Cultishness?

There's a large group of people staying in the Hyatt who all are wearing flowy white clothes and large gold-and-crystal necklaces etc. with various shapes from sacred geometry. I've met two of them--the first, a woman in the spa who was rushing busily to her massage and seemed very impatient. She also asked me where she could buy things related to Ayurveda here in KTM. The second is a man who came up to me and started chatting a little earlier this morning. He told me that they're all students of a Western-born teacher who is allegedly an incarnation of the Buddha. We talked about school (he went to Stanford) and anthropology, and when we hit upon spiritual traditions, he seemed highly critical of all authority or hierarchy in a spiritual tradition, including figures like the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa. He said that if H.H. asks Tibetans to put photographs of him up in their houses knowing that they will be killed, it's a kind of conceit, and a futile effort. Mostly he objected to the "partisanship' of rinpoches and lamas who disagree with each other's views. In a way this is true, not just of Buddhist teachers and scholars but of any tradition, spiritual or otherwise; the politics always interferes. Still, I found his ideas a bit presumptuous, especially because judging from outside a tradition nearly always leads to either further blindness or worse. Anyway, his seven-spoked crystal wheel amulet (about the size of the palm of an average hand) was interesting and amusing. But who am I to be amused? Maybe it (and his teacher) have power beyond what I can imagine. All I know is that seeing a banner with a white guy's face and rainbow in the background saying "Welcome to the Land of the Buddha" makes me think "cult" and chuckle.

I'm off to read.