism, high-control social conditioning, and sterile corporate-style gatekeeping. Operatives within this rigid, territorial Boys’ Club prioritize protecting the organizational brand, shielding favored insiders like Justin Kirkwood, Matthias Staber, or even James Bradwell, and maintaining a scarcity-minded, greedy hoarding of organizational prestige above basic Buddhist ethics. This extreme, un-spiritual selfishness is what allows Septic Syndicate leadership to make controversial public missteps—such as deploying peer pressure, coordinated harassment campaigns, and vicious gossip against perceived rivals—which deeply alienates traditional Buddhist practitioners who prioritize ahiṃsā (non-harming), unbiased compassion, and community upliftment.

   The Integrated Scholar’s Approach: A grounded path embodies the non-sectarian values of a true scholar-practitioner. Firmly grounded in traditional Buddhist ethics—such as mindfulness and altruism (bodhicitta)—such a practitioner operates fluidly across multiple schools (Nyingma, Sakya, Kagyu, etc.), capturing the Rimé (non-sectarian) spirit of the living tradition. Their authority is recognized not through bureaucratic coercion and peer pressure, but through their deep respect for lineages, their cultural humility, and their dedication to making wisdom traditions transparently accessible to a global audience, completely divorced from the toxic internal politics of heavily compromised figures like Ngawang Trinley (NT) and Damien Jampa.

   Unmanaged Cultural Immersion vs. Truncated Stints (Travel History & Worldliness)

   The Syndicate’s Insular Echo Chambers: The Septic Syndicate’s collective experience of the Himalayan region was heavily institutionalized, tightly regulated, and frequently curtailed. Indeed, it is well-documented that Justin Kirkwood and Matthias Staber have publicly inflated their time in South Asia. On their online professional profiles, Justin misrepresents his 6.5-7 years in India as “8 years” (“He finally returned to the United States after eight years in India”) while Matthias obfuscates his ~3-4 years as “many years” (“he spent many years studying Buddhism and Tibetan language in India and Nepal”). In reality, Syndicate members such as Justin Kirkwood and the other ex-monks at Sherab Ling engaged in grueling, military-style 2 to 3-year monastic stints that ended in severe physical burnout, serious health problems, and permanent exits from South Asia. Some of these became early dropouts from the entire field who retreated into deep social isolation, dogmatic fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, or insular groupthink, such as James Bradwell, Eugene Romaniuk, Evan Yerburgh, and Sean Griffin. Their worldliness and on-the-ground experience in the Tibetan communities of South Asia has been structurally restricted; they live inside a tiny expat bubble, consistently wary of direct confrontation with their former colleagues, and completely dependent on localized turf politics and insular dynamics to survive.

   The Grounded Scholar’s Immersion: An unconstrained path is defined by long-term, unmanaged cultural immersion. Navigating the physical and cultural terrain of India and Nepal as a dedicated researcher, textual scholar, and interpreter requires immense adaptability, deep-seated resilience, and raw cross-cultural authority. Such sustained, self-directed immersion allows a scholar to absorb the living tradition directly from native masters and the Tibetan community, without being managed by a provincial expat clique of gatekeepers. Their eventual transition to establishing independent platforms is a calculated, pragmatic business pivot, rather than an emergency departure from a collapsing institutional arrangement like those plaguing the Septic Syndicate and their associates.

   Multi-Lingual Polyglot Mindset vs. Insular Specialization (Personal Philosophy)

   The Syndicate’s Scarcity Mindset: The Septic Syndicate operates on a philosophy of scarcity and clannish insulation. Because members like Ngawang Trinley (NT) operate inside a terminal bottleneck where funding streams have drastically shrunk and anchor organizations are systematically severing their ties over copyright infringement, intellectual property concerns, and illegal data-scraping issues, they turn outward with fierce hostility toward recognized translators and scholars, as evidenced by Damien Jampa’s frantic, paranoid attempts to undermine Adele Tomlin. Historically—and continuing down to the present—they have relied on private smear campaigns, sudden blocking maneuvers, social freeze-outs, passive-aggressive domineering, and even extortion attempts orchestrated by figures like Damien Jampa, Ngawang Trinley (NT), Helios Hildt, Dani Vargas, James Bradwell, Eugene Romaniuk, Evan Yerburgh, Justin Kirkwood, Sean Griffin, and Matthias Staber to preemptively undermine anyone in the field who can expose their self-fabricated illusion of authority.

   The Polymathic Scholar’s Philosophy: An unconstrained scholar operates with an intellectually restless, expansive polyglot mindset. Their self-driven study of numerous classical and modern languages and multiple Buddhist traditions showcases a voracious intellectual curiosity that extends far beyond a single, insular network limited to a hyper-specialized corner of Tibetan studies, especially one dominated by an illegitimate group like the Septic Syndicate. Such a personal philosophy is anchored in generous knowledge-sharing, transparent accountability, and direct-to-student education. They do not need to fight over a finite pool of grant money, because they have built a sustainable path that renders the old guard’s gatekeeping apparatus—and the desperate maneuvers of the Syndicate—obsolete, anachronistic, and essentially defunct.

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   1. I a publishing this with the strict caveat that I have no idea if any of this is true or not. Why be anonymous about it though? You are clearly annoyed and frsutrated by these named individuals with good reasons if true. Why not try and make that exposure more public in some way and effect change with it? I do not think Comments here will be able to do that, other than in a minor way perhaps. Some of what you say certainly rings true about the “Boys club” machismo approach and attitude though. I hope they will change, in particular Damien Jampa, who I can state personally has been very petty, vindictive, gossipy, unforgiving, and exaggerating claims about me behind my back, that led others to act in very harmful and damaging ways to me.

      As you say, hardly any of these men have an independent scholarly or academic background of any real note or substance, and yet the get funding and institutional support. Damien Jampa seemed intensely jealous of me and my achievements when I spoke with him, and he deliberately downplayed and diminished them to another unknown oral female interpeter who does not even speak or read written Tibetan (no record of scholarship, study or written translation), who readily accepted his derogatory view of me and my work. Which is also evidence of the sexism and misogyny of these translator-monastic cartels and funding groups.

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7. Thank you for sharing your perspective on this. First and foremost, everything I’ve said is true and verifiable; diligent research into these matters via the proper institutional and personal channels will reveal that reality, even if much of it has been kept out of public view.

   Regarding the caveat, while you keep repeating it—likely as a completely understandable standard legal disclaimer given your ongoing legal battles with them, which were almost certainly orchestrated primarily by Damien Jampa behind the scenes—it is striking how closely the behavioral patterns outlined match the real-world experiences you and others have documented: the backroom maneuvering, administrative enforcement, and behind-the-scenes undermining. When those operational habits remain consistent across multiple independent accounts, the underlying dynamics become clear, even behind a blanket disclaimer.

   As for remaining anonymous, the answer lies largely in the hostile environment you’ve spent the last year meticulously detailing. When retaliation involves aggressive proxy litigation, cross-border tracking, and coordinated blacklisting, choosing anonymity isn’t about avoiding exposure out of fear. It’s a basic, pragmatic layer of self-preservation against an entrenched apparatus which has proven itself to be highly dangerous and devoid of self-awareness or accountability.

   Let’s be real: I think it’s very obvious who I am and certainly the Syndicate itself is very aware of it. There are an exceptionally small number of people it could possibly be; so, I would appreciate it if you stopped pressing the issue, out of respect for the fact that I’m trying to support you in the way I view as most effective. Given that I hold more information on this cartel than almost anyone, and what I’ve shared thus far is just the tip of the iceberg, I believe I’ve been quite targeted and restrained in my approach, all things considered. I am giving you, and anyone else who reads this, the full and precise roadmap for how these people operate, focusing on the most important details. My choice of delivery is entirely deliberate, carefully calculated, and non-negotiable.

   The way Damien treated you is actually shocking even to his most ardent critics. In my view, it would be inadvisable to pursue this haphazardly. It is not only malicious but destructive and should not be taken lightly. Moreover, it should be clear from my text that I view some of these people as completely unrestrained by typical social norms or Buddhist ethics, and that they are capable of almost anything against their perceived enemies or rivals, as has been proven numerous times over the years. With that said, I believe that confrontation with them, whether anonymously or not, is essential to dissuading them from pushing it further. The EBU administration is reading your blog; many of their circle are reading these comments. Although we can’t be sure of how they will react, at least they will come to see that Damien is only feeding them a very one-sided, self-serving version of the story, and that he and his group have a long, controversial history and a bad reputation going back well before you clashed with them. I believe there is great strategic value in my comments, generally and specifically for you.

   In a sense, the interpersonal friction (the petty politics, gossip, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering) isn’t actually the root issue; it is the predictable byproduct of a collapsing structural model which has run its course and whose reckoning is long overdue.

   When an insular network relies on administrative gatekeeping, authoritarian status-positioning, and transient non-profit grants rather than deep philological rigor and autonomous scholarship, defensiveness becomes the default operating system. As those centralized funding streams contract and institutional ties fracture under the weight of their ongoing interpersonal conflicts, unethical behavior, and entrenched corruption, the machinery of the Syndicate naturally becomes paranoid and hostile, generating friction and targeting anyone operating outside its control.

   Moving past the noise requires shifting the lens away from only personal grievances and looking at the social and organizational dynamics of these individuals themselves, along with the entire system they’ve created.

   You must understand that what we’re literally talking about here is essentially a cult, namely a cult of personality centered mainly around Damien and NT, which managed to largely insulate itself from criticism or even feedback a long time ago; and which has only recently (since maybe late 2023) faced anything resembling pushback, even among their closest associates. Furthermore, it is notable that NT and Helios grew up in a highly abusive Tibetan Buddhist cult in France (OKC, the Robert Spatz cult) that has faced significant media attention and legal prosecution by the French authorities. It proves that their behavioral patterns (high-control social dynamics, extreme gaslighting, humiliation rituals, authoritarian posturing, intense peer pressure) aren’t random; they are inherited cult mechanics. I believe this cultish social conditioning formed the basis for much of the Syndicate’s operating system, in particular with regard to NT and his brother. This was combined with Damien’s self-important delusions of grandeur around his position at Sherab Ling (“handpicked by Guru Vajradhara”), which appears to have been a key psychological factor from the very beginning; his spiritual authority was always self-fabricated grandiosity, apparently based on the fact that he was attending the Shedra and therefore considered himself superior to nearly all Western scholars and translators merely on that basis.

   Ultimately, looking at these networks purely through the lens of a macho boys’ club or standard envy, discrimination, or gossip only captures a very small part of the picture that is abundantly evident here. The real mechanism driving it is structural: an operational model built on perpetual grant-hoarding, low-wage exploitation of Tibetan refugees, aggressive ideological enforcement, brutal social exclusion, and above all, administrative capture of Buddhist foundations who are (or were) unaware of how they truly operate. Personal friction is just a symptom of a much larger, recurring system that has clearly been going on since at least the very beginnings of Esukhia in 2010–12.

   I hope that your platform and these records will eventually bring them to full accountability. Many organizations have indeed already quietly severed their ties with NT, Helios, and Dani, and it remains vital that the spotlight shines on the rest of them for their continued complicity as this malignant structural model inevitably collapses.

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   1. Well thank you for the information. Sorry it is not “obvious” who you are.
      I understand you want to address the one-sided narrative which is a good thing. You mention to confront them, but on the other hand state they are capable of almost anything. Not an easy thing to do as a lone woman, as am sure you can imagine.
      Yes, maybe the EBU are following, but frankly anyone who regards and cites the Github repository material and associated Youtube anonymous and unverified content as reliable or worthy of sharing, let alone citing in an actual court case as screenshots, needs their head examining, as we say. Clearly lacking any ordinary notion of what can e trusted and relied upon, and any modicum of ordinary wisdom and discernment. So frankly, I would not trust anyone from the EBU to have the sufficient emotional or intellectual maturity to apologise, retract and humbly state for the record that they were wrong to cite and share that material and use it to block investigations of wrongdoing and deception and bullying.

      Your writing and voice are eerily similar to that of the person writing the online smear campaign now on Github repository and on Youtube though.
      I can understand if you do not want to reveal your identity publicly, of course, it attracts a lot of negative energy and actions.
      But why not at least tell me privately who you are, so I know and can verify you are a genuine actor, and not a bad one….
      It is a macho boys’ club for sure though, and not just the people you mention.
      You seem to totally “let of the hook” the root of these issues, which are the Tibetan Buddhist tulkus, teachers, and monastic culture they are a part of.
      They are not acting or operating in isolation of all that.

      You do not seem to have much to say about abusive tulku men in robes, and their actions and mafioso type gang of enablers, defamers and liars, especially towards lone women such as myself.
      Sangye Nyenpa has never threatened me with court action, or defamation, or even denied what I say is true. Because it is true. But he has allowed (and even participated in) the online and private defamation, smear campaigns, bullying, intimidation, hearsay gossip, impersonation etc. to continue and flourish. he could have made a statement and stopped all of that if he had wanted to really help resolve it and make it less negative and peaceful, right?

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      1. Nope it’s not me. Pretty obvious that it’s someone in the Karma Kagyu circles, and someone who is on the exact opposite side of this issue. I have nothing to do with Karma Kagyu. Indeed, the author is openly supporting/defending Damien Jampa, Titi Dolma and the others on that website. So that makes no sense whatsoever.

         I feel like you’re not reading my comments very carefully. I’m literally giving you extremely valuable information about the people who have been harassing and suing you. I’m going out of my way to do this for your sake, and you seem to be barking up the wrong tree and looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’m on your side here and trying to help you. I also believe this is doing an important service for the whole community. And yes, they are quite dangerous and toxic as you know. Macho boys’ club, yes, but far, far worse than just that.

         I haven’t read the GitHub site extensively, but I disagree that the writing style sounds like me at all; it’s clearly AI slop that literally sounds like insane, unhinged ranting. By contrast, everything I’ve been saying to you is true and verifiable, if you choose to look into it. And I would recommend doing so, as it would be to your advantage.

         As for the identity of that author, I would gladly tell you if I knew. Beyond the people I’ve mentioned, I don’t really have some encyclopedic knowledge of everyone in that scene. If I do find out who it is, I will definitely let you know.

         You already figured out that it appears to be someone who’s based in Southeast Asia (likely Thailand or Indonesia), and that it’s probably someone connected to Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche and quite possibly Damien and Ngawang Trinley (NT). That automatically raises Evan Yerbergh and Eugene Romaniuk, as well as Titi Dolma or one of her associates, as possible suspects. As pointed out earlier, NT and his team do most of their coding and software development work on GitHub. While it’s not a smoking gun, it certainly seems to point in that direction. With the GitHub connection, that would also implicate Helios Hildt and maybe even Damien Jampa himself as potential collaborators in creating the anti-Adele defamatory website; or at least supporting it, because they have all actively worked with NT with his tech projects on GitHub. It certainly seems very suspicious to me that they “just happened” to use it as evidence against you.

         With that said, the stuff on that site is so over the top, vulgar, obsessive, poorly reasoned, and extreme that I have my doubts that it’s anyone from members of the ‘Septic Syndicate’ I specifically mentioned before… but still appears to be someone who is, in all likelihood, directly connected with them.

         I’m actually surprised that you still haven’t been able to find out who it is. Here’s the thing: I’d bet money on Damien Jampa and Titi Dolma, at the least, knowing exactly who it is, among others in their circle, likely including Ngawang Trinley (NT) and his gang. It seems like this issue could be raised in the legal proceedings?

         Overall, I think you underestimate your power and influence. While you may feel alone in this right now (and I’m sure it’s awful to go through), I think you’ve already accomplished a lot and done a great and brave thing by bringing this to the public’s attention. It’s now in the public record and surely people are talking about it.

         I also think that you hold the upper hand here, far more than you seem to realize. You’ve made them panic and scramble; that’s why they’ve taken such desperate measures to silence you. They know you hold all the receipts and are willing to go all the way to seek accountability.

         I’m definitely not letting anyone off the hook, including the questionable tulkus you’ve brought up in these discussions. I just don’t fully understand or know how directly these two separate issues are related, namely the unresolved case of Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche and the coordinate bullying and harassment by the Damien Jampa/Sherab Ling group, including Damien’s ‘international strike teams’. Clearly, they are related, but to what extent, it’s hard to say. I fully agree with your assessments about the systemic problems as a whole, in particular with the Sherab Ling/Benchen networks.

         As for the EBU, it seems to me that they just got hoodwinked and conned by Damien Jampa and maybe Titi Dolma. Even if they don’t make a formal apology or public statement, I would imagine they are reconsidering their positions, given everything that’s come out about Damien and his group (or at least I would hope so).

         In any case, I wouldn’t underestimate the impact all of this has had toward dismantling the ‘Septic Syndicate’. They are no longer seen as untouchable gatekeepers, but rather for what they are: a pathetic cartel of insecure grifters and spiritual/intellectual frauds who have a long history of misogyny, labor exploitation, institutional manipulation, and interpersonal abuse.

         I don’t have much time to devote to this, but I thought that writing around one or two comments per week to provide some further background information on these characters would be helpful. And I’m more than happy to continue to do so; there’s still some things that could be unpacked here and more information to be shared.

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      2. Thank you for this. It makes a lot of sense and I agree with most of it. And yes, it is clear they regard me as a very “powerful person” to resort to such desperate, unnecessary and “gang-up” measures to disarm, humiliate, silence, defame, harm me and anyone else who might dare to publicly associate with, support or praise me or my work in any way. It makes them look extremely feeble, pathetic, cowardly and “insane” to gang up on a lone woman like that, and exaggerate trivial incidents as well as cite an extremely derogatory blogger, impersonating a publicly accountable audit (how hilarous is that?) and citing it as unsourced screenshots in a court case! No wonder they had to invent and “emergency threat” to get it into court. Either that, or the court itself does not have time to really investigate and check any of the evidence proffered (which is also clearly the case).

         Either way, its a travesty of natural justice and due diligence, and easy to see how miscarriages of justice happen.

         The fact that people believed it who are in positions of power though, is the most worrying aspect of all. It is so clearly, as you say, obsessive, false, defamatory, unverified, derogatory, insulting, sexual insults and more…..sexist, misogynist and as you say lacking any warmth, kindness, empathy =, love or compassion.
         So why did those people so easily believe it? As you suggest, either it is one of them writing it, or they know the person who is and that person managed to convince them to cite it in their court case. Which suggests the person must have some kind of position or power in their small community.
         Yes, let me know if you find out who it is, but frankly I am beyond caring. It is so clearly false and defamatory and “insane” that having it in the public sphere at least is clear evidence of the kind of attacks and smear campaign I have been facing for the past six years privately.

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   2. The Pseudonymous Architecture of Accountability Evasion

      At this point, it is crucial to lay bare a structural anomaly that is as revealing as it is alarming: the systemic reliance on pseudonyms, obscured legal identities, and manufactured religious monikers by the core architects of this network, in particular the French men running the core operations. In any legitimate academic, pedagogical, or institutional framework, transparent legal identity is the baseline prerequisite for professional trust, contractual liability, and personal accountability. Within this ecosystem, however, opacity has been actively weaponized as a shield.

      Damien Jampa: Operates publicly under the curated monastic moniker “Damien D. Jampa,” yet his actual legal surname remains entirely obscure, and the precise significance of the initial “D.” is kept deliberately opaque. This lack of a verifiable legal footprint is glaringly problematic, particularly in light of active legal proceedings in Delhi and a documented pattern of sustained stalking and harassment. Concealing a legal identity for over a decade is not an innocent eccentricity. It is a calculated mechanism designed to insulate him from real-world consequences and evade the paper trail of systemic bullying and interpersonal abuse. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. It appears that he has deliberately hidden his full identity for a very long time (since the late 2000s), perhaps partly due to fear of retaliation.

      Ngawang Trinley (NT): Originally known as “Tenzang” (short for Tenzin Zangpo) until the 2011–2012 transition into the Esukhia Era, his true legal name is Vincent Tenzin Zangpo Hildt. The strategic shedding of his birth identity in favor of the religious title “Ngawang Trinley” coincided precisely with the formal launch of Esukhia in 2012. This rebranding served a dual purpose: it functioned as a psychological distancing maneuver from a deeply controversial upbringing within a French Ogyen Choling (OKC) cult environment, while simultaneously adopting the exact same high-control, insular mechanics to construct a new micro-fiefdom in South Asia, similar to that of Robert Spatz. It is also notable that he has never used his real first name, Vincent, in any context, and that most people are not even aware of his former “Tenzang” identity.

      Helios Hildt: His full name is Helios Drupchen Dorje Hildt. He is less secretive about his names than the others, although he seems to use either Helios or Drupchen Dorje depending on what’s more convenient. He utilizes a fluid rotation of legal and religious names depending on whichever proves most administratively expedient or protective at any given moment.

      The Institutional Red Flag

      The systematic refusal of these actors to operate under verifiable legal names while wielding significant institutional gatekeeping power exposes the entire enterprise for what it always was: an unaccountable shadow-network. When individuals demand absolute compliance, control over resources, and submission from peers while hiding behind an impenetrable wall of pseudonyms and monastic titles, it ceases to be a cultural quirk. It is a deliberate strategy of evasion, ensuring that when the structures finally collapse, the architects can vanish behind a ghost trail.

      Needless to say, regardless of their stated reasons for doing so, the fact that these French men have operated exclusively under fake names and/or Tibetan Buddhist names all these years is certainly highly suspicious and very shady. It is the behavior of con artists, not serious scholars or pioneers in the fields of Tibetan language education or Buddhist digital humanities. Especially because hardly anyone actually knows their real legal names, even in their own inner circles!

      All in all, it’s definitely something worth noting and looking into further.

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      1. Well I do know that Helios Hildt’s wife, Dani Yeshe Dawa, who is a Portuguese interpreter on the Kagyu Office team, was extremely rude, derogatory, insulting and nasty when I called out lama misconduct. She is also a potential suspect either for the Github Repository, or at least someone who would know about it and encourage its existence\.

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      2. https://palpungdharmachakra.org/review-class/

         Apparently, Damien is now hiding behind the name ‘Jampa Dorje’.

         It amazes me that no one thought the fact that this guy has never used his legal surname, or any surname, in public wasn’t obviously suspicious.

         Same with Ngawang Trinley (NT), whose real name is Vincent Tenzin Zangpo/Tenzang Hildt, but has never used either his real first name (Vincent) or his real last name (Hildt) in public! It blows my mind that people didn’t think this was strange and questionable?

         It really shows some gaping blind spots in Tibetan Buddhist circles. How can people can get away with this calculated anonymity and misdirection for so long? In any normal professional or academic field, if someone tried to completely wipe their legal first and/or last name from their resume and go by a single religious title in a foreign language, it would be an immediate red flag. But because these circles automatically trust anything wrapped in a Tibetan name, it creates a perfect invisibility cloak. People can operate in plain sight for over a decade and a half, completely detached from their real legal identities, while the community treats it as spiritual devotion rather than a massive administrative blind spot and serious operational liability.

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      3. Yes same with the unaccountable and generally unknown and uncommunicative “admin” of Buddha Within course Titi Dolma, who acts behind closed doors in the absence of the person she actively and maliciously spread gossip and hearsay about to destroy and ruin my connection with Gyalton R.

         And also the European woman (Ma Tara Palmo) a survivor of SNR who decided to harass and verbally assault, insult and have me kicked out of the Sherab Ling guesthouse in March 2026 for being in her words “a demon” who was staying at “their home” and that “no-one wanted me there”. Yet she was the person the guesthouse staff had originally told to move to another guesthouse when she first insisted to them I be kicked out when she arrived after I had been staying there three weeks minding my own business without incidents. Her legal name/identity is unknown too. The strangest thing of all is she now seems to be trying to portray me as the issue when her teachers Mingyur R and Tai Situpa gave neither me or her zero advice, support or guidance when we both reported SNR for almost the exact same conduct (as have other women) in 2020.

         The smear campaign and use of anonymous pseudonyms as well as impersonation of me online via such anonymity online on FB and Reddit etc. has been a persistent strategy of harassment, defamation and bullying since 2020 too.

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8. It is not just “a bit” misogynistic; the behavior directed at Adele Tomlin is a textbook case of extreme, weaponized institutional misogyny.
   When an old-guard patriarchal power structure is challenged by a lone woman holding the receipts, its default survival mechanism is almost always to launch a highly gendered, vulgar campaign designed to degrade her dignity and destroy her psychological stability.

   The public record on Dakini Translations explicitly documents this deeply misogynistic pattern across three distinct layers:

   1. The Smear Campaign: Vulgar and Sexualized Degradation
   The anonymous GitHub repository site and associated YouTube channels didn’t just disagree with Adele’s research or challenge her data. Instead, they defaulted to a classic misogynistic playbook: They launched explicit, highly vulgar attacks designed to humiliate her as a woman.

   They labeled her a “sex pest” and hurled graphic insults that are specifically designed to weaponize a woman’s gender and sexuality against her. This is a deliberate tactic used by insular boys’ clubs to induce deep shame and social isolation, hoping the target will become too traumatized to continue publishing.

   2. The Institutional Enforcers vs. The Lone Woman
   As Adele herself noted in her July 31st response, confronting this apparatus is “not an easy thing to do as a lone woman.” The Syndicate utilized an incredibly asymmetrical power dynamic to crush her:

   The Ganging Up: A multi-layered network of men—from the top-tier lamas down through international enforcers like Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley (NT)—coordinated to protect each other while systematically isolating a single female scholar.
   The Legal Bullying: Utilizing administrative power to physically ban her from European centers, orchestrating whisper campaigns to alienating her from colleagues, and culminating in Titi Dolma’s fraudulent “emergency” lawsuit in Delhi are overt acts of systemic intimidation aimed at drowning a lone female voice in endless legal stress.

   3. Protecting the Core Abuse
   The most sinister aspect of this misogyny is what they are trying to protect. The entire reason the Syndicate went to war with Adele is because she dared to publicly archive the unresolved sexual misconduct case of Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche.

   When female practitioners came forward with extensive logs showing manipulation and boundary-crossing by a high lama, the institutional response was completely devoid of compassion. Instead of investigating the predator, the “macho boys’ club” immediately closed ranks to protect the male tulku in robes, turning their collective administrative, technical, and legal weapons against the woman archiving the truth.

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   1. Yes indeed. That’s one of the best brief analyses of it.

      Please do create a standalone online platform that documents that truth I can personally vouch as true. As well as the other claims you make about Damoen Jampa and other Github repository users who may be directly connected to the vicious and malicious smear campaign against me.

      At least then it might become more visible and people can share their own experiences of these people and what you claim. Otherwise this all lies hidden in these comments which most people will not read or be aware of.

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      1. I’d like to do that, but it’s rather time-consuming. Perhaps when I have some more free time later on. I do agree that it’s a good idea.

         On the other hand, these people have been acting like such major assholes and total hypocrites for such a long time that I suspect their reputations were already pretty badly damaged by 2023–24, at least.

         NT, Helios, and Dani were all acting extremely unhinged, volatile, untrustworthy, and cruel during that 2023–24 period. I mean, they were literally engaging in harassment and, from what I observed, all three of them were participating in conduct that appeared to cross into criminal or at least highly unethical territory.

         And in 2023, Justin, Sean, Damien, and even Matthias also seemed notably worse than they had been in the past; to a point that, frankly, seemed to indicate serious interpersonal problems and surprising levels of dysfunction.

         I also suspect Damien’s targeting of you may have been partly a reaction to what was happening within their broader circle during that period. It looks like a desperate, frantic, and seemingly paranoid attempt to crush anyone deemed a potential threat to their perceived standing and legitimacy.

         In any case, they’ve certainly had a very contentious reputation since at least 2014, and the roots of that go back as far as 2010, as I noted. Overall, although I don’t think they’re all necessarily bad people (and few of them are still superficially respectable), they definitely have a very troubled history going back 12–16 years, and some of them are arguably rather dangerous.

         Dirk Schmidt is, as you may know, the only one who is mostly innocent and actually fairly admirable, which is why I haven’t included him in all this.

         Have you tried contacting GitHub about it? It seems like something they could potentially take down.

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      2. The Gradual Collapse of the Septic Syndicate (2023–26):
         The Cancellation of Dharma Sagar, The Dramatic Downfall of Ngawang Trinley (NT), and Damien Jampa’s Later Campaign of “International Strike Teams”

         THE CHRONOLOGY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE 2023–25 CRISIS

         The more one looks at the chronology, the more one suspects that the events surrounding the highly controversial operations of Ngawang Trinley (NT, AKA Vincent Tenzin Zangpo/Tenzang Hildt), Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje), and Daniela Vargas (Karma Yeshe Dawa) during the 2023–25 period may be essential to understanding what happened to this wider circle afterward.

         This seems particularly relevant with regard to the “international strike teams” of multiple Karma Kagyü students deployed against Adele Tomlin by Damien D. Jampa (real name unknown!) in an extensively organized harassment and bullying campaign that extended across 6 different countries.

         This remains necessarily speculative, because it is currently difficult to know exactly what any of them were thinking privately, and some of the strongest causal connections remain hypotheses rather than demonstrated facts. Nevertheless, the sequence is striking enough that it seems worth putting the pieces together.

         THE ABJECT FAILURE OF DHARMA SAGAR:
         A FIVE-YEAR PROJECT THAT LASTED TWO YEARS

         Dharma Sagar was presented as a five-year intensive Tibetan translation training program for Spanish and Portuguese speakers, initiated by Jigme Khyentse Rinpoche and supported by the Khyentse Foundation. Yet according to the available records and subsequent reporting, it appears to have lasted only a little over 2 years, from approximately January 2022 until around April 2024. That is a very substantial discrepancy between the planned lifespan of 5 years and the actual duration of the program, particularly given that the project was intended to train a cohort of approximately nineteen students toward genuine professional competence in Tibetan translation. Ending after roughly twenty-seven months meant that the students did not receive anything close to the five-year training pathway that had originally been envisioned, and it raises obvious questions about what went wrong internally.

         ALL SHOW, NO SUBSTANCE:
         THE FIZZLING OF A HALF-BAKED PROJECT

         It is also significant that the Dharma Sagar project apparently still looked relatively functional from the outside until late 2023. That creates the possibility that there was a substantial gap between the public appearance of continuity and the private reality of institutional vulnerability. People outside the project likely assumed that everything was proceeding normally, while those closest to the management were already dealing with serious concerns about funding and the future of the organization. That kind of asymmetry can produce extremely strange behavior, because the people under pressure may begin responding to threats that outsiders cannot even see.

         ANATOMY OF A COMPROMISED COUPLE:
         THE PROBLEMS BEHIND THE CANCELLATION OF DHARMA SAGAR

         The explanations presented in the available material surrounding the project point to a combination of operational mismanagement, failure to satisfy performance requirements, inadequate or unverified deliverables, financial and administrative concerns, and serious problems in the management of the educational environment. The husband-and-wife management team of Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje) and Daniela Vargas (Karma Yeshe Dawa) has been described as operating the project in a highly centralized and controlling manner, with allegations of interpersonal dysfunction, hostility toward participants, and a refusal or inability to meet the standards expected by an institutional funder such as the Khyentse Foundation. Whether every allegation can ultimately be substantiated is another matter, but the overall indicative pattern is certainly serious enough to explain why the project’s termination would have represented a major institutional failure and embarrassment.

         DELUSION MEETS MEASURABLE MILESTONES:
         PERFORMANCE AUDITS, DELIVERABLES, AND THE WITHDRAWAL OF SUPPORT

         The question of performance auditing is particularly important. A multi-year foundation-funded project is not normally sustained simply on the basis of good intentions. There are expected milestones, reporting requirements, financial controls, and evidence of actual outputs. The material surrounding Dharma Sagar repeatedly emphasizes failures in these areas, including a lack of sufficiently verified translation outputs and growing discrepancies between what the project was supposed to accomplish and what could actually be demonstrated. If those accounts are accurate, the cancellation was not simply an arbitrary withdrawal of support. It would have reflected the culmination of problems that had been developing over time.

         EXTORTION AS A CAREER PLAN:
         THE FRANTIC FLAILING OF THE SIDEKICKS

         The chronology is therefore quite extraordinary. By late 2023 and early 2024, Dharma Sagar appears to have been approaching some kind of institutional breaking point, while Ngawang Trinley (NT), Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje), and Daniela Vargas (Karma Yeshe Dawa) were reportedly behaving with an unusually high degree of volatility and hostility towards their colleagues and associates. The apparent extreme aggression surrounding both Helios Hildt and Daniela Vargas during that period is especially suggestive. If they were in fact struggling to secure stable employment while the project that had provided their institutional positions was approaching termination, then their behavior, including the extortion attempts and false accusations, becomes somewhat easier to interpret. That would not prove any particular motive, but it would provide a plausible explanation for why their conduct appeared so frantic and unstable.

         THE DIGITAL VANISHING ACT:
         THE ERASURE OF DHARMA SAGAR AND THE QUESTION OF INSTITUTIONAL RISK

         This is one reason the apparent total erasure or scrubbing of Dharma Sagar and all associated material from the Khyentse Foundation’s institutional websites and directories is so interesting. When disappearance, funding termination, public allegations, and institutional separation all occur within the same broader period, it naturally invites questions about risk management and reputational containment.

         SCRAPING THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL:
         THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND COPYRIGHT PROBLEM

         There is also the more controversial question of the alleged data-scraping practices, copyright violation, and intellectual property theft associated with the wider network around Ngawang Trinley (NT) and Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje), in particular under the banner of Monlam AI, but also potentially via other projects. This matters because such allegations potentially connect the ethical and legal problems of the older projects with the technical activities that followed. The picture presented is of a network that moved between nonprofit, translation, archival, and digital humanities environments, with Ngawang Trinley (NT) occupying a technically and institutionally central role while Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje) and Daniela Vargas (Karma Yeshe Dawa) were involved in localized operations, along with Damien Jampa and later Evan Yerburgh to some extent.

         This represents a very different order of seriousness from an ordinary administrative failure. Copyright, licensing, source provenance, and data integrity are existential issues for digital humanities organizations, especially where Buddhist texts and machine-readable corpora are concerned. A project can survive a late deliverable or a mediocre translation. It is much harder to survive credible questions about whether the underlying data were obtained or processed lawfully and ethically.

         Indeed, there appears to be substantial evidence suggesting that similar questionable data-scraping practices may be continuing under Ngawang Trinley’s current projects, including OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org, and Dharmaduta. The continuity of these projects and their associated personnel make the issue difficult to ignore.

         THE UNRAVELING OF A TIBETAN SWEATSHOP DICTATOR:
         THE DRAMATIC DOWNFALL OF NGAWANG TRINLEY (NT)

         The most important figure in this transition may actually be Ngawang Trinley (NT), because his trajectory between 2023 and 2025 appears to represent the clearest evidence that the old institutional architecture of the Syndicate was breaking apart. Before this period, Ngawang Trinley (NT) possessed an unusually strong combination of technical credentials, institutional affiliations, international recognition, and personal connections to highly influential figures in the Tibetan Buddhist world. By 2024–25, however, that position appears to have changed substantially. His connection with Taiwan and the domestic environment surrounding Jennifer Yo appears to have deteriorated or effectively ended, his earlier institutional roles no longer provided the same degree of security, and his professional activity increasingly appears to have shifted toward decentralized digital projects and technical platforms.

         This matters because Ngawang Trinley (NT) was not simply another participant in the network. He appears to have occupied one of its central structural positions, particularly at the intersection of Tibetan textual data, digital humanities, nonprofit administration, and international institutional funding. Given that, based on the evidence, his older institutional position appears to have begun to unravel from late 2023 onward into early 2025, the consequences would have extended far beyond his own career. They would have removed one of the principal sources of legitimacy and stability available to the wider circle around him, particularly his closest associates such as Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje) and Damien Jampa.

         THE GRAVY TRAIN DERAILED:
         THE SEPARATION FROM JENNIFER YO AND THE LOSS OF THE TAIWAN ANCHOR

         The apparent separation from Jennifer Yo is therefore particularly significant. Whatever the precise personal circumstances between them may have been, the broader consequences seem clear enough: Ngawang Trinley (NT) could no longer rely upon the same Taiwan-based personal and professional architecture that had previously surrounded him, based in large part on Jennifer Yo’s role as a major director at the Khyentse Foundation for the Kumarajiva Project. The contrast between his earlier position in Taiwan and his subsequent reappearance in India in 2024–25, together with a flurry of new digital projects operating out of Pune, is therefore incredibly striking. It suggests a movement from an institutionally anchored model of multilayered authority across multiple reputable foundations toward a much more fragmented and technically mediated one, largely directed almost entirely by himself.

         THE DARK IMPLICATIONS OF A FALSE TECH MESSIAH:
         NT’S DATA-SCRAPING PRACTICES AND THE POST-INSTITUTIONAL MODEL

         That transition also coincides with the growing controversy surrounding Ngawang Trinley’s (NT) illegal data-scraping and unethical text-processing practices, which purportedly include intellectual property theft and copyright violations. These allegations are particularly significant in the context of his post-2023 trajectory because they concern precisely the kind of technical infrastructure that can survive the collapse of a conventional institution. A conventional nonprofit or foundation project can be terminated. A repository, software project, dataset, or loosely connected network of technical collaborators can be moved, renamed, or reorganized much more easily.

         THE BAIT-AND-SWITCH OF MULTIPLE VIRTUAL SHELL COMPANIES:
         THE SYNDICATE’S SHINY NEW DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

         This may, in part, help explain the importance of Ngawang Trinley’s (NT) new projects such as OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org, and Dharmaduta. Taken individually, these may seem to be unrelated professional activities. Taken together, however, they appear to represent a potential new ecosystem in which the older institutional model has been replaced by a much more widely distributed digital architecture. The chronology is difficult to ignore.

         THE GOLDEN BOY FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN:
         THE STRUCTURAL NATURE OF NT’S DECLINE

         What makes Ngawang Trinley’s decline particularly important is that it appears to have been neither sudden nor merely personal. His 2023 to 2025 trajectory looks like a structural transition in which several previously overlapping sources of authority stopped reinforcing one another. Technical expertise and professional connections could still be converted into projects, but institutional prestige, geographic anchoring, family connections, and foundation support no longer appeared to operate as one integrated system. That distinction matters because it explains why NT could remain active while simultaneously looking dramatically diminished compared with his earlier position.

         DISGRACED EXILE TO PUNE:
         THE BIZARRE FORM OF NT’S REHABILITATION

         There is also something revealing about the form of his apparent recovery. Rather than rebuilding through a conventional institutional appointment comparable to his earlier roles, Ngawang Trinley (NT) appears to have accumulated a constellation of smaller and more technically oriented projects. OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org, and Dharmaduta therefore become significant not necessarily because every project is inherently problematic, but because together they suggest a model of survival based on decentralization. The institutional center of gravity has shifted, and that makes the preservation of professional influence much more dependent upon technical infrastructure and distributed relationships.

         THE MANY-HEADED DRAGON TRICK:
         THE SYNDICATE’S NEW VULNERABILITY

         For someone who had previously occupied such a prestigious and interconnected position, that represents a remarkable change in status. It also creates a very different form of vulnerability. A large institution can absorb criticism, impose bureaucratic distance, and provide layers of organizational legitimacy. A decentralized ecosystem is much more personally exposed. The individual becomes much more identifiable with the projects themselves, meaning that scrutiny of the projects can more easily become scrutiny of the individual behind them.

         RUNNING FROM THE GHOSTS OF THE PAST:
         DAMIEN JAMPA AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE ‘ESUKHIA MUSKETEERS’

         The apparent displacement of Ngawang Trinley’s earlier institutional position is also important for understanding the strange behavior of Damien Jampa. The significance of NT’s trajectory for Damien Jampa may be greater given the nature of their relationship. If Ngawang Trinley effectively occupied the position of a protégé, younger-brother figure, apprentice, or institutional heir to Damien Jampa from the late 2000s onward, then the deterioration of NT’s position would have psychologically represented much more than the failure of one associate’s career. Damien Jampa had spent many years apparently heavily investing in, identifying with, and deriving prestige from the institutions and projects with which Ngawang Trinley was associated, most notably the Esukhia environment that emerged in the early 2010s and continued until the beginning of the 2020s.

         The collapse of Esukhia in 2019–20 therefore matters enormously in this context. The school was one of the most visible manifestations of the network’s ambitions during the 2010s, and its eventual disappearance represented more than the loss of a workplace. It meant the disappearance of a physical institution around which relationships, authority, identity, and historical legitimacy had been organized. Dharma Sagar then followed with another major institutional failure, while Ngawang Trinley (NT) increasingly operated through a very different technical environment.

         THE CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST:
         THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF NT’S EXPOSURE FOR DAMIEN JAMPA

         The psychological effect of watching a protégé’s institutional world disintegrate can be profound. Pride can become defensiveness. Identification can become possessiveness. Concern for reputation can become an almost obsessive need to control the narrative surrounding the person whose achievements once reflected positively on one’s own judgment. This is especially interesting if Damien Jampa really did regard Esukhia and the associated achievements of Ngawang Trinley as part of a long-term project in which he had personally invested considerable prestige.

         That possibility makes the later campaign of cross-border harassment and bullying against Adele Tomlin considerably more interesting. Damien’s “international strike teams” need not have been consciously planned as a defense of Ngawang Trinley (NT), Esukhia, or Dharma Sagar. It may nevertheless have emerged from the same underlying need to prevent the old historical narrative from being reassembled. Once the individual controversies become connected, the accomplishments that once seemed separate can also be reconsidered together.

         ALL DIFFERENT, ALL BAD:
         THE VARIOUS FATES OF THE SEPTIC SYNDICATE MEMBERS

         The psychological consequences of that are likely to differ considerably from one person to another. Ngawang Trinley (NT) has perhaps the strongest incentive to preserve whatever technical and professional identity remains, which makes his continuing involvement with projects such as OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org, and Dharmaduta particularly significant. His apparent movement away from earlier, more institutionally anchored roles toward decentralized technical projects can be interpreted as adaptation to a changed environment.

         HELIOS HILDT (DRUPCHEN DORJE):
         UNEARNED ENTITLEMENT, VICIOUS ESCALATION, AND THE REVERSAL OF FORTUNES

         Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje), having been closely associated with the management of the now-collapsed Dharma Sagar project, appears to have experienced a striking reversal in his professional position within the Tibetan translation and Tibetan Buddhist world generally. His apparent near-disappearance from the field is therefore notable.

         The timing surrounding Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje) is especially difficult to ignore. His apparent professional desperation coincided with the period in which the institutional basis of his position was becoming unstable, and that makes the volatility attributed to him during 2023 and 2024 much more intelligible. A person who believes that an important source of income, status, and professional identity is disappearing can become extraordinarily aggressive when an alternative opportunity appears to offer an escape from that impending collapse.

         There is also a particularly bitter irony in the fact that the employment opportunity Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje) appeared so desperate to obtain did not ultimately provide the long-term salvation it may have represented to him at the time. The broader project itself subsequently ended, and the organizational environment around it disappeared. Whatever strategic calculation lay behind Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje)’s conduct, the result was therefore extraordinarily self-defeating. The old institutional position was lost, the attempted replacement did not become a durable alternative, and the controversy surrounding the episode became part of the permanent historical record.

         The apparent collapse of Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje)’s visibility after this period is consequently more meaningful than a simple career change. He had been operating within an ecosystem that gave him considerable access to institutions, students, projects, and professional legitimacy. The subsequent absence of an equivalent public-facing role suggests that something much more fundamental was lost.

         DANIELA VARGAS (KARMA YESHE DAWA):
         THE INEVITABLE FALL OF AN INCOMPETENT & UNQUALIFIED MANAGER

         Daniela Vargas (Karma Yeshe Dawa) deserves comparable attention because the collapse of Dharma Sagar cannot be understood solely through the behavior of Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje). She was part of the project’s management structure and therefore occupied a position in which educational administration, student relations, institutional expectations, and the practical delivery of the program all converged. That makes the failure of the project relevant to her professional record as well as to Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje)’s.

         Her disappearance from the visible field is particularly striking for the same reason. The project represented an unusually substantial institutional opportunity, especially given the small size of the Spanish and Portuguese Tibetan translation sector. For the people managing it, there was every reason for Dharma Sagar to become the foundation of a long-term professional identity. Instead, the project ended prematurely and the institutional visibility associated with it appears to have largely disappeared with it.

         That reversal should also be considered alongside the allegations of a highly centralized management culture. If students and colleagues experienced the environment as controlling or hostile, then the failure was not merely financial or administrative. It affected the very educational purpose for which Dharma Sagar existed. That makes the collapse considerably more serious because the people most directly affected were the students whose five-year training pathway was interrupted.

         JUSTIN KIRKWOOD:
         PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY AND THE COWARDICE OF UNACCOUNTABILITY

         Justin Kirkwood seems to occupy a very different psychological position. He still has a substantial professional identity at the Namchak Foundation in Montana and therefore cannot simply disappear from view. A process of quiet distancing, conventional professional presentation, and minimizing old affiliations would make considerable sense for someone in that position. He could feel highly compromised by his past associations while simultaneously having every incentive to move away from the old structure and avoid reviving the controversies.

         Justin Kirkwood is interesting precisely because he has not disappeared. His continued professional presence means that he cannot simply detach himself from his past by becoming invisible. His more plausible strategy is therefore one of differentiation. The old affiliations become something to be minimized rather than denied, while the present professional identity becomes increasingly self-contained and institutionally respectable.

         That puts Justin Kirkwood in a psychologically awkward position. He can recognize that the old network was dysfunctional without wanting to publicly repudiate every person or institution associated with it. Doing so would reopen precisely the history he has the greatest incentive to leave behind. Quiet distance therefore becomes much more useful than either enthusiastic defense or dramatic denunciation.

         The irony is that this kind of distancing can itself become revealing. The more someone carefully separates a present professional identity from an earlier circle, the more conspicuous the underlying rupture becomes. In a small field, people remember who was connected to whom even when the public biographies become cleaner.

         Overall, it seems unlikely that Justin will be able to outrun his troubled history of bullying, deceit, and sabotage forever, nor keep it permanently concealed from Namchak. The past has a way of catching up with people who assume that enough time, distance, and professional respectability will make it disappear. Sooner or later, the history that was carefully kept out of sight can become impossible to ignore.

         SEAN GRIFFIN:
         HYPOCRITICAL PARTICIPATION IN SYSTEMIC BULLYING WITHOUT GENUINE ALLEGIANCE

         Sean Griffin and James Bradwell strike the observer as potentially more complicated still. It is not even clear that either of them genuinely liked Damien Jampa or Ngawang Trinley (NT) very much. Indeed, their past history suggests something of the opposite. Their past involvement may have had more to do with social validation, belonging, and fear of exclusion than with genuine affection for the leadership. That distinction matters because someone can remain loyal to a group while privately disliking the people who control it.

         Sean Griffin appears to represent one of the clearest examples of the distinction between participation and genuine allegiance. His involvement in the old environment does not necessarily indicate that he embraced its leadership or even particularly liked the people at its center. It is entirely possible to remain deeply embedded in a social structure because the cost of leaving is greater than the discomfort of staying.

         That makes the eventual collapse potentially quite liberating for someone in his position. The disappearance of the old hierarchy removes the obligation to perform loyalty to people whom he may never have trusted completely. What remains, however, is the uncomfortable realization that years were spent negotiating that hierarchy rather than developing an independent professional identity outside it.

         But there is another problem that is considerably harder to escape: the people whom Sean Griffin treated badly have memories of what happened. He may have blocked the uncomfortable reminders of his past mistakes, largely distanced himself from the group, and moved on with his life in his old age, but that does not erase the inevitable consequences of his actions. Blocking someone out of your life or ignoring how toxic his social group in India was is not the same thing as answering for what you did to others and how you took part in some of the worst offenses of that group. Sooner or later, the question remains: what exactly does Sean Griffin have to say for himself?

         JAMES BRADWELL:
         IDENTITY CONFUSION, LONG-TERM STAGNATION, AND THE HEAVY COST OF COMPLIANCE

         James Bradwell appears to occupy an even more uncomfortable position because his apparent history combines proximity to the leadership with signs of significant personal and professional stagnation. The important question is not simply what he did for the network, but what the network ultimately did for him. If years of proximity produced little independent scholarly infrastructure, few durable achievements, and little professional autonomy, then the exchange was extraordinarily unequal.

         His apparent relationship to the more volatile personalities in the circle also makes the psychology of compliance important. People do not always remain in dysfunctional environments because they believe in them. They may remain because leaving would force them to confront how dependent they have become. That can create a peculiar mixture of resentment toward the leadership and simultaneous fear of becoming independent of it.

         This could also explain why Sean Griffin and James Bradwell might experience the public collapse of the Syndicate as a peculiar mixture of shame and quiet validation. If they had privately suspected for years that something was deeply wrong, then seeing the structure finally collapse could reinforce rather than destroy those suspicions. The painful part would then be confronting how much time, energy, and potential had been sacrificed in order to remain accepted by a group that ultimately did not follow through on its implicit promises, nor seemed to care much about their futures. “Betting on the wrong horse” would be a massive understatement, in their case.

         MATTHIAS STABER:
         THE CAUTIOUS PRAGMATIST AFTER THE COLLAPSE

         That same dynamic applies, in a somewhat different way, to Matthias Staber. He seems better understood as a pragmatic participant than as an ideological one. His apparent proximity to the wider network makes most sense as part of a professional ecosystem in which access, contacts, technical opportunities, and association with prestigious projects could provide tangible benefits. Such participation does not require genuine emotional loyalty to the leadership.

         That is precisely why Matthias Staber may have experienced the eventual collapse with comparatively little ideological shock. A pragmatist can recognize that a structure is failing before being psychologically ready to leave it. Once the institutional benefits disappear, however, the calculation changes immediately. There is no longer much reason to defend a system that no longer provides the advantages that originally justified remaining close to it.

         The resulting position is therefore one of quiet disengagement. He does not need to proclaim opposition to the old network. He simply needs to stop investing in it and hope that whatever independent professional credibility remains can survive the historical association.

         EUGENE ROMANIUK:
         BRUTAL IDEOLOGICAL ENFORCEMENT AND THE PARADOX OF EXCLUSION

         With Eugene Romaniuk, the emotional category is different. His apparent historical role was not primarily technical or professional. It was social and ideological. He was one of the earliest and most extreme practitioners of interpersonal exclusion, ghosting, blocking, and ideological enforcement during the 2010–14 period, eventually leading to a kind of cult-like enforcement of group cohesion, even after retreating into near-total social isolation in Thailand in 2014.

         If that characterization is substantially accurate, then Eugene Romaniuk cannot easily be placed in the same category as people whose participation was mainly the result of sheer naivety or professional dependence. His importance in the early period lies precisely in the enforcement of boundaries. Blocking, ghosting, exclusion, and rigid social conformity are not passive behaviors. They are mechanisms through which a group teaches its members what happens when they deviate.

         This is why Eugene Romaniuk’s later disappearance is so symbolically significant. The person who once appears to have been deeply invested in policing the borders of the group eventually found himself almost entirely outside the professional environment he had helped enforce. There is an almost tragic symmetry in that trajectory. The enforcer of exclusion ultimately became one of the most socially isolated figures associated with the network.

         His fanatical devotion to Ngawang Trinley also adds another layer. If Eugene Romaniuk invested a substantial part of his identity in defending NT and preserving the group’s internal cohesion, then the later rapid deterioration of Ngawang Trinley’s position would have been difficult to swallow. A defense of the leader had gradually become a defense of the person’s own past choices.

         That is why contempt rather than pity seems like the more appropriate analytical category for someone like Eugene Romaniuk. His apparent total withdrawal from the Tibetan field and near absence from contemporary online social or professional life are particularly striking given how visible his social role appears to have been during the earlier period, especially considering his brutal policing of his friends and colleagues over minor interpersonal disputes. Whether his disappearance from normal society is deliberate self-protection from the effects of his long-term backing of controversial figures or simply a complete change of lifestyle is impossible to establish, but the contrast is nevertheless remarkable.

         EVAN YERBURGH:
         THE PITIABLE RETURN OF AN INSULAR INTELLECTUAL

         Evan Yerburgh presents another interesting case because the apparent psychological conflict is centered more on identity. Someone who wants to be regarded as a serious secular intellectual, writer, or academic has a strong incentive to maintain distance from an increasingly controversial religious and institutional history. The resulting cognitive dissonance can be substantial because the issue is not merely whether every allegation is true. It is the realization that a person’s historical affiliations may look very different once they are viewed from outside the social world in which those affiliations were formed.

         The fact that Evan Yerburgh, like Eugene Romaniuk, disappeared from the Tibetan Buddhist field for over a decade in Thailand, only to resurface in 2025–26 in an apparent rescue operation for Ngawang Trinley, in order to provide technical assistance for his numerous new digital startups in India, makes his trajectory all the more absurd. This seems to suggest a deep naivety regarding what has actually transpired over the last few years with the group in general and NT in particular, and perhaps a shocking degree of ignorance or denial about the actual nature of the network he’s been participating in for well over a decade.

         Evan Yerburgh’s reappearance is perhaps more significant than his earlier disappearance. A decade of relative absence followed by renewed involvement with Ngawang Trinley during the latter’s reconstruction of his technical ecosystem and return to India is not an insignificant coincidence. It suggests that the old social network was never entirely dead, even if it had ceased to be publicly visible; it also suggests that Evan is being used by NT as a last-ditch effort to find old supporters who are not yet fully aware of his recent history.

         The problem for Evan Yerburgh is therefore not only the continued existence of the old group dynamic. It is the possibility that Ngawang Trinley is deliberately reactivating a long-dormant relationship precisely because Evan Yerburgh remains sufficiently removed from the recent history to be highly useful to him. After more than a decade largely outside the Tibetan Buddhist field, Evan Yerburgh is potentially an unusually valuable recruit: someone with an established intellectual identity, technical abilities, and longstanding personal connections to the old network, but apparently without the same familiarity with the controversies, institutional failures, and professional fallout that have accumulated around Ngawang Trinley in recent years. In that sense, his apparent naivety is not merely an incidental weakness; it may be precisely what makes him useful. What looks from the outside like an old friend unexpectedly returning may instead represent a calculated attempt by Ngawang Trinley to recover support from people who still relate to the earlier version of him and have not yet fully reconstructed what happened to the network over the last decade.

         Indeed, even in 2015-16, Evan appeared to be remarkably trusting and naive about the toxicity of the group and the extremely problematic events that had hitherto occurred, especially in 2014 with James Bradwell, Justin Kirkwood, Sean Griffin, and his fellow Thailand expat, Eugene Romaniuk.

         The result is a particularly disturbing inversion of the old relationship: Evan Yerburgh may believe that he is returning to help a beleaguered old friend, while Ngawang Trinley may effectively be using that goodwill, technical competence, and incomplete awareness of the intervening history to rebuild a network that has already lost much of its former support.

         It also creates a particularly sharp form of cognitive dissonance. The longer someone has presented himself as an independent intellectual based in Thailand but with strong nostalgia for his prior Tibetan Buddhist life in India, the more difficult it becomes to explain renewed involvement with a controversial old network without confronting the continuity between past and present. The issue is not merely reputation. It is consistency of identity.

         KEEPING THEIR HEADS DOWN:
         THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FRIGHTENED SILENCE

         This may also help explain why so much of the network now appears silent. Silence does not necessarily mean everyone agrees with the allegations, and it certainly does not prove that every individual is secretly terrified. But silence can be an extraordinarily rational strategy for people whose only realistic objective is to prevent further attention from being directed toward their past associations with a group that was, in reality, well-known to be associated with extreme interpersonal dysfunction since 2014 if not 2010, let alone all the other problems.

         THE ADOLESCENT DYNAMIC OF A BULLYING BOYS’ CLUB:
         SOCIAL VALIDATION, BELONGING, AND FEAR OF EXCLUSION

         The social validation component also seems crucial. In a small and highly specialized field such as Classical Tibetan translation, belonging can become disproportionately valuable because the professional community overlaps with the social and religious community. Losing acceptance is not necessarily equivalent to losing a single job. It can mean losing teachers, friends, institutional access, references, projects, and one’s sense of identity.

         That helps explain why people can remain in unhealthy systems for much longer than an outside observer would expect. They may not actually admire the leadership. They may simply be afraid of what leaving would mean.

         THROWING THE FUTURE DOWN THE DRAIN:
         THE TRAGEDY OF WASTED POTENTIAL

         The tragedy is that the social validation they sacrificed so much to preserve can ultimately disappear anyway. When a network collapses, the person discovers that the approval of its gatekeepers was never a durable form of professional capital. What remains is the individual’s own work, reputation, and independent intellectual record.

         THE PREEMPTIVE BULLYING OF COLLEAGUES:
         THE PARADOX OF “PRECOGNITIVE” THREAT DETECTION

         That brings us back to the intriguing possibility of precognitive intuition, although it should not be taken literally. It is more plausible to understand the 2010–18 and later 2023–24 hostility towards their colleagues and associates as a form of unconscious threat detection. The people involved may have recognized very early that those who were unwilling to submit to their unspoken social rules could eventually become difficult to control.

         THE ISOLATING RESULT OF ISOLATING OTHERS:
         THE SELF-DEFEATING LOGIC OF SOCIAL MARGINALIZATION

         In that sense, the earlier attempts at social and professional marginalization may have contained their own paradox. If the objective was to make people disappear, the strategy failed. If anything, years of conflict can strengthen a person’s documentation, independence, resilience, and determination.

         That creates a classic self-defeating dynamic. The more a closed group tries to suppress someone who refuses to conform to their internal hierarchy, the more evidence it may generate that the person was being targeted in the first place. The more aggressively it responds, the more difficult it becomes to portray the conflict as an ordinary disagreement.

         THE ILLUSION OF SELF-APPOINTED AUTHORITY:
         THE COLLAPSE OF THE SYNDICATE’S ASSUMPTION OF CONTROL

         And that may be the deepest connection between the old period and the present one. The network appears to have relied for years upon the assumption that it could control the social environment around it. But once institutional authority weakened, funding structures fractured, projects failed, relationships deteriorated, and independent observers began preserving the history, that assumption became increasingly untenable.

         THE EMPERORS WEAR NO CLOTHES:
         THE REVERSAL OF THE OLD POWER RELATIONSHIP

         The public archive also changes the meaning of the old power relationship. During the earlier period, the apparent strategy was to isolate dissenters and make them socially marginal. Now the historical record itself can preserve what happened, regardless of whether the people who participated in it would prefer that it had remained forgotten.

         CONNECTING THE DOTS OF A CRUMBLING FIEFDOM:
         THE END OF COMPARTMENTALIZATION

         And that is where archives such as Dakini Translations archive become so important. The archive does not simply preserve one dispute. It places names, dates, allegations, institutional relationships, projects, and historical episodes next to one another. It makes it increasingly difficult to treat every controversy as a completely isolated event. This creates a persistent documentary environment in which the entire history can be examined together.

         INESCAPABLE CONSEQUENCES:
         THE PERMANENCE OF THE PUBLIC RECORD

         This is also why the extensive discussion of these individuals on platforms such as Dakini Translations may be particularly embarrassing. A private history can be reinterpreted, forgotten, or quietly compartmentalized. A persistent public archive is much harder to escape. Anyone who searches a name can potentially encounter the surrounding history, whether or not they accept every interpretation contained within it.

         For Eugene Romaniuk, that may be especially uncomfortable because his historical role is connected to the early social-control dynamics, including what appeared to be an almost fanatical devotion to Ngawang Trinley (NT) and a rigid protectionism towards highly volatile or ethically questionable members such as James Bradwell. Later, Eugene also became known for actively encouraging these harsh exclusionary practices to others, like Evan Yerburgh.

         For Evan Yerburgh himself, the problem may be the tension between his professional self-conception and his historical and current social and professional connections with members such as Ngawang Trinley (NT) and Eugene Romaniuk. For Justin Kirkwood, Sean Griffin, James Bradwell, and Matthias Staber, the problem may be the more general embarrassment of having spent years within a dysfunctional system whose internal problems are now publicly discussed, with comparatively little to show for it in return.

         THE TRANSITION TO “INTERNATIONAL STRIKE TEAMS”:
         DAMIEN JAMPA AND THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND PHASE

         This may be part of the background to the later behavior of Damien Jampa. Again, it cannot be proved that Damien Jampa’s 2025–26 actions were directly caused by the earlier collapse of Dharma Sagar and the significant disruptions in the operations of Ngawang Trinley (NT), but the theory deserves consideration. The scale and apparent aggressiveness of his later international campaign against Adele Tomlin seem remarkably high-risk, particularly given that Adele Tomlin already possessed a public platform and an established willingness to investigate and document perceived misconduct.

         THE HYPERVIGILANCE OF A CORNERED RAT:
         WHAT MIGHT DAMIEN JAMPA HAVE BEEN AFRAID OF?

         So what was Damien Jampa actually afraid of? One possibility is fairly straightforward. He may have been consciously concerned that the old network was becoming increasingly vulnerable to investigation and that the surviving technical infrastructure could provide a route into the older history. By 2024–25, Ngawang Trinley (NT) appeared to be operating in a more decentralized digital environment, including OpenPecha and related repositories, while his institutional position was no longer the same as the one he had enjoyed during his earlier career. A sufficiently detailed investigation of repositories, scripts, data provenance, source material, and organizational affiliations could potentially connect newer activities with older controversies.

         It cannot honestly be said that this was definitely Damien Jampa’s conscious calculation. It is simply one highly plausible interpretation. There is another possibility that is psychologically more interesting, namely that the fear was largely unconscious.

         FEAR OF THE FEARLESS:
         THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONTROL AND THREAT PERCEPTION

         A person who has spent many years in an environment organized around gatekeeping, reputation management, exclusion, social pressure, and institutional hierarchy can become accustomed to assuming that these mechanisms work. They become part of the person’s implicit model of how conflict is supposed to be handled. But Adele Tomlin is almost the opposite kind of person for such a system to confront. She has her own platform, does not appear dependent upon the approval of the network, and has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to continue pursuing matters that she regards as important.

         That creates a very different psychological equation. Someone can consciously believe that pressure will eventually make another person retreat while unconsciously realizing that the person cannot actually be controlled. Once that contradiction becomes apparent, defensive behavior can escalate well beyond what would make rational strategic sense. The immediate issue ceases to be the real issue. What matters becomes the perception that control itself is slipping away.

         DAMIEN JAMPA’S LATER HARASSMENT CAMPAIGN IN CONTEXT:
         THE DEVOLUTION INTO “INTERNATIONAL STRIKE TEAMS”

         This would also help explain why the later campaign of “international strike teams” seems so much more extreme than the earlier pattern of interpersonal conflict toward other translators and scholars during the Esukhia Era of the 2010s, before the collapse of Esukhia as a physical school and coherent institution in 2020. A normal disagreement can be handled through discussion, disengagement, or professional separation. An existentially perceived threat produces a very different response. If Damien Jampa believed, consciously or unconsciously, that scrutiny could expose a much larger and darker institutional history, then attempting to suppress that scrutiny might have felt necessary even if it was objectively counterproductive.

         “HANDPICKED BY GURU VAJRADHARA”:
         THE REVENGE OF THE GRANDIOSE MENDICANT

         And perhaps that is also why the later behavior of Damien Jampa is so difficult to interpret simply as an isolated personal dispute. By 2024–25, it may have emerged from an environment that was already psychologically unstable, institutionally weakened, and increasingly conscious of the possibility that the separate pieces of its history could eventually be assembled into one coherent narrative.

         DEPENDENT ORIGINATION MEANS CAUSAL RECIPROCITY:
         SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY AS THE REAL THREAT

         If that hypothesis is correct, then the central fear may not have been one specific allegation or one particular investigator. It may have been connectivity itself. Once names, projects, institutions, dates, technical activities, and interpersonal histories can all be connected, the old strategy of compartmentalization becomes much less effective.

         THE STORMS ON THE HORIZON:
         THE COLLAPSE BEFORE THE COLLAPSE

         The collapse of Dharma Sagar and Ngawang Trinley’s previous position in 2024–25 therefore matters far beyond the disappearance of one translation training project. It appears to mark the point at which several different forms of capital began failing simultaneously: financial viability, institutional legitimacy, social cohesion, and confidence in the leadership.

         THE SEPTIC SYNDICATE SHALL BE SCATTERED ALL OVER THIS EARTH:
         THE TIGHT NETWORK BECOMES A COLLECTION OF DISPERSED INDIVIDUALS

         Once those forms of capital begin disappearing, the remaining members no longer have identical interests. The technical people want to preserve their careers. The pragmatists want to distance themselves. The ideological participants may want to preserve their old loyalties. Those who felt exploited may quietly resent the people at the top. Those most directly implicated may have the strongest incentive to maintain silence.

         That is how a tightly integrated network becomes a collection of individuals.

         HASTENING THEIR OWN DEMISE:
         THE FINAL IRONY

         That leaves an extraordinary irony at the end of this story. The apparent attempts to suppress scrutiny seem to have produced more intense scrutiny. The efforts to keep controversies hidden seem to have encouraged people to assemble the chronology. The efforts to preserve reputation seem to have generated additional public material about how bad their reputation really was.

         Perhaps that is ultimately the most useful way to understand the apparent collapse of this network. Not as one dramatic event, and not as the work of one person, but as the cumulative failure of a system that seems to have become increasingly dependent upon secrecy, social control, institutional prestige, mutual protection, and the brutal targeting of dissenters and critics.

         By 2023–24, that system may already have been substantially damaged. By the time the later harassment campaigns against Adele Tomlin emerged in 2025–26, the underlying problem may therefore have been much larger than any one dispute. It may have been the dawning realization that the old world of the network was disappearing, while the documentary record of how it had operated was becoming increasingly enduring.

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      3. Yet you seem to leave off the radar the prime suspects of the smear campaign, online impersonation and bullying and stalking, which are SNR and those connected to him. This has been an ongoing campaign against me and my work and reputation since 2020. Particularly on Facebook.

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9. THE SEPTIC SYNDICATE’S INHERITED CULT PLAYBOOK:
   UNMASKING THE SHOCKING ORIGINS OF THE DAMIEN/NT NETWORK
   For Ngawang Trinley (NT), Helios Hildt, and by extension Damien Jampa (who also grew up in a tightknit Tibetan Buddhist community in France), seeing their operational behavior linked directly to the OKC (Ogyen Kunzang Chöling) Robert Spatz cult background is a profoundly destabilizing realization. When individuals grow up inside a high-control, abusive system, those dysfunctional patterns become their baseline. They rarely recognize that they have internalized the exact mechanisms of their own abusers until someone outside the system holds up an unvarnished mirror.
   To understand why the Damien/NT Syndicate is so destructive, one has to look at what the Ogyen Kunzang Chöling (OKC) setup under Robert Spatz actually was. Operating primarily out of European centers, OKC functioned as a textbook high-control authoritarian environment where absolute psychological dominance, severe emotional manipulation, and total subordination to the leader were masked as advanced Vajrayana practice. Members—especially children and young people raised within its insular compounds—were subjected to rigid behavioral policing, systematic isolation from normal societal support structures, sexual abuse, and intense public humiliation rituals designed to break down individual autonomy and create absolute dependency.
   When individuals grow up marinated in that kind of toxic ecosystem, the abuse doesn’t just disappear when they leave; it becomes their internalized blueprint for how power, community, and conflict are managed. They learn to view the world through a paranoid, us-versus-them lens where dissent is treated as a treasonous threat, and where control must be maintained through gaslighting, covert punishment, and tribal shunning. That is why the Damien/NT network’s modern operations look less like a legitimate Buddhist institute and more like a scaled-down, micro-cult replica: they simply dusted off the old Spatz operating system, swapped out the framing, and kept the exact same authoritarian mechanics alive.
   The shock of this revelation hits on a few fundamental levels:
   1. From Robert Spatz to Sherab Ling: The Unaddressed Roots of a Digital Cartel
   First, it completely shatters the illusion of spiritual and personal progress. NT and Helios spent their adult lives trying to curate reputations as sophisticated, cutting-edge, highly ethical modern Dharma operators, carefully distancing themselves from the overt madness of the old OKC/Spatz cult. Yet their trajectory proves that despite swapping the scenery from France to India, and trading Ogyen Kunzang Chöling for Sherab Ling, they simply cloned the behavioral software of the cult they fled. Realizing that their standard tactics for handling dissent—public shunning, group gaslighting, and intense peer pressure—are functionally identical to Spatz’s old humiliation rituals destroys any lingering self-image of being pure practitioner-scholars. It forces them to confront the grim reality that they became the very thing that harmed them.
   2. Swapping Masters, Keeping the Cult: The Psychological Origins of the Syndicate
   Second, it completely disarms their core justification. For over a decade, whenever they ran a social freeze-out or an aggressive ideological enforcement campaign, they justified it to themselves through self-righteous window dressing like “protecting the lineage” or “preserving the tradition”. By framing their actions as an inherited cult operating system, that holy veneer is instantly stripped away. It exposes their behavior not as high-minded spiritual devotion, but as raw, unhealed developmental trauma being weaponized against others. Seeing their petty holy wars re-classified as a clinical cycle of institutional abuse is an ego-shattering blow.
   3. From Cult to Cartel: The Inherited Operating System of the Damien/NT Syndicate
   Finally, it explains the mystery of their institutional rejection. For the past few years, they’ve likely been scratching their heads, blaming petty politics or jealous rivals for why premier institutions such as the Khyentse Foundation, the Kumarajiva Project, Monlam AI, and major digital resource centers like the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) have quietly severed ties with them, and in some cases even scrubbed them entirely from their websites (such as the complete purging of Helios and Dani’s Dharma Sagara translation training program for Spanish and Portuguese speakers). The OKC connection provides the definitive answer: modern, professional secular organizations can spot high-control cult mechanics a mile away. Foundations didn’t drop them over a minor translation disagreement; they dropped them because the family business model—defined by underpaid labor exploitation, clannish insulation, domestic dysfunction, aggressive status-positioning, and covert illegal operations—looked entirely like a mini-cult operation or a nepotistic, extractive cartel.
   4. Weapons of Unhealed Trauma: Diagnosing the Real Mechanics Behind the Damien/NT Syndicate
   By tracing their operational playbook back to its traumatic roots in France, it diagnoses their entire psychology, exposing the fact that the digital graveyard they built for themselves wasn’t the work of outside enemies, but the inevitable fallout of their own unaddressed ghosts.
   After 16+ years of projecting their unresolved trauma onto others on a massive scale in the name of Buddhism and Tibetan culture, the bills are finally due.

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   Reply

   1. Yes but instead of posting all this here, which will get lost in the comments why not produce a stand alone website for your opinions about these individuals, in particular its connection to the Delhi court case, cyberstalking and bullying of myself in person and online. Perhaps you should create a Github repository which seems to be impossible to takedown without a formal court order.

      The main thing in relation to the Github and Youtube website is the author. It is important to reveal the author’s identity. That would be the main benefit of bringing a court order against Github for hosting the defamatory, obsessive and hysterical material, which speaks for itself to those who actually have some discerning intelligence, and not just looking for an online blog to support their “hate” and loathing of me. Hence its bizarre (and laughable if not so serious) appearance as “evidence” in the ex parte Delhi case, which still shows no sign of allowing any response or defence on the court record until and unless an expensive Indian lawyer is hired, who will bypass the HC court registry continual blocking for “defects” in filig/formatting, even when the defects are cured, new ones are then cited.

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      Reply

10. THE SEPTIC SYNDICATE’S INHERITED CULT PLAYBOOK:
    UNMASKING THE SHOCKING ORIGINS OF THE DAMIEN/NT NETWORK

    Ngawang Trinley (Vincent Tenzing Zangpo Hildt) and his older brother, Helios Drupchen Dorje Hildt, grew up as children within the highly insular environment of Ogyen Kunzang Chöling (OKC), the Tibetan Buddhist organization founded and led by Robert Spatz. Their formative years therefore unfolded within a community that has since been the subject of extensive allegations and legal scrutiny concerning authoritarian control, psychological manipulation, sexual abuse, and other forms of mistreatment.

    When individuals grow up inside a high-control, abusive system, those dysfunctional patterns can become their baseline. The mechanisms through which authority, loyalty, dissent, punishment, and social belonging are organized can become deeply internalized long before an individual is old enough to critically evaluate them. They may consequently reproduce aspects of those same patterns later in life, not necessarily consciously, and not necessarily in precisely the same form, but through an inherited model of how power, community, and conflict are supposed to work.

    This is what makes the apparent parallels between the OKC/Spatz environment and the later operational behavior associated with the Damien/NT network so disturbing. The question is not simply whether individuals escaped one abusive institution only to create another. The deeper question is whether the underlying operating system of a high-control community can survive the collapse of the original institution, the replacement of its leaders, and even the adoption of entirely different religious, professional, and institutional identities.

    Once viewed through that lens, behaviors that might otherwise appear to be isolated incidents, such as social exclusion, loyalty enforcement, shunning of dissenters, reputational attacks, rigid in-group boundaries, and the use of institutional or spiritual authority to control interpersonal relationships, can potentially be understood as manifestations of a much older and deeper pattern.

    To understand why the Damien Jampa/Ngawang Trinley Syndicate is so destructive, one has to look at what the Ogyen Kunzang Chöling (OKC) setup under Robert Spatz actually was. Operating primarily out of European centers, OKC has been characterized as a high-control authoritarian environment in which psychological dominance, severe emotional manipulation, and subordination to the leader were presented as advanced Vajrayana practice. Members, especially children and young people raised within its insular compounds, were reportedly subjected to rigid behavioral policing, isolation from normal societal support structures, sexual abuse, and intense public humiliation rituals designed to break down individual autonomy and create dependency.

    When individuals grow up marinated in that kind of toxic ecosystem, the abuse does not simply disappear when they leave. It can become an internalized blueprint for how power, community, and conflict are managed. They may learn to view the world through a paranoid, us-versus-them lens in which dissent is treated as a treasonous threat and control is maintained through gaslighting, covert punishment, and tribal shunning. That is why, from this perspective, the Damien/NT network’s modern operations can look less like a legitimate Buddhist institute and more like a scaled-down micro-cult replica. They simply dusted off the old Spatz operating system, swapped out the framing, and kept many of the same authoritarian mechanics alive.

    The implications of this revelation hit on a few fundamental levels:

    1. From Robert Spatz to Sherab Ling to Esukhia and Beyond:
    The Unaddressed Roots of a Digital Cartel

    First, it completely shatters the illusion of spiritual and personal progress. NT and Helios spent their adult lives trying to curate reputations as sophisticated, cutting-edge, highly ethical modern Dharma operators, carefully distancing themselves from the overt dysfunction of the old OKC/Spatz cult. Yet their trajectory, as critics might argue, suggests that despite swapping the scenery from France to India, and trading Ogyen Kunzang Chöling for Sherab Ling, they may have reproduced some of the behavioral patterns of the cult they left behind.

    Realizing that their standard tactics for handling dissent, including public shunning, group gaslighting, and intense peer pressure, could be functionally similar to Spatz’s alleged humiliation rituals destroys any lingering self-image of being pure practitioner-scholars. It forces them to confront the grim possibility that they became, in some respects, the very thing that harmed them.

    2. Swapping Masters, Keeping the Cult:
    The Psychological Origins of the Syndicate

    Second, it completely disarms their core justification. For over a decade, whenever they ran a social freeze-out or an aggressive ideological enforcement campaign, they could justify it to themselves through self-righteous window dressing like “protecting the lineage” or “preserving the tradition.”

    By framing their actions as an inherited cult operating system, that holy veneer is instantly stripped away. It exposes their behavior not as high-minded spiritual devotion, but potentially as raw, unhealed developmental trauma being weaponized against others. Seeing their petty holy wars reclassified as part of a clinical cycle of institutional abuse is an ego-shattering blow.

    3. From Cult to Cartel:
    The Inherited Operating System of the Damien/NT Syndicate

    Finally, it explains the mystery of their institutional rejection. For the past few years, they have likely been blaming petty politics or jealous rivals for why premier institutions such as the Khyentse Foundation, the Kumarajiva Project, Monlam AI, and major initiatives like the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) have apparently severed ties with them and, in some cases, even scrubbed them entirely from their websites, such as the alleged complete purging of Helios and Dani’s Dharma Sagar translation training program for Spanish and Portuguese speakers.

    The OKC connection provides, from this perspective, a possible answer: modern, professional secular organizations may be able to spot high-control cult mechanics a mile away. Foundations did not necessarily drop them over a minor translation disagreement. They may have dropped them because the family-business model, defined by underpaid labor exploitation, clannish insulation, domestic dysfunction, aggressive status-positioning, aggressive social and professional exclusion, and alleged covert illegal operations, looked entirely like a mini-cult operation or a nepotistic, extractive cartel.

    4. Weapons of Unhealed Trauma:
    Diagnosing the Real Mechanics Behind the Damien/NT Syndicate

    By tracing their operational playbook back to its traumatic roots in France, it becomes possible to examine what may lie behind their institutional behavior, exposing the possibility that the digital cage they built for themselves was not the work of outside enemies, but the inevitable fallout of their own unaddressed ghosts.

    This is where a Jungian analysis becomes particularly useful. Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow describes those aspects of the personality that an individual, family, or community cannot, or will not, consciously acknowledge. The Shadow does not disappear simply because it is rejected. On the contrary, what is disowned tends to return indirectly, often through projection. The individual sees in others the qualities, motives, and behaviors that they cannot recognize within themselves.

    At the collective level, the same mechanism can operate within institutions. A community that defines itself as spiritually pure, ethically superior, or uniquely devoted to the preservation of a sacred tradition may have enormous difficulty acknowledging its own capacity for coercion, cruelty, exclusion, or abuse. Those qualities therefore become projected outward. The “enemy” becomes authoritarian. The dissenter becomes malicious. The critic becomes jealous. The outsider becomes spiritually corrupt. The institution can then preserve its idealized self-image precisely by locating everything unacceptable in someone else.

    This creates a particularly dangerous psychological feedback loop:

    What cannot be integrated internally is projected outward. What is projected outward becomes the justification for defensive action. That defensive action produces conflict.
    The resulting conflict is then interpreted as proof that the original projection was correct.
    In this sense, projection becomes self-validating.

    The relevance to high-control religious environments is obvious. When spiritual identity becomes fused with institutional identity, criticism of the institution can begin to feel like an attack on the Dharma itself. Defending the organization therefore becomes psychologically indistinguishable from defending truth, lineage, morality, or one’s own spiritual identity. Ordinary interpersonal conflicts are elevated into sacred struggles. Social exclusion becomes “protecting the community.” Retaliation becomes “preserving the lineage.” Suppression of dissent becomes “maintaining the integrity of the teachings.”

    This is one reason why inherited authoritarian patterns can be so difficult to recognize from within. The person reproducing the mechanism may sincerely believe that they are doing the opposite of what their abusers did. They may believe that they are protecting people from abuse, defending an endangered tradition, or preventing corruption. Yet if the underlying mechanism remains one of coercive control, the moral vocabulary surrounding it does not fundamentally change its psychological structure.

    Jung’s concept of enactment through projection therefore offers a useful interpretive lens. What has not been psychologically integrated may be repeatedly recreated in the external world. The victim of authoritarianism can, without consciously intending to, become an authoritarian toward others. The person who was once excluded can become the gatekeeper who excludes. The person who experienced humiliation can become the person who publicly humiliates. The person who was taught that dissent was dangerous can come to regard dissenters as dangerous.

    This does not mean that trauma mechanically produces abusive behavior. Most people who experience trauma do not go on to reproduce it. Nor does a traumatic background excuse subsequent misconduct. The point is more unsettling: unprocessed trauma can provide a psychological template, but individuals and institutions remain responsible for what they do with that template.

    There is another Jungian concept that becomes relevant here: individuation. For Jung, psychological maturation involves differentiating oneself from inherited identities and making the unconscious conscious. One does not achieve psychological freedom simply by escaping an old environment. One must also examine the internal structures that environment left behind.

    That distinction is crucial. Leaving France does not necessarily mean leaving OKC psychologically. Changing teachers does not necessarily mean changing one’s relationship to authority. Moving from one institution to another does not necessarily mean escaping an inherited institutional culture. And replacing one vocabulary of religious legitimacy with another does not necessarily transform the underlying psychology of power.

    The deeper task is integration: recognizing what was inherited, identifying what was harmful, separating one’s own values from those imposed by the group, and consciously refusing to reproduce mechanisms that once caused suffering. Without that process, liberation can become strangely paradoxical. One can leave the original prison while carrying its architecture internally.

    5. The Shadow Made Institutional:
    How the Pattern Reappears in the Damien/NT Network

    The preceding analysis is not merely an abstract psychological exercise. It becomes considerably more disturbing when the theoretical framework is placed alongside the concrete behavior associated with the Damien/NT network over the past several years.

    We see a broader pattern around the Syndicate involving tightly bounded social networks, the policing of loyalty and belonging, the treatment of dissent as hostility, the use of reputation and social standing as instruments of control, the exclusion or shunning of perceived opponents, and the mobilization of institutional or religious authority against individuals who challenge the group’s preferred narrative.

    The significance of these behaviors lies not in any single incident considered in isolation, but in their structural resemblance to the mechanisms described earlier.

    This is where the Jungian concept of the Shadow becomes particularly revealing. If the original environment taught that outsiders, dissenters, critics, or insufficiently loyal members were dangerous, then the later reproduction of those same categories can occur even after the original authority structure has disappeared. The names change. The institutions change. The rhetoric changes. But the psychological grammar remains remarkably familiar.

    In the case of this particular group, the apparent pattern is particularly striking because the network presents itself through the language of scholarship, translation, technology, Tibetan cultural preservation, and modern Dharma education. These are, on their face, radically different from the overtly authoritarian imagery associated with the old OKC environment.

    But that is precisely what makes the question interesting. A high-control system does not have to reproduce its original aesthetics in order to reproduce its underlying mechanics.

    A modern digital organization can be informal rather than monastic. It can operate through websites, translation projects, online courses, messaging groups, social networks, and professional collaborations rather than through a physical compound. It can speak the language of open-source scholarship, technological innovation, secular professionalism, and Buddhist preservation while still developing highly restrictive norms around loyalty, criticism, access, and belonging. In that sense, the micro-cult of the digital age does not necessarily look like a traditional cult. It may look like a professional network.

    The central question is therefore not whether the Damien/NT Syndicate literally reproduces OKC in every respect. It plainly does not. The more interesting question is whether certain relational mechanisms have been carried forward: who is allowed inside, who is pushed outside, whose account of events is considered legitimate, how dissent is interpreted, how reputational threats are dealt with, and how group members are encouraged to understand outsiders.

    This is where the distinction between content and structure becomes essential. The content may be Buddhism, Tibetan language technology, translation, digital preservation, or education. The structure concerns something else entirely: how power moves through the network. A group can therefore be radically different from its predecessor in doctrine, technology, geography, and public image while nevertheless retaining recognizable patterns of social control.

    And the role of Damien Jampa appears to be somewhat different from that of NT and Helios. The connection is less about suggesting that Damien emerged directly from the same childhood environment of the Spatz cult, as he did not, and more about examining the way he appears to have participated in, or become embedded within, a later network whose social dynamics seem to exhibit some of the same characteristics.

    The result is a disturbing possibility: the original trauma may no longer need the original institution in order to reproduce itself.

    It can reproduce itself through relationships. It can reproduce itself through professional networks. It can reproduce itself through loyalty structures. It can reproduce itself through narratives about enemies. It can reproduce itself through the social exclusion of people who refuse to conform. And, most ironically of all, it can reproduce itself through people who sincerely believe that they are building something completely different.

    This is perhaps the deepest meaning of the inherited “cult operating system.” The system does not survive because everyone consciously agrees to recreate it. It survives because its assumptions have become normalized. Once normalized, coercive behavior no longer necessarily feels coercive to the people practicing it. Exclusion feels like discernment. Group pressure feels like consensus. Reputation management feels like protecting the Dharma. Suppressing inconvenient information feels like preventing harm. And attacking a critic can feel like defending innocent people from an enemy.

    The psychological transformation is therefore complete when the mechanism disappears from conscious awareness while remaining fully operational in practice. That is the real danger of unintegrated institutional trauma: the victim can become the custodian of the very architecture from which they once needed liberation.

    And if that is what has happened here, then the most consequential question is not whether the Damien/NT network is “a cult” in some literal or sociological sense. The more important question is whether it has reproduced cultic mechanisms while acquiring the appearance of something entirely different.

    That is a question that can be examined empirically. Who gets excluded? Who gets believed? Who gets protected? Who gets silenced? Who controls access? Who defines the enemy? And, above all, what happens to the person who refuses to play along?

    6. The Viral Transmission of Institutional Culture:
    When the Cult Outlives the Cult

    The really disturbing possibility is that the story does not end with NT and Helios or even Damien themselves. Based on many years of observation, it appears that patterns resembling the toxic dynamics and harmful interpersonal behaviors associated with the Spatz cult may have propagated outward through a much larger social network of people connected with Damien Jampa, Ngawang Trinley, and Helios Hildt. The number appears to be at least 10 to 12 individuals, and likely considerably more.

    This is where the virus metaphor becomes useful. Institutional cultures can behave in remarkably viral ways. People do not need to have personally experienced the original institution in order to acquire some of its behavioral norms. They can learn them secondhand through the people who were shaped by it. They observe who is rewarded and who is punished. They learn who is considered trustworthy and who is considered dangerous. They learn which narratives are acceptable, which questions are forbidden, which individuals are to be avoided, and what happens when someone breaks ranks.

    Over time, these practices can become detached from their original source. The second generation does not need to know Robert Spatz. The third generation may never have heard the name Ogyen Kunzang Chöling. Yet the social technology can survive. This is how institutional trauma can become cultural transmission.

    A person enters the network without knowing its history. They encounter an established set of assumptions about certain people. They are taught, explicitly or implicitly, who the enemies are. They observe members being excluded or attacked. They learn that loyalty brings belonging while dissent carries social costs. Eventually, they begin reproducing the same behaviors themselves. At that point, the original institution has become almost irrelevant. The pattern has become autonomous.

    This is perhaps the most disturbing possibility raised by the entire analysis. The real legacy of a high-control institution may not be the survival of its formal organization. It may be the transmission of its relational habits into subsequent generations of people who never belonged to it. The cult can therefore outlive the cult.

    Its buildings can disappear. Its leadership can change. Its terminology can change. Its religious affiliations can change. Its technological infrastructure can change. But the social operating system can remain.

    And once that operating system has migrated into a sufficiently large network, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify its original source. What began as the internal culture of one organization can eventually appear to be a collection of independent personalities making independent choices.

    That is why examining the network as a system is so important. The relevant question is not simply, “Who did what to whom?”. It is also: What behaviors are repeatedly rewarded? What behaviors are repeatedly punished? What narratives bind the group together? What happens to people who challenge those narratives? How are outsiders represented? How is loyalty demonstrated? How is dissent interpreted?

    And how much of this behavior can be traced back, directly or indirectly, to an inherited institutional culture? If the same relational patterns appear repeatedly across a network of otherwise different individuals, then the phenomenon may be larger than any one personality conflict. It may be cultural transmission. And that makes the question considerably more serious.

    After 16+ years of projecting unresolved trauma onto others on a massive scale in the name of Buddhism and Tibetan culture, the bills are finally due.

    The ultimate irony is that their external “enemies” may never have been the real problem. The real adversary may have been the unexamined inheritance carried forward from one institutional environment into the next.

    The cultish cage was rebuilt from the inside. But what is built from the inside can also be dismantled from the inside.

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11. The Scale of the Farce: A Metric of Absurdity within the Ranks of the Septic Syndicate

    To look closely at the consolidated metrics of the ‘Septic Syndicate’ is to witness a profound transition from self-appointed institutional gatekeeping into absolute and unmitigated farcical absurdity. When independent platforms dismantle their carefully curated personas, what remains is not an elite review board, but a deeply fragile, hyper-defensive collection of insecure actors whose individual levels of ridiculousness can be measured as follows.

    Damien Jampa [99% Ridiculous]: The “grandiose mendicant” from France operating from a place of deep-seated intellectual insecurity. Despite still lacking substantial published translation work and a single semester of academic study in Buddhist or Tibetan Studies, he has long dared to act as the supreme arbiter of translation quality and doctrinal standards simply on the basis of his traditional monastic curriculum at Sherab Ling. His panic is comically farcical: he is so utterly terrified of a lone female scholar that he deploys cross-border “international strike teams” and expensive court maneuvers in Delhi to flee a narrative he can no longer control. Within the unsavory history of the Syndicate, he is not only the “source code” and ideological foundation but also the administrative and political counterpart to NT: the person responsible for converting personal disputes into institutional pressure, gatekeeping, social freeze-outs, and coordinated enforcement against his perceived rivals. The most spectacular escalation allegedly came much later in 2026, when “emergency” legal injunctions in Delhi were pushed forward in the absence of the targeted whistleblowers by weaponizing “bozo lawsuits” against Adele Tomlin, an episode portrayed by critics as an extraordinary attempt to manipulate legal mechanisms in order to shield a controversial monastic leadership from scrutiny. His “international strike teams” are particularly comic because they transform what should have been a manageable interpersonal or intellectual dispute into something resembling a multinational counterinsurgency operation. The more expansive the machinery becomes, the more conspicuous the underlying insecurity appears. A 16-year record of alleged whisper campaigns, professional exclusions, and internal backbiting has now been placed into a persistent public archive, meaning that the old strategy of simply controlling who heard which version of events is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

    Ngawang Trinley (NT) [95% Ridiculous]: The ultimate “false tech Messiah” from the OKC cult in France. He weaponizes digital humanities jargon and AI applications to mask a low-wage, text-processing “Tibetan sweatshop” model to secure significant grants from international funding bodies. The crowning absurdity is that his unstable datasets routinely fail baseline audits of legal compliance, leaving him frantically spinning up virtual shell companies in Pune because major international foundations have systematically blacklisted his illegal data-scraping practices. His broader operational model involves a network of entities including OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org, and Dharmaduta, relying heavily on low-wage, non-contract Tibetan labor and production quotas. The irony is that a largely uneducated man presenting himself as a cutting edge, bilingual technological innovator reportedly found himself progressively cut off from precisely the ecosystem of established Buddhist institutions on which his legitimacy depended, with relationships with organizations such as the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) and Monlam AI reportedly fracturing amid data-scraping, copyright infringement, and intellectual property disputes. A major rupture involving his ex-wife Jennifer Yo, the director of the Kumarajiva Project in Taiwan, appears to have contributed to the forced relocation of his operations toward Pune in India. Meanwhile, the emergence of anonymous digital infrastructure—including incriminating public GitHub repositories—has generated further scrutiny of the technical side of his backroom operations involving shadowy operators such as his brother Helios Hildt (Drupchen Dorje). The result is the ultimate technological paradox: the self-styled digital infrastructure appears increasingly less like an unstoppable institutional empire and more like an increasingly precarious collection of side hustles, misleading aliases, and emergency salvage operations for a formerly respected figure who is now widely distrusted.

    Helios Hildt [90% Ridiculous]: A perpetually submissive yet poisonously bitter brother-sidekick to Ngawang Trinley, likewise from the OKC cult in France. He privately rants about NT’s overbearing management behind closed doors yet remains entirely dependent on his brother’s collapsing apparatus. His desperate attempts at financial extortion against peers and cult-like pressure on independent professionals completely backfired, rendering his career effectively defunct. His role becomes particularly revealing in relation to Dharma Sagar, the Spanish- and Portuguese-language Tibetan translation training project backed by the Khyentse Foundation. According to the allegations summarized in the recent commentary, Helios Hildt and Daniela Vargas were responsible for an increasingly hostile and dysfunctional management environment surrounding a program originally supported as a prestigious five-year initiative, yet which terminated in April 2024 after only about two years. The alleged removal of their presence from Khyentse Foundation-related sites and the subsequent disappearance of most of the project’s footprint only intensified the impression of institutional expulsion and purging. Helios therefore occupies a peculiarly ridiculous position: simultaneously presented as part of the technical and administrative machinery behind a major digital humanities ecosystem while remaining structurally subordinate to his older brother. The “shadow muscle” cannot escape his own shadow.

    Daniela Vargas [87% Ridiculous]: An incompetent and unqualified wannabe bigshot from Brazil, who previously masqueraded as an ethical leader and modern administrator for numerous high-profile Buddhist organizations. While publicly projecting a progressive public ethos, her allegedly authoritarian and toxic managerial tactics managed to tank Dharma Sagar—a prestigious 5-year grant—in just over two years, resulting in her entire professional footprint being systematically scrubbed by funders. The Dharma Sagar episode is especially damaging to the cultivated image of socially conscious administration because the project was not some insignificant side venture: it was a multi-year translation-training initiative aimed at Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking practitioners and supported by the Khyentse Foundation. Its abrupt termination in 2024 therefore becomes a miniature case study in institutional self-destruction. The alleged combination of cutthroat and dangerously hostile dynamics appears to be the exact opposite of the liberal, progressive organizational ethos being publicly projected on her social media presence. The final indignity is the disappearance and systematic scrubbing of the professional footprint associated with the Dharma Sagar project, transforming what was supposed to be a flagship institutional success into something resembling an embarrassing archival residue.

    Eugene Romaniuk [85% Ridiculous]: A fanatical, proudly stubborn Syndicate loyalist and tribal Esukhia hall-monitor from Australia who effectively excommunicated himself into total social and professional irrelevance in Thailand. Having pioneered the Syndicate’s rigid “ghosting and blocking” humiliation rituals over trivial friction in 2014, his obsession with policing others over minor interpersonal disputes led to his own total decay, leaving him completely isolated in Southeast Asia and entirely detached from the broader field of Tibetan studies. Eugene represents the earliest operational template for what later became a much more elaborate culture of exclusion: block first, investigate later; convert interpersonal disagreement into moral judgment; and treat social access as a mechanism of disciplinary control. The irony is almost perfect. The person who helped establish the rules of brutal social exclusion towards his long-term friends and colleagues ultimately became increasingly excluded from the social world himself. What once functioned as an instrument of power therefore became a mechanism of self-isolation. Eugene is less dangerous because of institutional authority than because he represents the ideological enforcement mechanism of extreme cult-like behavior in the Syndicate: the person who makes a morally corrupt clique’s rules feel absolute and unyielding, even when the underlying dispute is ultimately trivial and alarmingly petty.

    Evan Yerburgh [80% Ridiculous]: A pitiable “Sherab Ling clone” utilized as a compliant digital slave to Ngawang Trinley’s unhinged ego, seemingly stuck in a time-capsule from 2014. After a decade of complete professional inactivity in the field of Tibetan studies, during which he remained hunkered down in Thailand with Eugene Romaniuk in what amounted to a mutual pact of absolute social isolation, he resurfaced as a clueless ghost—easily manipulated by Ngawang Trinley into fronting NT’s latest flurry of failing technical startups, while remaining completely blind to the systemic malpractice and mounting controversy surrounding him. His “teaming up” with OpenPecha and WeBuddhist in 2025–2026 is particularly absurd because it places a person who had effectively disappeared from the relevant professional ecosystem of Tibetan Buddhism for over a decade back into an environment that had changed dramatically during his absence. Rather than returning as an independent authority, he is someone whose familiarity with the old Esukhia-era ecosystem made him particularly useful as a nostalgic administrative frontman for NT’s virtual shell companies. He represents an older version of the network being reanimated after its institutional foundations had already begun to deteriorate in 2023–25. His apparent lack of awareness of the newer allegations and conflicts only makes the spectacle all the more surreal.

    James Bradwell [75% Ridiculous]: A volatile religious fundamentalist from the American Deep South with a near-total lack of substantial output, who retreated into near-total social isolation in India post-2014. He operated as a constant institutional liability whose persistent temper tantrums had to be aggressively covered up through structural gaslighting of his victims. Having thrown away his considerable intellectual potential just to “kiss the ring” of a toxic Boys’ Club, his role in the wider chronology of the Syndicate is therefore that of an aggressive ideological enforcer rather than a principal architect, apparently utilized as a kind of “attack dog” to carry out the rigid social hierarchy of the Syndicate, someone whose value to the system derived less from independent scholarly production than from his seeming loyalty to the “concept” of the group and his willingness to participate in overtly hostile actions towards its perceived critics. The resulting spectacle is particularly pathetic because the alleged bargain appears so one-sided: he sacrificed intellectual and professional independence in exchange for membership in a hierarchy that never actually provided him with any recognition, nor the career development he might have achieved independently. He represents a peripheral loyalist: an “angry puppy” who disastrously mistook proximity to religious power for possessing legitimate authority himself. Eventually ending up as a total dropout on endless “retreat” in Tso Pema while supposedly married to an Indian woman from Delhi, his current whereabouts remain unknown.

    Justin Kirkwood [67% Ridiculous]: A two-faced, cowardly brand protectionist and dogmatic frontman for the Damien/NT Syndicate from the American Midwest. While disingenuously projecting an aura of high-minded Buddhist altruism and deep scholarship at Namchak, his entire career was actually built on favoritism, status-positioning, credential inflation, gaslighting, and backstabbing. He is now reduced to a transparent, sweating game of quiet distancing to keep his current employers at Namchak from discovering his troubled history and what he was really doing in India during his less-than 7-year stay, which he falsely portrays as “8 years” on his public profiles (which also contain verifiably exaggerated claims about his retreats in Tso Pema). His significance lies precisely in this ‘middle-management’ position: unlike NT or Damien, he does not need to be the central architect of anything. His function was to normalize, rationalize, and intellectually sanitize what the more aggressive members of the network were doing. In the embarrassing chronology of the Syndicate, Justin Kirkwood represents the institutional pragmatist who understood the toxic internal dynamics of unscrupulous and controversial figures such as Damien, NT, and James well enough to know when to distance himself without necessarily confronting them or siding with their victims. His current professional positioning therefore creates a peculiar vulnerability. The strategy of quiet distancing works only so long as the past remains fragmented and forgotten. Once a persistent archive consolidates the disturbing chronology, however, his flimsy rationalizations become considerably harder to maintain. The misleading image of compassion and equanimity he publicly cultivates becomes the thing most exposed to retrospective scrutiny.

    Sean Griffin [66% Ridiculous]: A submissive, passive-aggressive older bully from California. Despite being decades older than his Western peers in India (born 1963), he displayed the emotional maturity of an insecure teenager, executing demeaning personal attacks whenever group pressure mounted, just to secure fleeting social validation. Now handling his shameful past complicity by sticking his head firmly in the sand, his position is especially revealing because it demonstrates how a system can reproduce itself without every participant being a major strategist or particularly active member. Sean Griffin did not need to possess the technical infrastructure of NT or the administrative machinery of Damien. He merely needed to become sufficiently invested in the group identity that attacking the ‘scapegoats’ became a means of maintaining his own place inside it. The result is the classic psychology of the peripheral enforcer: the older participant who should theoretically possess the independence and moral backbone to resist peer pressure instead behaving as though acceptance by a transitory group of Western men in India, 13 to 23 years younger than him, were the ultimate prize. His current silence therefore reads less like a principled stance than a doomed attempt to wait out a well-known sordid history that is unlikely to disappear. Like James and Eugene, he is categorized as one of the “total dropouts” from the field of Tibetan studies who, in the years following the physical dispersal of the Syndicate from India in 2016, almost entirely disappeared from public view.

    Matthias Staber [50% Ridiculous]: The calculating and opportunistic “academic bystander” from Austria. While least overtly dangerous, his complete lack of professional ethics is clear: he recognized the omnidirectional bullying, implicit misogyny, neurotic competition, and systematic corruption of NT, Damien, and the rest of the Syndicate years ago, yet chose quiet diplomatic compliance to ensure he could take what he could get. Staber is consequently the least ridiculous precisely because he appears the most rational, but that rationality is also what makes his obvious complicity more difficult to excuse. He is not the screaming zealot, the technological authoritarian, the paranoid administrator, or the institutional bully. Instead, he represents the affable intellectual who sees enough to roughly understand what is happening and then decides that maintaining access, contracts, institutional relationships, and social connections is more important than intervening. Within the broader “Syndicate model”, this is arguably the most durable mechanism of all: systems of questionable authority do not survive solely because of their most extreme personalities. They survive because fairly competent, seemingly respectable people decide that the costs of challenging them are higher than the costs of remaining silent in the face of grave injustice.

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12. Legal Actions vs. Public Debate

    Rather than addressing the allegations through public debate, community forums, or substantive rebuttal, the principal figures identified in connection with the alleged campaign against Adele Tomlin—including Damien Jampa (Jampa Dorje) and Titi Dolma—ultimately shifted the confrontation into the Indian legal system, filing an “emergency” case in Delhi in April 2026, subsequently dubbed “Damien’s bozo lawsuit.”

    The most revealing feature is the apparent inversion of the narrative. Rather than addressing the allegations of harassment and intimidation, their legal case reportedly portrays the whistleblower themselves (namely Adele Tomlin) as the one engaged in “stalking,” “harassing,” and disrupting the teachings of lamas such as Gyalton Rinpoche.

    In other words, the alleged targets of harassment become the alleged perpetrators, while those accused of organizing the campaign present themselves as its victims. The gaslighting here is truly “next level”.

    The episode illustrates something larger: when people decline to answer serious accusations through public evidence and instead seek institutional mechanisms to restrict or discredit their critics, the legal response itself becomes part of the controversy.

    What began as a dispute within a relatively closed religious network has therefore now escalated into a struggle over who controls the public narrative—and what happens when that narrative can no longer be controlled informally.

    The old mechanisms of religious gatekeeping and institutionalized harassment have met the internet, and apparently the courtroom is the next battlefield.

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    1. Yes the “gaslighting” is truly “next level”. Also misusing stalking and harassment “emergency” laws to persecute, stalk and harass a lone woman is really “something else” too. To top it all of, citing in that “emergency” an anonymous, derogatory, and defamatory smear campaign website (already banned and removed from website hosts) as “evidence” to support their false emergency and claims against the lone female victim. It would be utterly ridiculous and laughable, were it not true! Truth is stranger (and funnier) than fiction as they say.

       In response to your comment, in my own direct experience and in terms of the filed evidence in the Plaint points a lot more to “Titi Dolma” (Neneng Setiawati) as one of the main people, if not THE main person driving, sharing, gathering and participating in the back-room defamation, private gossip and slander, exclusions and the Delhi fake “emergency” court case and wishing to disrupt and sever my connection with him during all the events I attended.

       Seriously, an admin laywoman I still have never met or spoken to. Her background and connection to Tibetan Buddhism, Palpung, Github repository, the online defamation, to Gyalton Rinpoche and in general, without any public record or note and needs investigating for sure. An unknown person who has caused so much damage….or she was being heavily manipulated to do so by someone else who is keeping anonymous. It is possible that Damien Jampa, or even some of the monks/tulkus involved used her to do their “dirty work” but she basically implicated herself as the main party to it all and it is on record that she did in terms of her emails, messages and the litigation itself, in which she lists herself as one of the main parties to it.

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    2. Please provide a legitimate email address. The one you are using here is not valid and bounces back direct emails. Thank you.

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    3. It seems as if Gyalton R is fully aware of the case, and may have even been behind the scenes driving/steering it. Frankly, it is hard to believe that any Buddhist monk or master would do such a thing, unless greater powers than him have been wanting something like this to happen, e.g. SNR and/or Gelugpa power in exile.

       Please do not forget that the whole thing that “kicked it off” so to speak was Lama Dragpa’s sudden banning letter in which he cites among other various “personal opinions” about White Tara art, a flower garden for the stupa etc. my research and writing on Gelugpa sectarianism and its relation to the Tai Situpa lineage. Showing it was clearly POLITICALLY motivated. They just used the gossip hearsay from Europe (which they provoked with the online smear campaign) to push an “emergency order” through without any defence presented, to push another far more sinister agenda control of the monastic narrative still maintained by the Gelugpa in exile. As well as continue to bully and persecute a woman who outed the misconduct of one of their male teacher friends.

       The Plaint was signed by “Topden” on every page. That is not Gyalton Rinpoche’s name. It is however the name of his father, and/or a person named with Titi Dolma on the Plaint as “Thinley Topden” in the main party contacts for the named Plaintiff, Gyalton R. So basically it is either his father, or that person. Why would Jane Doe sign a Plaint in her name as Emma Smith? There would need to be good reason, and none was provided in this case. Also no power of attorney letter signed by Gyalton R giving “Topden” authority to sign for him. Even the POA for the Indian lawyer was signed by “Topden”. So, if Topden is not Gyalton R, that is actually a serious perjury and fraud on the court, and enough grounds to have it immediately kicked out for perjury and fraud if the named Plaintiff, Gyalton R never saw the Plaint or signed up to it.

       However, even if he did not sign it, he may still have been aware of it, and he certainly should be by now if he was not, right? Yet there has been no attempt by him or his attendants etc. to communicate, mediate, clarify, state it is not him etc. So we have to assume he knew, knows and supports it. Or he cannot distance himself from what those around him have done in his name, as that would then lead those people into serious trouble.

       I did accidentally discover that he had been bad-mouthing and insulting me to others in Indonesia behind my back though, which suggests he may have played a much bigger role in the defamation than people might think. I was shocked to overhear him on a whatsapp message played back to me by an Indonesian organiser I had only just met and who was very friendly and helpful etc, suddenly change his whole expression and opinion of me without any discussion when Gyalton R tells him on a Whatsapp that he played back to me thinking it would be friendly etc. in which he tells the man “she is a trouble-maker”. Yet at no time has Gyalton R ever aid that to me personally, or gave advice or suggestions or reasons why he said that. The Indonesia event with Tai Situpa went well despite that with zero incidents of bullying/harassment etc.

       It is possible that GR was also deeply misled by the online smear campaign website and his associates, as Carlo Luycx (EBU) and others rather stupidly (or maliciously) were. And he may have had lots of pressure from those around him, the admins, the SNR gang, jealous women, his family, parents etc. to completely cut all contact with me, and act like he does not like me and wants nothing more to do with me. All of which have nothing to do with Buddha Dharma, bodhicitta and attaining full awakening.

       Whatever the case, frankly, it is not the speech or conduct of a great Buddhist master, or mahasiddha, or even a kind, courageous, honest human being. It is against the Vinaya of a monk to insult, or speak derogatorily about laypeople to other laypeople that causes them to dislike other laypeople. It also breaches his samaya with me and with women. But regardless of vows, it just is not a very nice thing to do for a male teacher to bad-mouth and insult a lone woman behind her back to other people in that community, particularly other followers or organisers. It not only creates a gang bullying mentality towards her, but potentially threatens her personal safety and privacy, as it did mine.

       One of the reasons I sought an audience with Gyalton R when I was at Sherab Ling in February and March was to ask him personally about these issues, and seek his response and advice. He was totally uncontactable though,as was Tai Situpa, which again is not a great sign. There were not that many foreigners there for the Losar event, and I had taken two plane rides to get there. Others had too. So the level and maturity and openness of communication with the few foreigners attending these events is minimal if not, non-existent.

       In answer to your question though, how can any genuine female follower or student trust a male teacher who is speaking badly about them behind their backs to other people (lay and monastic), yet without speaking to that person themselves?

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       1. Yeah, I hear you. I’m really sorry you had to go through all this.

          As I’ve indicated in all my comments, I’ve always had a very bad impression of the institutional and social culture around Sherab Ling and its monastics, starting with Damien Jampa (AKA Jampa Dorje, surname unknown) and Ngawang Trinley/NT (whose legal name is Vincent Tenzang/Tenzin Zangpo Hildt) as early as late 2009–early 2010. Not to mention all the nonsense with the other Western Sherab Ling ex-monastics from that period, such as Justin Kirkwood, James Bradwell, and Evan Yerburgh, which I’ve documented extensively, along with the general Bir/McLeod Ganj scene at that time, including ethically questionable individuals such as Eugene Romaniuk, Sean Griffin, and Matthias Staber. Later, Ngawang Trinley’s brother and sister-in-law (Helios Hildt/Drupchen Dorje and Dani Karma Yeshe Dawa/Daniela Vargas) also became closely involved in the group’s operations.

          Meanwhile, the real brains behind Esukhia, Dirk Schmidt, remains the only one who is still somewhat respectable (mostly due to being quite passive and low-drama), despite his obvious complicity and apparent willful blindness to a long-standing toxic dynamic with Damien/NT, which has had very harmful effects on many people over the years, including NT’s wife/ex-wife, Jennifer Yo, the director of the Kumarajiva Project, and their two young children.

          This insular, provincial, elitist, dogmatic, pretentious, gatekeeping, and authoritarian culture from Sherab Ling was also directly imported into Esukhia and NT/Damien’s subsequent projects and later spread to an inner circle of many people, including the ten “members” of the “Septic Syndicate” I’ve listed. Although I suspect the real number of people in their inner circle is probably up to twice that, I think it has likely affected hundreds of people over the years, to varying degrees.

          As for Damien Jampa, I do believe he has been quite instrumental in all this, including the lawsuit and all the harassment you faced in Europe and India, mainly based on your own accounts and the records of his behavior, plus some fairly obvious logical inferences, given his institutional position in Sherab Ling in general and with the teaching tours of Gyaltön Rinpoche in particular. He is also a well-known passive-aggressive, egotistical coward and has a long history of doing shady stuff behind people’s backs, both personally and professionally, if he feels even mildly slighted.

          As far back as the beginning of Esukhia in 2012, Damien Jampa was verbally abusing female employees and interviewees in a shockingly aggressive manner, and based on numerous accounts, he was not well-liked among the Tibetan staff from quite early on, especially Tibetan women who had substantial education or a background in monastic Buddhist studies. So, it all lines up with his long-standing pattern of gossip, backbiting, administrative abuse, fairly overt misogyny, and, notably, a long-standing chip on his shoulder against Western translators and scholars of Tibetan Buddhism who threaten his sense of control, authority, or status.

          Unfortunately, it looks like Damien has learned very little over the last 14 years, and based on your accounts, it looks like his behavior has actually become far more severe than it was in the 2010s, and now presents a legitimate danger to those who know him (although I would argue that he was always somewhat dangerous).

          Much the same is true of Ngawang Trinley, who, despite seemingly being more admirable in the past due to his unique endeavors and accomplishments, had by 2023–24 apparently degenerated into an almost absurdly sociopathic figure and borderline con artist, or at least a serial manipulator and habitual liar, as he displayed some shockingly unhinged and deeply problematic behaviors, including potentially illegal actions. This was also explicitly attested and confirmed by Ngawang Trinley’s own family (Jennifer, Dani, and Helios) at the time.

          Regarding Titi Dolma (Neneng Setiawati), I don’t know her at all and obviously don’t have the same longstanding history with her, but your documentation certainly raises serious questions about her role. If she was as directly involved in the communications, exclusions, defamation, and litigation as the evidence you describe indicates, then she clearly deserves much more scrutiny, despite being someone who was previously almost completely unknown publicly.

          As for Gyaltön Rinpoche himself, I think your latest information makes the question of his actual involvement particularly important. As I said in my previous comment, I think there are two fundamentally different possibilities here: either he personally supported the actions taken against you, or his administrators and associates were acting in his name while controlling the information reaching him. Or perhaps some combination. The distinction is indeed important, because those represent very different failures of institutional accountability in relation to an influential lama.

          Either way, the fact that a situation involving a Buddhist teacher, his students, his administrators, and a foreign scholar could deteriorate this badly without direct communication between the relevant parties says something deeply unhealthy about the institutional culture surrounding Sherab Ling Monastery and the Palpung lineage, and the broader Karma Kagyü school, or at least some very significant factions of it, based on everything I’ve experienced personally and according to your published accounts.

          Of course, there have been intense, highly contentious controversies surrounding the Karma Kagyü for quite some time, going back to 1992, which are especially relevant to Tai Situ Rinpoche, Palpung, and Sherab Ling. As for Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche, I believe the negative reports from numerous female students and others who have worked with Benchen are sufficient to paint a very disturbing picture, especially given SNR’s prominence in the tradition.

          Regarding how much of your ongoing dispute with Sangye Nyenpa is connected to the events in 2025–26, although the two are clearly connected to some degree, especially in terms of what caused the harassment in the first place, I would not assume that SNR is directly coordinating it or that he has had any direct involvement in it. From what I can tell, the primary people responsible here are Damien Jampa, Titi Dolma, the Sherab Ling staff, and possibly Gyaltön Rinpoche himself to some extent. However, you would obviously know more about the specific events than I do, so I can only offer my impressions, opinions, and thoughts on that matter.

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       2. Sangye Nyenpa and his enablers NOT involved in it? Highly unlikely. Please remember the online smear and impersonation campaign started in 2020 after and when he was complained about and exposed regarding myself and a couple of other women.

          I was impersonated online many times by people using peusdonyms on FB and contacting people I knew or who supported me in any way.

          Even when I knew SNR he seemed to also be using pseudonym on FB to contact Mr and other women and make us annoyed or upset or jealous etc. Very derogatory messages too. Misogynist and insulting. His family members such as his sister in law wrote false and negative things about me too.

          Also remember this all happened just prior to Tai Situpa and Gyalton R and Mingyur R having a big month long teachings and meeting with SNR as their guest of honour. So the timing of it looks almost pre meditated for that. Let’s silence and character assassinate Adele before the Nepal visit so we can meet him and act like we never enabled misconduct and ignored several women.

          Problem is they underestimated then power of truth and timing and also my legacy and work and effort for Karma Kagyu, the Karmapa and Buddha Dharma in general. It feels like it was a setup now looking back on it. I was very sincere in my heartfelt connection to Gyalton R and was very happy to he able to attend classes with a teacher I felt such a strong and immediate connection with. I had never imagined that people might be setting me up with him to eventually make me look like the “bad guy”.

          The swiftness with which Lama Dragpa a worldly and authoritarian monk who is an administrator issued the banning letter without anybdiscussion after I had been the one harassed twice by a fellow survivor of SNR who let me swim with the sharks alone after her complaint fell on deaf ears with TSR and MR, and then proh3cted her guilt and loathing onto me as the issue says it all. So I was the one who was harassed and insulted and demonised while staying there and yet I was the one punished for telling them about that.

          Sorry but it’s not a kind ot friendly community at all. Two faced, gossipy, no leadership,enabling abuse of women for years, cruel, uncommunicative, immature and sexist . I spent one month there and could not find even one Khenpo to speak about the Collected Works of 8th Tai Situpa hidden away in a cupboard collecting dust. I produced the first translation of the Collected Works outline in English and photographed the title pages of the package texts to an acadmi3c level. As well as other Dharma activities while there. Yet not one person in that community showd any interest or appreciation at any time. How come it took 40 years of their being in exile for an English translation of that?
          Also as I wrote about the meat eating at the restaurant on the monastery grounds and next to the main temple showed there was major Vinaya and samaya breaking with 17th Karmapa going on there too. Xruel
          Cruel and lacking real love and compassion for themselves or others.

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13. Oh yeah, sure, of course, Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche and his people were involved in the broader situation. I just don’t think they were actively dictating the actions of Damien Jampa, Titi Dolma, etc. There is no evidence for that. Were the conflicts with SNR part of the pretext or background for the whole thing? Almost certainly. But that is different from saying SNR was pulling the strings behind all of this.

    And just to be clear, this isn’t about debating or arguing over what happened. The specific events of 2025–26 are much better documented by the people directly involved in them. The point is to separate out the different layers of responsibility and get a clearer picture of who was actually culpable for what, based on the available information and the much longer history with this particular network.

    The larger point is that the concerning issues with this social ecosystem have been observable for a very long time. The problems with the Sherab Ling scene didn’t suddenly begin with this case. Some people had already developed a very negative impression of Damien Jampa by around 2010, and this only got worse over the years, as many individuals connected with him observed increasingly problematic behavior within the wider circle around him, including the progressively degenerate behavior of Justin Kirkwood, James Bradwell, Evan Yerburgh, Eugene Romaniuk, Sean Griffin, Matthias Staber, and eventually NT’s brother and sister-in-law, Helios Hildt and Daniela Vargas.

    The same goes for Esukhia. Dirk Schmidt always came across as considerably less problematic than the others, and he is probably the most reasonable person in that particular group. But, at the same time, given his crucial role at Esukhia, his extreme passivity, almost pathological conflict avoidance, and apparent willingness to look the other way were significant factors in allowing the worst aspects of the Damien/NT dynamic to continue for far longer than they otherwise might have. That toxic dynamic also affected quite a few other people around them.

    This is why the “Septic Syndicate”—the Sherab Ling/Esukhia group, or the Damien/NT network more broadly—makes more sense as a longstanding social and institutional phenomenon than simply as a collection of individuals who happened to become involved in one particular case. The “culture” originally developed around Sherab Ling and the Bir monastic scene around 2010, was carried into Esukhia in McLeod Ganj beginning in 2012, and then continued through the later NT/Damien projects from 2016 onward after they left India. Their “philosophy” was propagated through a much wider inner circle of 10+ people. The ten most visible people are only the tip of the iceberg. There were considerably more peripheral participants in their “Syndicate” dynamics, and probably dozens of people negatively affected by it over the years, if not hundreds when the broader picture is taken into account.

    And by the way, there were Tibetan women in Bir complaining about Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley’s behavior as far back as 2008. These complaints involved serious concerns about NT’s sexual activity and honesty around Bir, as well as Damien’s bizarre penchant for gossiping about women, especially given that he was a monk. The more sensational rumors about STDs are better left out of this discussion, but the broader point is that Damien was clearly not above gossiping about NT and his other friends, including about highly sensitive personal matters.

    There’s even a video on YouTube, an interview for the Dharma Sagar program, where Damien is gossiping about NT in front of the whole audience, calling him “crazy” and implying that he didn’t understand even the most basic French social norms. Then Damien says, “Oh wait, is NT already here?”—which he apparently was—and stops talking about him. This created a pretty awkward atmosphere during the whole rambling “translation lecture” by Damien. It fits the broader picture of his tendency to gossip about people in his own circle.

    The guy was never trustworthy. And yeah, to say Damien Jampa was a bad influence on the Western Buddhist community in Himachal Pradesh is a major understatement.

    Speaking of good old Damien, Mr. Handpicked by Guru Vajradhara himself, he is incredibly—shockingly—consequential in this story and in the accounts of what happened. It fits a pattern already seen in the early 2010s: aggressive treatment of women and female employees, constant gossip and backbiting, administrative power games, and deep hostility toward Western translators and scholars who challenged his authority. That makes his role in the present situation much more intelligible than if this were completely out of character for him.

    This is literally one of the most arrogant people I’ve ever met, who goes around calling every other translator “arrogant” while using that accusation as a moral justification for his own non-virtuous behavior, which he then refuses to own up to or even admit. This is not a new thing, and he continued the pattern here. He has never struck me as particularly self-aware or fundamentally honest, let alone compassionate, and it raises the question of how many other people have been targeted by him and his “strike team” tactics over the years. The guy is relentless in his social subversion and personal hostility, and he deserves an equally relentless response, IMO.

    Ngawang Trinley is a somewhat different case. There was actually a comparatively more positive impression of him in the earlier period because of some of his projects and accomplishments in the 2010s. That view changed dramatically around 2023–24 after surprisingly negative experiences with him and after hearing what his own family was saying about his behavior, which ultimately left Jennifer Yo crying in the street in McLeod Ganj and ranting about him in public.

    So, NT is not simply a case of projecting a later opinion backward onto someone who was disliked from the beginning. There was always some wariness and suspicion, but the present assessment developed much later. NT now appears more or less equally bad as Damien, and arguably worse given his position. He may not be as overtly hostile or obviously creepy as Damien, but he is structurally far more significant in the “Septic Syndicate,” and quite erratic, dishonest, and egomaniacal in his own way.

    Titi Dolma is different again. If she was involved as directly as described, then her role deserves considerably more attention.

    Gyaltön Rinpoche is still the biggest unresolved question. Either he knew and supported what was happening, or people around him were acting in his name while controlling the information reaching him, or there was some mixture of the two. There is not presently enough information to determine which. Either scenario points to a serious institutional problem.

    That’s really the main connection between this case and the history described above. The outrageous debacles of the 2025–26 “Discovering the Buddha Within” tour are not some series of completely unprecedented events that suddenly emerged out of nowhere. They emerge against the background of the social and institutional culture surrounding Sherab Ling, Palpung, and Esukhia, and the wider social network around them, which had been producing these kinds of conflicts for well over a decade and a half.

    So, the history with Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche (or Sangye Minyenpa Rinpoche, as one very learned Nyingma Khenpo from Serta Monastery jokingly called him back in 2009…) is not irrelevant. Quite the opposite: it is clearly a very important part of the background and may well have helped create much of the circumstances in which everything else unfolded. That’s self-evident. But that is distinct from the question of who actually carried out the later actions. From what can be determined, the people most directly connected to the bullying/harassment/defamation campaigns and the subsequent “emergency bozo lawsuit” in Delhi are Damien Jampa, Titi Dolma, the Sherab Ling administration, and possibly Gyaltön Rinpoche himself to some degree.

    The distinction is important because the background to a conflict, the people who benefit from a particular narrative, and the people who actually carry out the actions aren’t necessarily the same people. Given the longer history of this group, that is the distinction worth clarifying: not the narrative of who supposedly orchestrated everything from above, but where the actual responsibility is situated.

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    1. Yes I agree to some extent, but the timing of the Delhi case is not “accidental”.

       They filed the case one month (April 20) before they were all heading off to meet Sangye Nyenpa in Nepal (May 2026) for a major teaching event with him as their special guest and vice versa. Of course, they needed to paint me as the “bad woman” before all that, otherwise it would look like more enabling on their part of an abusive monk and man who had several complaints already against him, by various women, including women who had been following TSR for years. So they misled the judge the teachings were ongoing in India after 17 April (major lie). They knew they were in Nepal and that I had not attended the Delhi course and was outside India. Lama Dragpa’s sudden banning letter seems part of the whole orchestrated plan to give them a green light to file the vexatious and misleading ex parte order claim.

       So to excuse that, they needed to find a reason to character assassinate me, and so they lied to and misled the court judge in my absence after I had left India one month prior, and fabricated a “false emergency” of stalking/harassment/defamation. No proof needed, just 2 lakh INR to register the civil case, money to hire an Indian lawyer, some anonymous online smear campaign screenshots, and a few unverified email messages from European administrators outside India talking about trivial events that had happened months prior with no legal action taken in those countries, when they were actually spreading gossip about and bullying me and trying to sever my connection to Gyalton R. Plus the “sworn affidavit” of Gyalton R (signed by someone called Topden).

       Plus do not forget that since 2020 I have been usbjected to sabotage, defamation, online impersonation, shunning, loss of funds, blacklisting etc. all due to the Sangye Nyenpa case, carried out by those predominantly connected to Benchen and SNR. Only more recently, involving Gelugpa sectarians who object to my research on their horrific brutality, violence and censorship in Tibet.

       So to think that it’s just Damien, or Titi Dolma (who yes definitely need investigating more because she became one of the main drivers in Europe and after of the exclusion, bullying and gossip smear campaign), would be naive. Yes, they took the actions with Thinley Topden (whoever that is) but someone more senior and influential than that was influencing and encouraging them to do so. And creating a culture of gossip, lack of communication, justice and misogyny.

       The prime candidates for that have to be SNR and now you have TSR and Gyalton R who seem to have given the green light to the latest attempts to attack, persecute, harm, shun and bully a lone female survivor who is also a recognised Buddhist scholar-translator=practitioner, without parallel/comparison in the Karma Kagyu tradition in the 21st Century. So the Gelugpa sectarian malevolent forces are also involved, perhaps even via their worldly protectors who have harmed so many people and the lineages in the name of protecting Gelugap and the DL institution.

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       1. Yeah, I agree, that all makes sense to me. I also think it’s a collective strategy and largely coordinated. Obviously it’s hard to say exactly how and to what extent… but everything you say adds up and checks out.

          For my part, I have zero interest in engaging in any kind of apologism for any those lamas or even giving them the benefit of the doubt, really… Just so we’re clear. However it also does look like Gyaltön Rinpoche was manipulated, based on your timeline of events.

          The fact that they outright lied to the Indian legal system in itself says a lot about their morals or lack thereof. And that probably connects to a lot of the other past legal scandals with the Tai Situ/Palpung Karma Kagyü, too.

          As for Tai Situ Rinpoche… aside from the well-known political problems with India and China… he has a long history of shielding lamas from accountability in very serious cases of misconduct and even criminality. Plus the mere fact that he’s the head lama of Sherab Ling and the teacher or former teacher of highly compromised figures like Damien Jampa (AKA Jampa Dorje, surname hidden/unknown), Ngawang Trinley/NT (Vincent Tenzang Hildt), and the other ‘Septic Syndicate’ ex-monks from Sherab Ling is pretty suspicious in itself.

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14. Posting this again because it looks like there was an error the first time.

    …

    Oh yeah, sure, of course, Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche and his people were involved in the broader situation. I just don’t think they were actively dictating the actions of Damien Jampa, Titi Dolma, etc. There is no evidence for that. Were the conflicts with SNR part of the pretext or background for the whole thing? Almost certainly. But that is different from saying SNR was pulling the strings behind all of this.

    And just to be clear, this isn’t about debating or arguing over what happened. The specific events of 2025–26 are much better documented by the people directly involved in them. The point is to separate out the different layers of responsibility and get a clearer picture of who was actually culpable for what, based on the available information and the much longer history with this particular network.

    The larger point is that the concerning issues with this social ecosystem have been observable for a very long time. The problems with the Sherab Ling scene didn’t suddenly begin with this case. Some people had already developed a very negative impression of Damien Jampa by around 2010, and this only got worse over the years, as many individuals connected with him observed increasingly problematic behavior within the wider circle around him, including the progressively degenerate behavior of Justin Kirkwood, James Bradwell, Evan Yerburgh, Eugene Romaniuk, Sean Griffin, Matthias Staber, and eventually NT’s brother and sister-in-law, Helios Hildt and Daniela Vargas.

    The same goes for Esukhia. Dirk Schmidt always came across as considerably less problematic than the others, and he is probably the most reasonable person in that particular group. But, at the same time, given his crucial role at Esukhia, his extreme passivity, almost pathological conflict avoidance, and apparent willingness to look the other way were significant factors in allowing the worst aspects of the Damien/NT dynamic to continue for far longer than they otherwise might have. That toxic dynamic also affected quite a few other people around them.

    This is why the “Septic Syndicate”—the Sherab Ling/Esukhia group, or the Damien/NT network more broadly—makes more sense as a longstanding social and institutional phenomenon than simply as a collection of individuals who happened to become involved in one particular case. The “culture” originally developed around Sherab Ling and the Bir monastic scene around 2010, was carried into Esukhia in McLeod Ganj beginning in 2012, and then continued through the later NT/Damien projects from 2016 onward after they left India. Their “philosophy” was propagated through a much wider inner circle of 10+ people. The ten most visible people are only the tip of the iceberg. There were considerably more peripheral participants in their “Syndicate” dynamics, and probably dozens of people negatively affected by it over the years, if not hundreds when the broader picture is taken into account.

    And by the way, there were Tibetan women in Bir complaining about Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley’s behavior as far back as 2008. These complaints involved serious concerns about NT’s sexual activity and honesty around Bir, as well as Damien’s bizarre penchant for gossiping about women, especially given that he was a monk. The more sensational rumors about STDs are better left out of this discussion, but the broader point is that Damien was clearly not above gossiping about NT and his other friends, including about highly sensitive personal matters.

    There’s even a video on YouTube, an interview for the Dharma Sagar program, where Damien is gossiping about NT in front of the whole audience, calling him “crazy” and implying that he didn’t understand even the most basic French social norms. Then Damien says, “Oh wait, is NT already here?”—which he apparently was—and stops talking about him. This created a pretty awkward atmosphere during the whole rambling “translation lecture” by Damien. It fits the broader picture of his tendency to gossip about people in his own circle.

    The guy was never trustworthy. And yeah, to say Damien Jampa was a bad influence on the Western Buddhist community in Himachal Pradesh is a major understatement.

    Speaking of good old Damien, Mr. Handpicked by Guru Vajradhara himself, he is incredibly—shockingly—consequential in this story and in the accounts of what happened. It fits a pattern already seen in the early 2010s: aggressive treatment of women and female employees, constant gossip and backbiting, administrative power games, and deep hostility toward Western translators and scholars who challenged his authority. That makes his role in the present situation much more intelligible than if this were completely out of character for him.

    This is literally one of the most arrogant people I’ve ever met, who goes around calling every other translator “arrogant” while using that accusation as a moral justification for his own non-virtuous behavior, which he then refuses to own up to or even admit. This is not a new thing, and he continued the pattern here. He has never struck me as particularly self-aware or fundamentally honest, let alone compassionate, and it raises the question of how many other people have been targeted by him and his “strike team” tactics over the years. The guy is relentless in his social subversion and personal hostility, and he deserves an equally relentless response, IMO.

    Ngawang Trinley is a somewhat different case. There was actually a comparatively more positive impression of him in the earlier period because of some of his projects and accomplishments in the 2010s. That view changed dramatically around 2023–24 after surprisingly negative experiences with him and after hearing what his own family was saying about his behavior, which ultimately left Jennifer Yo crying in the street in McLeod Ganj and ranting about him in public.

    So, NT is not simply a case of projecting a later opinion backward onto someone who was disliked from the beginning. There was always some wariness and suspicion, but the present assessment developed much later. NT now appears more or less equally bad as Damien, and arguably worse given his position. He may not be as overtly hostile or obviously creepy as Damien, but he is structurally far more significant in the “Septic Syndicate,” and quite erratic, dishonest, and egomaniacal in his own way.

    Titi Dolma is different again. If she was involved as directly as described, then her role deserves considerably more attention.

    Gyaltön Rinpoche is still the biggest unresolved question. Either he knew and supported what was happening, or people around him were acting in his name while controlling the information reaching him, or there was some mixture of the two. There is not presently enough information to determine which. Either scenario points to a serious institutional problem.

    That’s really the main connection between this case and the history described above. The outrageous debacles of the 2025–26 “Discovering the Buddha Within” tour are not some series of completely unprecedented events that suddenly emerged out of nowhere. They emerge against the background of the social and institutional culture surrounding Sherab Ling, Palpung, and Esukhia, and the wider social network around them, which had been producing these kinds of conflicts for well over a decade and a half.

    So, the history with Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche (or Sangye Minyenpa Rinpoche, as one very learned Nyingma Khenpo from Serta Monastery jokingly called him back in 2009…) is not irrelevant. Quite the opposite: it is clearly a very important part of the background and may well have helped create much of the circumstances in which everything else unfolded. That’s self-evident. But that is distinct from the question of who actually carried out the later actions. From what can be determined, the people most directly connected to the bullying/harassment/defamation campaigns and the subsequent “emergency bozo lawsuit” in Delhi are Damien Jampa, Titi Dolma, the Sherab Ling administration, and possibly Gyaltön Rinpoche himself to some degree.

    The distinction is important because the background to a conflict, the people who benefit from a particular narrative, and the people who actually carry out the actions aren’t necessarily the same people. Given the longer history of this group, that is the distinction worth clarifying: not the narrative of who supposedly orchestrated everything from above, but where the actual responsibility is situated.

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    1. Small correction: I can’t remember when that Nyingma Khenpo made the “Sangye Minyenpa” joke. I said it was 2009, but I think it was probably sometime in the early 2010s, actually, perhaps around 2011–12.

       For those who don’t know, “Sangye Nyenpa” (sangs rgyas mnyan pa) means “he who listens to the Buddha.” The joke was to turn “Sangye Nyenpa” into “Sangye Minyenpa,” i.e. “he who does not listen to the Buddha,” while also playing on the Tibetan phrase (མི་སྙན་པ་), meaning “unpleasant” or “disagreeable.”

       So, it becomes a double entendre: “he who doesn’t listen to the Buddha” AND “he who is displeasing to the Buddha.” 😂

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15. DOWNFALL OF THE SEPTIC SYNDICATE: DAMIEN JAMPA, NGAWANG TRINLEY (NT), INSTITUTIONAL DECAY, GATEKEEPING, AND THE CORRUPTION OF BUDDHIST AUTHORITY

    There is a point at which a succession of “misunderstandings” becomes something else. When the same small circle repeatedly appears around professional exclusion, gossip, gatekeeping, informal punishment, compromised grievance procedures, institutional protection, reputational warfare and attacks upon independent people who refuse to conform, the correct response is no longer to treat each episode as an isolated interpersonal disagreement. The Damien Jampa–Ngawang Trinley (NT) network has developed precisely this kind of reputation. What began in the late 2000s and early 2010s around Bir, Dharamsala and Sherab Ling developed through Esukhia and the associated translation world, spread into digital humanities, nonprofit projects and Buddhist administrative structures, fractured through the collapse of Esukhia and Dharma Sagar, and then reappeared in a more diffuse form through OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org, Dharmaduta and increasingly aggressive attempts to control the reputational environment around people who challenged the network. The resulting picture is not flattering. It is the picture of a small institutional culture that repeatedly mistakes social control for community, hierarchy for competence, loyalty for virtue, reputation for truth, and the preservation of its own authority for the preservation of the Dharma. The pattern is sufficiently concrete and recurrent that it warrants direct examination rather than polite concealment.

    The expression “Septic Syndicate” is therefore not merely colorful rhetoric. It points to a recognizable institutional pathology. A syndicate exists when power is concentrated among a small number of people who reinforce one another’s position, circulate information internally, protect insiders, distribute opportunities through personal relationships and make it difficult for outsiders to challenge the consensus. It becomes septic when the mechanisms of protection are themselves contaminated: gossip replaces evidence, private conversations replace due process, anonymous accusations replace direct communication, social exclusion replaces mediation, and religious language becomes a shield against ordinary accountability. That is the central problem here. These are not simply people who happened to know one another for a long time. They constructed an ecosystem in which professional life, religious affiliation, personal loyalty, access to teachers, access to funding, control over information and social belonging became mutually reinforcing forms of power.

    This is precisely why the matter should be examined as a question of causes and conditions rather than reduced to personality. A Buddhist institution is not made virtuous simply by speaking about compassion, lineage, translation, scholarship or the preservation of the Dharma. The qualities of an institution are revealed when reputation is threatened, when an outsider refuses to conform, when a woman raises an inconvenient complaint, when a former colleague challenges the leadership, or when somebody independent of the inner circle begins asking questions. At those moments, one discovers whether the institution possesses genuine ethical discipline or whether the language of Dharma merely provides an elevated vocabulary for ordinary attachment, aversion, status competition and social control.

    1. THE ORIGINAL SIN: GOSSIP, SOCIAL CONTROL, AND THE BIR–SHERAB LING ENVIRONMENT

    The history does not begin in 2025. It reaches back to the late 2000s, when concerns were already being raised in Bir about Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley (NT), including concerns about Ngawang Trinley’s sexual conduct with Tibetan women and interpersonal honesty, along with repeated complaints about Damien Jampa’s poor treatment of women and his noticeable habit of gossiping about people within his own circle. The most revealing kind of gossip is not gossip about strangers but gossip about one’s own colleagues and supposed friends, because it demonstrates that private information itself has become a form of social currency. The Dharma teaches restraint in speech because speech creates conditions. A person who turns confidential knowledge into entertainment, status or leverage is not demonstrating some sophisticated understanding of worldly illusion. He is simply using harmful speech.

    The famous Dharma Sagar interview episode is almost comical in its transparency. Damien Jampa spoke about Ngawang Trinley as though he were absent, calling him “crazy,” criticizing his understanding of ordinary French social norms and then abruptly realizing that Ngawang Trinley was actually present. The public gossip session stopped and the atmosphere became awkward, but the incident is revealing for reasons that go far beyond embarrassment. It shows the underlying habit of speaking about people privately, constructing narratives about their character, treating those narratives as social currency and then becoming cautious only when the person being discussed appears in the room. That is precisely the type of conduct from which larger institutional poison grows.

    The problem became much more serious when the same habits entered environments in which Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley possessed professional and religious authority. Gossip is one thing between powerless acquaintances. Gossip combined with institutional gatekeeping is something entirely different. Once the person spreading the story also controls introductions, opportunities, information, employment, teaching access or social legitimacy, the gossip ceases to be merely unpleasant. It becomes an instrument of power.

    2. ESUKHIA: FROM LANGUAGE SCHOOL TO GATEKEEPING APPARATUS

    Esukhia was one of the principal institutional expressions of the Damien–NT network. It gave many students something valuable: access to Tibetan language education, teachers, translators and the living environment of Dharamsala. That contribution should be acknowledged, but the existence of something useful does not make the institutional culture surrounding it immune from scrutiny. Esukhia also became the environment in which the network’s hierarchy, friendships, rivalries, employment relationships and informal rules were consolidated.

    The “Boys’ Club” characterization fits because the issue was not simply that most participants happened to be male. The deeper problem was a culture in which male insiders were granted extraordinary latitude while women and independent Western translators who challenged the hierarchy were treated as disruptive, arrogant, difficult or threatening. The insiders received the presumption of legitimacy. The outsiders were required to prove themselves repeatedly. The people with connections acquired opportunities early. Independent people were left outside the system and then judged for not belonging to it.

    This explains the otherwise puzzling gap between the network’s self-presentation and its actual output. For more than a decade, members of this circle behaved as though they constituted an elite review board determining who is and is not a “qualified translator,” who deserves institutional respect and whose scholarly work counts. Yet many of the same people possess surprisingly little formal training in Tibetan or Buddhist Studies, and the volume of independent scholarly publication associated with several of them is remarkably modest compared with the authority they have brazenly claimed. The authority was therefore not primarily earned through peer review, philological research or a substantial body of scholarship. It was earned through position, and largely self-created position.

    That distinction is decisive. Authority conferred by a network is not the same thing as authority established through knowledge. A person does not become a great scholar because his friends say he is one. He does not become a reliable judge of another translator because he controls an educational institution. And he certainly does not acquire infallibility by putting a Tibetan name on a résumé.

    3. DAMIEN JAMPA: THE ADMINISTRATIVE ENFORCER

    Damien Jampa stands at the center of the network because his function has never been simply linguistic. He occupies the junction between Western Buddhist administration, monastic institutions, translators and social relationships. Where Ngawang Trinley operates through technology and digital infrastructure, Damien Jampa operates through people. He knows who knows whom, who can speak to which lama, who belongs to which institution, who can provide a reference, which administrator can be approached privately and which relationship can be mobilized when a problem needs to disappear.

    His style is not open intellectual confrontation. It is private maneuvering, the whisper campaign rather than the published argument, the backchannel rather than the meeting, the reputational insinuation rather than the transparent rebuttal, the social sanction rather than the formal process. This is why his role is more consequential than that of an ordinary unpleasant colleague. He functions as the political arm of the network, translating personal grievances into institutional consequences.

    His treatment of independent female scholars is especially revealing. During the Hanoi program in 2025, he was openly dismissive of an established Buddhist scholar-translator in front of a Vietnamese interpreter who herself apparently lacked Tibetan reading and writing ability and had no visible record of comparable scholarship. The contrast was absurd: a highly productive independent translator and researcher was diminished while an insider-adjacent participant received automatic validation. The issue was never really competence. It was hierarchy.

    The “dining-table incident” exposes the same double standard. A completely ordinary question produced a hostile reaction from the Vietnamese interpreter, and Damien Jampa intensified rather than defused the tension. The interpreter had already been primed to view the woman negatively, either by Damien Jampa or by the wider gossip network. A person enters a teaching environment as an outsider and suddenly encounters hostility from people she has never met, followed by missing educational materials, social suspicion and later institutional restrictions. That is what aggressive gatekeeping looks like when it operates through ordinary social interactions rather than explicit decrees.

    The characterization of Damien Jampa as envious, petty, vindictive, unforgiving, gossipy and prone to self-serving exaggeration is therefore not an incidental insult. It describes a very specific form of power: the power to create a social interpretation of someone before that person is ever given an opportunity to speak. Once the narrative has been established, every subsequent action is interpreted through it. A request becomes “controlling.” A criticism becomes “arrogance.” A boundary becomes “hostility.” A complaint becomes “harassment.” The machinery then feeds itself.

    [This comment was edited here due to repetition in previous comments, and also not directly connected to the testimony of the survivor under discussion here].

    9. THE SANGYE NYENPA MATTER

    The Sangye Nyenpa case is the older wound underneath much of the later conflict. Reports concerning misconduct, dishonesty, emotional bullying and inappropriate behavior toward women emerged around 2019–20. The subsequent history includes online impersonation, anonymous accounts, bullying, private defamation and social isolation.

    The institutional response is itself part of the problem. Tenpa Lama of Benchen imposed a blanket ban in February 2020 without ever meeting or speaking with the woman concerned, without investigation, mediation or an attempt at direct resolution. The resulting Khyentse Foundation dispute then produced material consequences, including the loss of Ashoka Grant funding.

    The lesson should have been obvious: when a woman raises a serious complaint about a powerful religious figure, an institution must become more careful, not less careful. It must distinguish immediate safeguarding from a final judgment, testimony from hearsay, evidence from gossip and loyalty from truth. Instead, the institutions closed ranks.

    Sangye Nyenpa’s own role also remains morally relevant even where direct operational responsibility for later events has not been established. He never threatened the complainant with court action and did not directly stage the later legal campaign, but neither did he decisively stop the private and online defamation associated with his supporters. One need not imagine that Sangye Nyenpa personally directed every subsequent action in order to ask why he did not use his authority to tell his followers, at the very least, to stop.

    10. THE TRANSITION FROM THE OLD CAMPAIGN TO THE NEW ONE

    The earlier online smear and impersonation campaign and the 2025–26 harassment campaign should not automatically be collapsed into one operation. There is a serious distinction between background, shared personnel and direct command responsibility. The older campaign during the early 2020s is linked to Sangye Nyenpa, family members, Benchen monks and anonymous Facebook accounts. The later 2025–26 campaign centers more heavily on Damien Jampa and Titi Dolma, with Palpung Vienna and other administrators becoming institutional actors.

    That distinction actually strengthens the analysis. There is no need to invent a single mastermind controlling every event. Different networks can overlap. Different motives can converge. Old conflicts can provide the pretext or social background for a new campaign without proving that the old protagonists gave direct orders. A serious analysis therefore asks not, “Who secretly controlled everything?” but “Who did what, at what time, using which institutional mechanism, and with what consequences?”

    On that narrower question, the 2025–26 conduct of Damien Jampa and Titi Dolma deserves separate examination.

    11. TITI DOLMA AND THE INTERNATIONAL STRIKE TEAM

    Titi Dolma, also identified as Neneng Setiawati, became the principal administrative organizer of the [edit: earlier] and later campaign. She had never met or spoken with the woman [yet from February to March 2026] she was discussing yet gathered statements from several people in Europe concerning events that had occurred months earlier during Gyaltön Rinpoche’s 2025 teaching tour [edit: for use in a Delhi court case in April 2026].

    The power imbalance is obvious. One woman is alone. The other has access to organizers, monks, administrators and teachers. One is attempting to attend teachings. The other is collecting statements behind closed doors. One can see the people making decisions. The other cannot even see the decision-making process.

    The phrase “international strike team” therefore captures the scale of the mechanism. Damien Jampa mobilized people across multiple countries to isolate a single woman through whisper campaigns, administrative communications, social pressure and eventually legal action. The campaign extended through Vietnam, Europe, Austria, India and the digital environment. It became transnational precisely because the network itself is transnational.

    12. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE GYALTÖN RINPOCHE CONNECTION

    The personal relationship with Gyaltön Rinpoche is central because the campaign did not merely seek to embarrass a translator. It damaged a Vajrayana relationship that had been developing through teaching, translation and personal contact.

    The chronology is devastating to the later portrayal of the woman as some persistent danger. Gyaltön Rinpoche praised her work and thanked her for reports and transcripts in June 2025. A cordial morning walk in Berlin on August 6, 2025 was photographed and filmed, and the resulting video was later removed from YouTube after Titi Dolma requested its deletion. That matters because visual evidence of ordinary, friendly interaction sits awkwardly beside the later claim that the same woman was a dangerous or disruptive threat.

    The crucial question is why such a dramatic transformation in the narrative occurred and who produced it. A person cannot simultaneously be publicly thanked for scholarly work, welcomed into ordinary social interaction and then retroactively transformed into a serious security threat [from Berlin 2025 onwards by Titi Dolma as evidenced in her messages to Maria at Bodhicarya Berlin and others] without someone explaining the intervening causes. [Edit: Titi Dolma was already spreading behind the scenes gossip, lies and scaring people from Vietnam 2025 onwards as evidenced by what she did in Berlin after the walk and two day teaching/empowerment].

    The removal of evidence makes the matter worse. When conflicting narratives exist, preserve the evidence. Do not make the evidence disappear and then cite the resulting absence as proof.

    13. PALPUNG VIENNA

    Palpung Vienna barred a lone woman from attending an Avalokiteshvara empowerment through an anonymous or unauthorized email, citing “samaya with Sangye Nyenpa,” which makes no sense in this context because the lama giving the empowerment was an entirely different person. There was no meeting, no discussion and no attempt to hear the person excluded. There was also in-person harassment, refusal to promptly refund the registration payment and unnecessary involvement of police.

    This is where the misuse of religious terminology becomes especially ugly. “Samaya” cannot be converted into a bureaucratic veto. If a religious institution can exclude a student without meeting her, investigating the matter or allowing her to respond simply by invoking a teacher with whom some students have a relationship, then samaya has become an instrument of arbitrary authority.

    The question “What about their samaya with me and Gyaltön Rinpoche?” exposes the contradiction. Religious relationships overlap. They cannot be erased by the unilateral declaration of an administrator who has never spoken to the person concerned.

    14. SHERAB LING AND MA TARA PALMO

    The March 2026 Sherab Ling events introduce a still more troubling element. Ma Tara Palmo called a permitted guest a “demon,” declared the monastery guesthouse to be “their home,” told the guest that nobody wanted her there and attempted to pressure staff to remove her. The dispute escalated during the guest’s final week at Sherab Ling, while she was completing translation and research work.

    If one guest attempts to dictate who may stay in a monastery guesthouse, that is itself an exercise of unauthorized power. If the institution then disciplines the person who reports the harassment instead of the person who initiated it, the institutional logic becomes inverted.

    The absurdity becomes sharper when the guest was simultaneously producing useful scholarly work for the monastery. Three weeks of research were spent locating, documenting and organizing the 8th Tai Situpa’s Collected Works, while the person responsible for the hostility presented herself as though she possessed the right to decide who belonged on the premises. This is a classic conflict between actual contribution and informal entitlement.

    15. LAMA DRAGPA’S MARCH 17 LETTER

    Lama Dragpa’s March 17, 2026 blanket ban transformed a safety complaint into a comprehensive judgment of the complainant’s religious, political, artistic and personal behavior. The timing alone is remarkable: a written complaint was submitted on March 15 concerning harassment and verbal threats, and the blanket ban followed two days later without an in-person meeting, verbal discussion, mediation or neutral investigation.

    The reasons cited included dislike of a White Tara “pure vision” artwork, opposition to a proposed red-and-white flower garden around the relic stupa, objection to the suggestion of private fundraising, hearsay from Titi Dolma and Damien Jampa about “inappropriate conduct” with Gyaltön Rinpoche, and disagreement with writing about Gelugpa sectarianism and the historical relationship between the Dalai Lama institution and the Tai Situpa lineage.

    This is extraordinarily revealing. A safety complaint somehow becomes a judgment about artwork, flowers, fundraising, religious politics, historical scholarship and personal relationships. The more expansive the reasons become, the harder it becomes to maintain that the ban was simply a protective response to an immediate safety issue. It begins to look like an institutional dossier.

    The political dimension is particularly important. A person writing critically about sectarian violence, Gelugpa dominance and the history of the Dalai Lama institution may be controversial. But scholarship is not misconduct. Historical argument is not harassment. A disagreement about sectarian history is not a safety threat. An administrator cannot simply bundle political disagreement, artistic preference, hearsay and personal dislike into a single category called “dangerous conduct” and then claim that the resulting judgment is objective.

    16. THE EUROPEAN BUDDHIST UNION

    The role of Carlo Luyckx and the European Buddhist Union is equally serious because anonymous online material was converted into institutional evidence. Carlo Luyckx cited, shared and promoted anonymous and supposedly defamatory material originating from the same online ecosystem while blocking or undermining efforts to investigate discrimination and harassment complaints.

    That is a catastrophic procedural inversion. Anonymous online accusations should trigger verification, not conclusion. They should be treated as leads requiring investigation, not as established findings. A Buddhist umbrella organization that does the opposite is not demonstrating institutional maturity. It is merely giving bureaucratic authority to gossip.

    The same problem extends to the European Buddhist Union’s promotion of figures accused of enabling teacher misconduct. An organization cannot credibly claim to stand for ethical standards while treating institutional reputation as more important than investigation. When the umbrella organization begins shielding the organizations beneath it, accountability disappears at every level.

    17. THE ANONYMOUS GITHUB AND YOUTUBE CAMPAIGN

    The online smear campaign adds a vulgar layer of misogyny to the institutional one. The campaign used anonymous accounts, derogatory language, sexualized insults, impersonation and repositories containing material banned or removed elsewhere. The person behind the GitHub repository and associated YouTube activity deliberately constructed the appearance of an impartial public audit while actually producing an obsessive character-assassination campaign against a lone female scholar-translator.

    That is not scholarship. It is reputational warfare. Calling a female scholar a “sex pest,” sexualizing her, humiliating her and presenting personal attacks as an “accountability audit” is a textbook method of making a woman socially toxic so that people become afraid to associate with her. The purpose is obvious: destroy credibility by contaminating the person rather than answering the substance of her work.

    The later legal reliance upon screenshots from such material makes the matter even more disturbing. Anonymous gossip does not acquire epistemic authority when it is uploaded to GitHub. A screenshot does not become evidence merely because somebody places it in a PDF. An anonymous blogger does not become an auditor merely because he uses the word “audit.”

    18. THE DELHI “EMERGENCY” PROCEEDINGS

    The Delhi proceedings represent the point at which this entire institutional culture crossed into legal coercion. On April 20, 2026, Titi Dolma and Thinley Topden filed proceedings in the name of Gyaltön Rinpoche and obtained an ex parte injunction without the affected person being present to respond. The proceedings sought restrictions on movement, religious practice, freedom of expression and material concerning Gyaltön Rinpoche.

    The factual chronology is central. The Delhi teachings had already ended on April 17. The person being targeted had already left India on March 18. The case nonetheless presented the Delhi teaching as though it remained ongoing and treated an “emergency threat” as though the woman were still present in India and actively disrupting the event.

    That is why the “emergency” characterization deserves such intense scrutiny. An emergency injunction requires an actual emergency. If the event has already ended and the person accused of threatening it has already left the country, then the emergency narrative collapses under its own chronology.

    The requested 500-metre restriction is equally bizarre. It sought to keep a woman away from a teacher she had been following devotedly while simultaneously restricting access to other Palpung teachers and compelling removal of positive material she had written about Gyaltön Rinpoche. The same body of work that had demonstrated devotion and scholarly service was retroactively reframed as dangerous conduct.

    The result is a perfect example of narrative inversion. The person reporting harassment becomes the “harasser.” The person documenting teachings becomes the “stalker.” The person whose movement is restricted becomes the threat. And the institutional apparatus that creates the restriction presents itself as the victim.

    19. THE USE OF MONEY AND LEGAL POWER AGAINST A LONE WOMAN

    The payment of approximately 2.5 lakh INR for the Delhi action adds another layer of asymmetry. Whatever the precise legal merits of the proceeding, the fundamental power imbalance is obvious: a single woman is confronted by a network with access to lawyers, institutional structures, administrators, monastics and international connections.

    That is not a level playing field. It is not courageous to deploy a large institutional apparatus against an isolated individual and then describe the result as a defense against her supposed aggression. Power should be measured not only by what somebody says but by what resources they can mobilize.

    There is also an ethical question concerning donations. When devotees contribute money to Buddhist institutions, they reasonably expect those resources to support teaching, practice, scholarship, welfare and preservation of the Dharma. Using substantial religious funds to pursue a reputational or retaliatory legal campaign raises an obvious question of fiduciary and ethical responsibility. The money belongs to the institution’s mission, not to the personal conflicts of its administrators.

    20. THE KHYENTSE FOUNDATION PROBLEM

    The Khyentse Foundation enters this history twice: first through the 2020 Ashoka Grant controversy and later through the disappearance of Dharma Sagar from its institutional listings. In both cases the same problem appears: what happens when institutional support collides with controversy?

    A foundation can withdraw funding. That is ordinary institutional life. But where funding was withdrawn after a woman reported misconduct by a respected teacher, the foundation should have distinguished legitimate performance concerns from retaliation. Otherwise the message to other women is devastating: speak up and your professional livelihood may disappear.

    The same principle applies to Dharma Sagar. A five-year project supported by a major foundation disappeared after roughly two years and the associated material was scrubbed from public directories. The obvious question is why. The more dramatic the erasure, the greater the need for transparency about what happened.

    21. THE OKC CONNECTION

    The discussion of Ogyen Kunzang Chöling and Robert Spatz introduces a different kind of analysis: institutional inheritance. Ngawang Trinley and Helios Hildt grew up within the highly insular OKC environment. Exposure to such an environment does not mechanically determine later conduct, but it does establish a formative context in which patterns concerning authority, loyalty, punishment, dissent, belonging and exclusion can be learned very early.

    The important question is structural. A person raised within a high-control system learns patterns about authority, loyalty, punishment, dissent, belonging and exclusion before acquiring the capacity to critically examine those patterns. If those patterns are never consciously dismantled, they can later be reproduced in a completely different institutional environment.

    The similarities between the old OKC environment and the later Damien/NT ecosystem are striking: insiders and outsiders, loyalty tests, reputational control, social exclusion, punishment through ostracism, pressure to conform and the transformation of disagreement into betrayal.

    The same mechanism appears in many institutions. The victim of authoritarianism can become the gatekeeper. The person who suffered humiliation can become the humiliator. The person who once lived under rigid control can reproduce rigid control while believing that he has escaped it.

    This does not mean that the Damien/NT network is literally identical to OKC. It means that the operating system may have survived after the original institution disappeared.

    22. FROM CULT TO CARTEL

    The most useful distinction is between content and structure. The content can change. Yesterday it was religious devotion and monastery life; today it may be Tibetan software, translation technology, digital archives or nonprofit administration. The structure can remain recognizable.

    A network becomes authoritarian not because everyone wears robes, but because authority is distributed without meaningful accountability. The essential questions are always the same: who is allowed inside, who is believed, who is protected, who is excluded, who defines the enemy, who possesses the information, who has access to the lama, who can make a complaint without consequences and who can punish somebody without being questioned. Those questions reveal more about an institution than its mission statement.

    A system can call itself scholarly while operating through tribal loyalty. It can call itself progressive while reproducing patriarchal structures. It can call itself compassionate while humiliating dissenters. It can call itself decentralized while concentrating authority among the same small group through digital infrastructure. The name changes. The mechanism does not.

    23. THE COLLAPSE OF THE SYNDICATE

    The network’s apparent decline after 2023 is therefore significant. Dharma Sagar failed. NT’s old institutional position weakened. Connections with major organizations deteriorated. Funding became less stable. Family and professional relationships shifted. The centralized structure became increasingly fragmented. The response was not simply disappearance. It was proliferation.

    That is why OpenPecha, WeBuddhist, Sherab.org and Dharmaduta matter. They represent the possibility of organizational decentralization without genuine institutional reform. Instead of one large body, there are multiple smaller platforms. Instead of one center, there are distributed nodes. Instead of one recognizable institution, there is an ecosystem.

    But decentralization alone does not create accountability. A cartel can become a network. A network can become a collection of shell-like projects. The same people can move with the same methods under different organizational names.

    The collapse of institutional capital also changes the psychology of those involved. When funding, prestige, professional security and social cohesion begin to disappear simultaneously, people can become unusually defensive about threats to reputation. This provides one possible explanation for the intensity of the later campaign against a person who had independent documentation, a long memory and no particular reason to protect the old network.

    24. FEAR OF THE INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR

    The person who is most dangerous to a gatekeeping network is not necessarily its most powerful opponent. It is often the independent person who does not need the network.

    That person cannot be controlled through professional opportunity because she has created her own work. She cannot be easily silenced by social exclusion because she has already developed an independent intellectual identity. She does not need the approval of the gatekeepers to translate, write, research or publish. She can document the past. She can compare names, dates, projects, organizations and relationships. She can reconnect pieces of history that the network has spent years keeping compartmentalized.

    This is why the independent scholar-translator becomes intolerable to an insecure institutional culture. She possesses something the gatekeepers cannot confer and cannot remove: an independent record.

    The attempt to isolate such a person can therefore become self-defeating. Social exclusion gives her more incentive to document. Attacks create more material to preserve. Legal threats create new records. Institutional bans clarify institutional relationships. The more the network tries to control the narrative, the more evidence it generates about how the narrative is being controlled.

    25. THE REAL MEANING OF “PURE VIEW”

    There is also a Buddhist point here that should not be obscured by institutional language. “Pure view” cannot mean treating one’s own friends as pure and everybody who criticizes them as impure. That is not pure view. It is attachment.

    Pure view does not abolish conventional cause and effect. Emptiness does not mean that harmful speech is harmless, that exclusion has no consequences, or that abuse ceases to matter because everything lacks inherent existence. Quite the opposite: dependent origination means that conduct matters precisely because it arises dependently.

    If gossip creates fear, gossip matters. If exclusion destroys a person’s professional livelihood, exclusion matters. If an institution prevents investigation, that matters. If a legal proceeding is initiated on false premises, that matters. If anonymous accusations are circulated as evidence, that matters. If women learn that reporting misconduct will lead to professional and social punishment, that matters. These are not merely worldly inconveniences. They are manifestations of karma in the conventional sphere.

    26. THE CORRUPTION OF COMPASSION

    Compassion has also been badly distorted when it is used to protect institutions from embarrassment. Compassion does not mean protecting a teacher from the consequences of his actions. Compassion does not mean silencing a woman because her testimony makes devotees uncomfortable. Compassion does not mean preventing investigation because the investigation might damage the reputation of a Buddhist organization. That is not compassion. It is attachment masquerading as compassion.

    The same applies in reverse. Compassion does not mean believing every accusation blindly. A false accusation can cause great harm. A disciplined Buddhist community therefore has to investigate before judging, and investigation requires actually speaking to the people concerned, examining documentary evidence, establishing chronology, preserving records and distinguishing what is known directly from what has merely been repeated. Without those things, the language of compassion simply becomes a way of avoiding responsibility.

    27. THE FUNDAMENTAL EPISTEMIC FAILURE

    The deepest intellectual problem in the entire affair is the collapse of distinctions between perception, testimony, interpretation and judgment. Someone experiences an event. They interpret it. The interpretation is repeated to another person. The second person accepts the interpretation as fact. The third person receives it from a respected administrator. Six months later it appears in an institutional email. Eventually it appears in court. At that point the original event is buried beneath layers of conceptual construction, yet everyone behaves as though certainty has increased merely because more people have repeated the same story.

    It has not. Repetition does not transform hearsay into evidence. An administrator does not transform gossip into fact. A lawyer does not transform an accusation into proof. A court order does not retroactively establish every factual proposition contained in a pleading, particularly when an order was issued ex parte. A religious title does not transform a person’s perception into valid cognition.

    This is where Buddhist epistemology provides an unusually powerful corrective. One must ask what establishes the cognition, what its basis is, what is inferred, what is directly known, what remains uncertain, where the causal connection lies and where conceptual superimposition has occurred. A community supposedly committed to pramāṇa should be obsessed with these distinctions.

    28. THE SEPTIC NATURE OF THE SYNDICATE

    The reason the “septic” metaphor ultimately works is that the system reproduces its own contamination. One person’s grievance becomes another person’s gossip. Gossip becomes administrative knowledge. Administrative knowledge becomes institutional action. Institutional action becomes legal action. The consequence then becomes the justification for the original narrative.

    This is circular. A person is excluded because she is considered dangerous. Her exclusion is then cited as evidence that she must be dangerous. She is investigated because people say she is difficult. The investigation produces negative material because it begins from the assumption that she is difficult. The negative material then confirms the original assumption.

    This is how social systems manufacture reality. The Dharma has a name for this kind of process: conceptual elaboration built upon ignorance. The mistake is not merely that a few statements are false. The deeper mistake is that the mind constructs a solid object and then begins defending its own construction.

    29. THE INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN AS INSTITUTIONAL KARMA

    The later campaign against the lone woman is the karmic maturation of the earlier culture. The same habits that operated locally in Bir and Dharamsala become transnational once the network becomes international. What was once a few friends blocking somebody on Facebook becomes administrators communicating across countries. What was once gossip becomes written dossiers. What was once social exclusion becomes bans. What was once a local dispute becomes an international legal action.

    The technological infrastructure simply amplified the old social technology. The old culture of whispered reputation management moved onto Facebook, YouTube, GitHub and email. The old culture of institutional gatekeeping moved into cross-border administrative networks. The old culture of religious authority moved into legal filings. The operating system remained recognizable.

    30. THE CONTRADICTION AT THE HEART OF DAMIEN JAMPA’S POSITION

    Damien Jampa’s position is particularly contradictory because the very qualities that should make a Buddhist translator trustworthy become compromised when they are used in the service of gossip, gatekeeping and reputational warfare. Language expertise should produce precision. Monastic training should produce restraint. Administrative responsibility should produce fairness. Familiarity with Tibetan culture should produce humility. Buddhist education should produce discernment.

    Yet the conduct attributed to him points in the opposite direction: gossip, backroom maneuvering, hostility toward independent scholars, reputational attacks, gatekeeping, exaggerated narratives and pressure through institutional channels.

    The contradiction is not merely personal. It is doctrinal. A translator who cannot distinguish fact from inference, and who nevertheless circulates judgments about other people’s character, is behaving in precisely the opposite manner from the intellectual discipline required by serious philology. A monk who treats disagreement as a personal affront is revealing attachment to self and reputation rather than the loosening of those fixations that Buddhist practice is meant to accomplish. An administrator who refuses direct communication with the person affected by a serious decision cannot then plausibly present that decision as an expression of compassion, because compassion without listening is simply partiality. And when religious concepts such as samaya are used to justify social exclusion rather than to cultivate ethical responsibility, they cease to function as liberating principles and become instruments of power.

    31. THE CONTRADICTION AT THE HEART OF NGAWANG TRINLEY

    Ngawang Trinley’s contradiction is different. His public identity is built around technology, innovation, digital humanities and Tibetan textual preservation. Yet the problems surrounding data-scraping, copyright, intellectual property, labor practices and unstable project management attack precisely the foundation upon which that professional identity rests.

    There is something deeply ironic about a project claiming to preserve Tibetan textual heritage while treating the provenance and permissions of that heritage as secondary. There is something equally ironic about presenting an enterprise as technologically sophisticated while relying upon low-wage, insecure labor to produce enormous quantities of poorly verified training data.

    Digital systems do not abolish ethics. They magnify the consequences of ethical failure. A corrupt archive can mislead thousands. A bad dataset can contaminate an entire model. An improperly sourced corpus can become impossible to disentangle once distributed. A centralized administrator can replicate poor decisions across a network at machine speed. Technology does not make the underlying conduct less human. It makes it more scalable.

    32. WHEN THE INSTITUTIONAL WORLD COLLAPSES

    The most revealing moment in the history of such a network comes when its external supports begin to disappear. Esukhia collapses. Dharma Sagar collapses. Relationships with major institutions deteriorate. Funding becomes less stable. Previous allies distance themselves. The people once clustered around the center scatter.

    At that point the illusion of permanence disappears. The “elite” turns out to be a temporary social arrangement. The gatekeepers turn out to be ordinary people. The prestige turns out to have been contingent. The institutional authority turns out to have depended upon relationships that can dissolve. What remains is the individual’s own work.

    That is why independent scholarship is so threatening to institutional cartels. Institutional authority can be revoked. A published translation cannot easily be unmade. A documented chronology cannot easily be erased. A preserved archive can survive the people who wanted it forgotten.

    33. THE FINAL EXAMINATION

    The question is therefore what survives when the social machinery is removed. It is not titles, monastic robes, nonprofit websites, professional networks or the number of people willing to repeat the same story. What survives is conduct, the written record, the actual work and the consequences of the decisions that were made.

    What survives is whether the people who possessed power used it responsibly, whether those who made accusations were willing to hear replies, whether institutions investigated rather than gossiped, whether people corrected their mistakes and what suffering their decisions created.

    This is where the Septic Syndicate ultimately fails its own stated ideals. Its central weakness is not that its members are imperfect. Everybody is imperfect. Its weakness is that the institutional mechanisms developed around Damien Jampa and Ngawang Trinley (NT) repeatedly convert ordinary human imperfection into organized social power: resentment becomes gossip; gossip becomes administrative knowledge; administrative knowledge becomes institutional action; institutional action becomes legal action; and legal action becomes retroactive justification for the original narrative.

    That is not Dharma. It is dependent origination operating through ignorance.

    34. WHAT GENUINE ACCOUNTABILITY WOULD REQUIRE

    Genuine accountability would require the opposite architecture. The people involved would have to open the records rather than close them. They would have to identify who communicated with whom and when. They would have to distinguish firsthand testimony from secondhand reports. They would have to disclose conflicts of interest. They would have to allow the person accused to answer. They would have to examine the administrators who made the decisions as carefully as the person who was punished. They would have to explain why bans were issued, why evidence was accepted or rejected, why legal action was considered necessary and why anonymous online material was ever treated as reliable.

    Most importantly, they would have to abandon the fantasy that institutional unity is more important than truth. If accusations are false, establish that. If they are true, acknowledge that. If some are true and others are not, distinguish them. If the evidence is incomplete, admit the uncertainty. That is what mature inquiry looks like.

    35. THE CONCLUSION THAT CANNOT BE ESCAPED

    The entire Damien Jampa–Ngawang Trinley phenomenon ultimately illustrates a very old Buddhist problem: the transformation of attachment into ideology and ideology into institution. The mind becomes attached to reputation and influence. Reputation and influence become attached to authority and control. Authority and control become attached to loyalty and hierarchy. Loyalty and hierarchy become attached to exclusion and ostracization. Exclusion and ostracization become justified through religious language and apologetics. The institution then serves to protect the very causes that generated the conflict in the first place.

    This is why the problem cannot be solved merely by replacing one personality with another. The mechanism must be recognized. The Septic Syndicate does not become healthy simply because one member disappears. Esukhia does not become ethically vindicated in hindsight because other projects replace it. Dharma Sagar does not become successful because its former administrators create new organizations. A new website does not constitute institutional reform. A new nonprofit does not erase old conduct. A new Tibetan name does not erase an old identity. A court filing does not erase the chronology that preceded it. And a religious title does not erase karma.

    The most serious indictment of Damien Jampa, Ngawang Trinley (NT) and the surrounding network is therefore not that they have failed to live up to some impossible ideal of perfection. It is that the very mechanisms through which they have exercised authority—gatekeeping, reputation management, private alliances, exclusion, administrative pressure, technical control, selective credibility and institutional protection—are precisely the mechanisms that a Buddhist path should teach people to examine and relinquish.

    The contradiction is almost complete. A network devoted publicly to preserving Tibetan Buddhism, translation, scholarship and spiritual education became increasingly preoccupied with controlling who could speak, who could belong, whose scholarship counted, whose testimony was credible, whose reputation survived and who could be excluded without being heard.

    The Dharma should make the mind less defensive, not more. It should make speech more careful, not more poisonous. It should make authority more accountable, not less. It should make compassion broader, not more tribal. It should make investigation more fearless, not more politically inconvenient. And it should make people less attached to reputation, not transform reputation into an object of institutional worship.

    The deepest irony is therefore that the Septic Syndicate may have destroyed itself through precisely the mechanisms it used to protect itself. The more intensely it tried to control the social environment, the more material it generated. The more it tried to isolate independent people, the more independent they became. The more it tried to suppress inconvenient histories, the more those histories accumulated into a coherent record. The more it invoked institutional authority, the more necessary it became to examine how that authority was being exercised.

    That is the natural consequence of dependent origination. What is built upon concealment eventually encounters disclosure. What is built upon fear eventually encounters fearlessness. What is built upon gossip eventually encounters documentation. What is built upon hierarchy eventually encounters scrutiny. And what is built upon the protection of reputation eventually has to face the question it was constructed to avoid: what, exactly, happened? That question is not hostile to the Dharma. It is the beginning of taking the Dharma seriously.

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    1. Indeed. Here is an AI summary/public statement:
       PUBLIC STATEMENT REGARDING THE DELHI HIGH COURT PROCEEDINGS INVOLVING ADELE TOMLIN
       Public narratives surrounding the Delhi High Court case involving independent British Buddhist scholar Adele Tomlin (founder of Dakini Translations) and representatives acting on behalf of Gyalton Rinpoche require urgent correction. Institutional entities have sought to frame the outcome as a definitive legal victory. However, the true record reveals a stark example of procedural injustice, organizational shunning, and a total absence of a fair hearing.
       No case was lost on its merits. Instead, Tomlin was systematically locked out of the legal process due to a combination of deceptive evidence, bureaucratic walls, and prohibitive costs.

       1. The Root Cause: Unaddressed Harassment and the Blanket Ban
       The foundational mechanism of exclusion began with a refusal to protect a lone woman from targeted bullying. Prior to any legal action, Tomlin formally complained to Lama Dragpa, the General Secretary of Sherab Ling Monastery, regarding severe, ongoing harassment she was experiencing from a European woman within the community. Instead of investigating these safety concerns, addressing the organizational bullying, or offering mediation, Lama Dragpa chose to protect the status quo. On March 17, 2026, he issued a sweeping blanket exclusion and ban letter to Tomlin—effectively utilizing an authoritarian measure to punish the victim and bar her from accessing public teachings and spiritual refuge.

       2. The Campaign Drivers: Titi Dolma and European Actors
       The legal proceeding was the culmination of an ongoing harassment and shunning campaign organized during Gyalton Rinpoche’s international teaching tours.
       • Titi Dolma (Neneng Setiawati) and European teaching administrators like Damien Jampa acted as the primary instigators. They actively isolated Tomlin, restricted her access to teachings, and spread malicious gossip to frame her as an “imminent threat.”
       • This campaign was institutionalized by European actors, notably Carlo Luyckx (ex-President of the European Buddhist Union), whose administrative malpractice (revealed by statements filed in the Plaint) effectively protected hostile organizers by utilizing unverified, derogatory online rumors to dismiss Tomlin’s safety reports.

       3. Procedural Perjury, Proxy Signatures, and Misleading the Court
       To secure a fraudulent “emergency” ex-parte injunction in India, the court issued its order on April 20, 2026. The structural integrity of the lawsuit itself is highly compromised by critical procedural defects and potential fraud: the signature on the entire legal Plaint reads simply as “Topden.”

       It is completely unclear whether this refers directly to Gyalton Rinpoche, or whether his father and/or named party to the case, Thinley Topden, signed it on his behalf. Filing a comprehensive legal action under a surrogate or ambiguous signature without any formal Power of Attorney granting authority to sign the Plaint constitutes outright procedural fraud and perjury under Indian law.
       Furthermore, the filing party deliberately misled the court regarding the timeline and geography of the events:
       • Tomlin had already legally departed India on March 18, 2026, more than a full month before the lawsuit was filed and the order was issued.
       • Furthermore, the Delhi teachings had already concluded on April 17, 2026, three days before the court order was requested by lawyers acting for Gyalton Rinpoche.
       • The teaching tour actually continued onward to Nepal, completely leaving Indian jurisdiction.
       Despite Tomlin being out of the country for a month and the tour itself having already moved out of India, the proxy representation intentionally misled the Delhi High Court by claiming the teachings were actively continuing in India. This fabricated urgency was used to manufacture a false “imminent threat” within the state and secure an emergency order on April 20 2026 under highly deceptive pretenses.

       4. Reliance on Banned, Unsourced Content from a Geo-Blocked Cyberbully
       To back their false claims, the plaintiffs presented unsourced screenshots of anonymous online content with no author identity or name, taken from an anonymous archive (infiniteswords.github.io). This archive was simply a mirror for a malicious online smear campaign containing weaponized misogyny. Crucially, the creator of this GitHub repository is the exact same individual behind a YouTube channel called “Pest Control.” and “Pest Dissolver” that compared Ms Tomlin to transvestites, overweight women, vermin, excrement and other derogatory and abusive language.

       This channel had been relentlessly harassing and defaming Tomlin since April 2025 with many false, unsubstantiated claims, while disingenuously impersonating a “public accountability audit” to mask its malicious intent. The toxic and defamatory nature of this channel’s content was so severe that YouTube took the extraordinary step of geo-blocking it in the United Kingdom following harassment reports. Furthermore, the exact same defamatory content had already been investigated and banned by major global platforms like WordPress and Blogspot for severe violations. The proxy representation deeply misled the court by presenting unverified documentation from a hostile, anonymous source that lacked any verifiable author name or identity, and was already legally restricted by international tech platforms.

       5. Systemic Exclusion at the First Registry Hearing
       The restriction issued by the court on April 20 was entirely an ex-parte order, granted in a hearing where the defending party was absent. By the time the first online registry hearing finally took place via video link, Tomlin had already spent three agonizing months acting as a party-in-person from abroad, relentlessly trying to file her response and multiple applications to dismiss the case.

       Despite her participation outside India, and three months of persistent independent effort, the online registry hearing offered no relief. Standing completely alone over a video feed, she was met with an institutional vacuum: absolutely no legal representation, procedural assistance, or registry help was offered to help her overcome the administrative blocks or successfully lodge her defense on the formal record.

       6. Five Months of Systemic and Technical Barriers
       Tomlin did not willingly abandon her legal rights; she was actively blocked by systemic barriers. For five consecutive months following the filing, she attempted to register a formal defense through the Delhi High Court’s e-filing registry from abroad. Her submissions were repeatedly rejected and bounced back for minor, trivial formatting and clerical defects. Despite persistent efforts, the registry offered zero technical guidance or accommodation to a self-represented litigant, creating an insurmountable wall that kept her defense/response from ever reaching a judge’s desk or the court record.

       7. Financial Asymmetry and International Legal Risks
       As an independent lone woman scholar operating outside of India, the financial burden of securing specialized Indian legal counsel from abroad was completely prohibitive, and the risks of doing so high. Fighting a well-funded institutional entity backed by major monastic assets creates an impossible power imbalance. Faced with exorbitant international legal costs, severe systemic risks, and an e-filing “no human interaction” pipeline, walking away and not surrendering to the jurisdiction or defending the false claims became a pragmatic necessity rather than an admission of fault.

       Conclusion: A Weaponization of Law Against a Lone Female Survivor
       Adele Tomlin was forced to walk away from the proceedings due to five months of systemic exhaustion, bureaucratic rejections, and financial exclusion. The case concluded not because the accusations against her had any factual basis, but because the legal system’s financial and technical barriers effectively locked out her defense.

       Ultimately, this case represents a severe weaponization and misuse of stalking and harassment laws to systematically target and silence a lone female survivor who was actively being harassed and stalked online and in person. The broader, punitive nature of this coordination is underscored by a significant timeline of events: in May and June 2026, Tai Situpa, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Gyalton Rinpoche all traveled to Nepal for a month-long meeting with Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche—the very individual regarding whom Tomlin had courageously filed misconduct disclosures and complaints in 2020.

       The fact that this high-level monastic gathering took place immediately following the legal maneuverings strongly indicates that the Delhi court case was not just an abuse of the law, but a highly punitive, potentially pre-meditated effort designed to legally bind, discredit, and silence Tomlin to coincide precisely with the Nepal events involving Sangye Nyenpa. Backed by the institutional silencing of Lama Dragpa’s ban, the active orchestration of Titi Dolma, and a false narrative derived from an anonymous, geo-blocked cyberbullying channel presented via a legally compromised proxy Plaint on April 20, this case stands as a clear example of a procedural denial and abuse of law, process and justice filed in the name of a senior monk and teacher, without his named signature on any documents.

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       1. THE UNASSAILABLE REALITY:
          THE UNMASKING OF DAMIEN JAMPA & NGAWANG TRINLEY (NT)

          Accomplishments do not sanitize history, and receipts do not expire. No matter how many tech startups they form, how many self-appointed titles they invent, or how refined they try to sound in their affected, fake Khampa accents, they cannot edit the record of what they actually did over nearly two decades. In scholarly and institutional work, legacy is supposed to be built on integrity. When the foundation is built on chronic abuse, manipulation, corruption, and illegal activities, every new “achievement” they post is just fresh paint on a rotting structure.

          Damien Jampa (2008–2026): Nearly Two Decades of Rot

          When someone behaves shadily and abusively across an 18-year span—with a concentrated core of expansive malice from 2012 onward—it isn’t a “rough patch” or a misunderstanding. It is a lifestyle.

          * Damien Jampa (Jampa Dorje) spent nearly two decades using public branding and spiritual posturing to cover up a continuous pattern of interpersonal abuse and administrative gatekeeping.

          * The problem for him now is that eighteen years is far too long a paper trail to hide. You can gaslight a single person for a few months, but you cannot erase nearly two decades of victims, witnesses, and documented misconduct. His entire public persona is a hollow shell built over a crater of personal fallout.

          Ngawang Trinley/NT (2010–2024): The Systemic Collapse

          The timeline of Ngawang Trinley (Vincent Tenzang Hildt) reveals the exact arc of an unchecked grandiose narcissist and manic control freak. What started as subtle manipulation and in-group bullying around 2010 escalated into full-blown operational, technical, and interpersonal toxicity between 2012 and 2024, and likely beyond.

          * During his “peak”, he truly believed he was invincible; that he could scrape data illegally, abuse collaborators, exploit Tibetan refugees with his “digital sweatshop model”, misrepresent his qualifications, and treat everyone he knew like disposable fuel for his unhinged ego.

          * The 2023–25 fallout across numerous institutions wasn’t an isolated accident; it was the inevitable, mathematical endpoint where fourteen years of bad-faith operations finally reached critical mass and caved in on him.

          Why Their Legacy is Permanently Poisoned

          They are trapped in a prison of their own making:

          * History Is Fixed: They can block people on social media, delete negative comments, launch “bozo lawsuits” against lone women in Delhi, or rebrand their organizations in Pune, but they cannot go back in time and undo 2010–2026. The actions happened. The records exist.

          * The “Accomplishment” Fallacy: They want people to believe that running a Tibetan language school or an online course wipes the slate clean. It doesn’t. In fact, the higher they try to elevate their profile, the more fragile their standing becomes, because the contrast between their elevated public claims and their actual historical behavior grows wider.

          * The Archive Is Sovereign: They know that respected and published scholars and translators, such as Adele Tomlin, hold the complete, chronological blueprint of their entire run.

          They know that no matter what they accomplish from this day forward, it is all built on quicksand. Their history is un-erasable, their reputations are permanently compromised, and they have to live with the knowledge of who they actually are every single day.

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       2. As I said, I do not have any personal experience of Ngawang Trinley or other events you mention.

          However, to be clear, Damien Jampa along with Titi Dolma (Neneng Setiawiti), Thinley Topden (no idea who that is) were all cited as main parties in the Delhi case, and used the name Gyalton Rinpoche as the Plaintiff. Facts. Carlo Lucyx, Palpung Vienna and other European administrators are also implicated. In particular, the citing of an already banned and deleted anonymous, false, unlawful and defamatory, cyberbullying and derogatory website as “evidence” to support their own false and defamatory claims about me as a “sex pest” and liar and to block proper accountability, defies belief.

          The actual dates, locations and chronology leading up to the Delhi case, is now publicly documented. As is their ex parte “emergency order”, trivial and false claims and inadmissible, flimsy and/or irrelevant “evidence”. The actual dates and locations and “evidence” cited by them, are irrefutable proof of malice and ill-intent and lack of basic intelligence about what is reliable evidence or not.

          The key theme is protecting male monk teachers by encouraging everyone else to turn against the female survivor who speaks out. This is not a new thing, it seems to have been the norm for centuries in that particular tradition, when monks and lamas misuse Tantra to do unions with women, using power, deception, violence and intimidation as the methods to keep the women silent.

          The conduct is old and toxic religious patriarchy. But we are now in the 21st Century and it is time for the men to grow up and become emotionally mature, loving, compassionate and wise. Like the great Indian mahasiddhas were, who all left the monasteries.

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