There are few things I enjoy more than an engrossing book, and I want to thank Scott Carney for writing this one. A Death on Diamond Mountain: A True Story of Obsession, Madness and the Path to Enlightenment kept me thoroughly engaged from beginning to end.

Carney has written an in-depth account of the 2012 death of Ian Thorson after he and his wife, Christie McNally, were expelled from an ostensibly Buddhist retreat.

Carney provides background on Thorson and McNally and also on Michael Roach, a former Gelugpa monk and their spiritual leader. (Mr. Roach does not consider himself to be a “former” monk, but he can no longer claim a tie to Galugpa. More on that in a bit.)

Michael Roach is the primary subject of A Death on Diamond Mountain, and the picture that emerges of his spiritual journey and teachings is a disturbing one. Scott Carney’s account shows Roach falling into every known pothole on the spiritual path and eventually plunging down a rabbit hole into a steaming pile of New Age, um, mush, taking McNally and Thorson and a lot of other people with him.

However, it has to be said that I don’t know Michael Roach personally. It is possible that Scott Carney’s portrayal is inaccurate, and we all must keep that in mind. However, I also followed up reading Carney’s book by reading Roach’s most successful book, The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life (Doubleday 2009), and having waded through Roach’s appallingly shallow understanding of the Diamond Sutra I’m inclined to think Carney is on to something.

Carney has had his own experiences with Tibetan Buddhism and probably understands some aspects of Vajrayana better than I do. However, his understanding of enlightenment is light years away from how this Zen student understands it. He also mistakenly believes that only Tibetan Buddhists take bodhisattva vows to remain in the samsaric world until all beings are enlightened, but in fact that’s what all Mahayana Buddhists do.  Beyond that, though, my quibbles with Carney’s depiction of Buddhism are minor.

How Everything That Could Go Wrong, Did

Many of the reviews of Death on Diamond Mountain have highlighted the psychological pitfalls of intensive meditation, which I have written about also.

Read More: Buddhist Meditation and the Dark Night of the Soul

Carney presents arguments that western cultural programming and Asian mysticism don’t mix. There may be something to that that might be addressed in a future article. However, most of what went wrong at Diamond Mountain, Michael Roach’s retreat center in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, was rooted in spiritual malpractices that Asian teachers have noted for centuries.

Based on Roach’s own description, early in his spiritual journey he experienced what a zennie like me would call samadhi. Samadhi itself is not enlightenment, but if skillfully integrated into Buddhist practice samadhi can bring one closer to realization.

From Carney’s description, however, Roach got no help at all from his teachers in understanding samadhi, and the samadhi was followed with some wild hallucinations that persuaded Roach he is a singularly special being destined to be a bodhisattva. I infer Roach thinks a bodhisattva is some kind of holy celestial superhuman creature, like an angel, and not just regular folks embodying selfless compassion and loving kindness.

Roach also seems to think he has penetrated the teaching of emptiness, or sunyata, when it’s obvious he doesn’t get it at all (and this is clear from his Diamond Cutter book). Otherwise he would have understood there can be no such thing as a singularly special being. Or, as it says in the Diamond Sutra (Edward Conze translation):

As many beings as there are in the universe of beings, comprehended under the term “beings” egg-born, born from a womb, moisture-born, or miraculously born; with or without form; with perception, without perception, and with neither perception nor non-perception, as far as any conceivable form of beings is conceived: all these I must lead to Nirvana, into that Realm of Nirvana which leaves nothing behind. And yet, although innumerable beings have thus been led to Nirvana, no being at all has been led to Nirvana.’ And why? If in a Bodhisattva the notion of a ‘being’ should take place, he could not be called a ‘Bodhi-being’. ‘And why? He is not to be called a Bodhi-being, in whom the notion of a self or of a being should take place, or the notion of a living soul or of a person.’  

The Buddha also warned us that the desire to become (bhava tanha), even to become a worthy thing like a doctor or a monk, is just as much a barrier to enlightenment as a desire for sensual pleasure. Yet Carney tells us that Roach is driven by a desire to become a bodhisattva, which is not how bodhisattva-nature works, according to the Diamond Sutra.

See also Enlightened Beings: Are They Really Different From Us?

It seems to me Roach was not at all well served by his teachers and given way too much space to figure things out for himself, which he did badly. He was given the exalted geshe degree more because of his financial support of Tibetan Buddhism than because of his understanding of dharma, according to Carney.

Roach’s misunderstanding of emptiness continued in his objectification of McNally, with whom he had a relationship/marriage before she divorced him and married Ian Thorson. According to Carney, he persuaded himself that enjoying sensual pleasure with McNally was not a violation of his vows of celibacy, because he realized McNally was a goddess, and not a human female. If this is accurate, it tells us Roach had pretty much slipped any tether to Buddhism, including traditional Tibetan tantra, and was making up his own religion as he went along.

Roach has also developed a theory that building up the right kind of karma will bring you love and wealth and whatever else you want, and I’ve found this idea expressed in Michael Roach’s own words. Roach’s views on karma are a ghastly mashup of The Secret and “prosperity gospel” teachings that bears no resemblance to the Buddha Dharma.

Yet, Carney says, Michael Roach seems to be entirely sincere. In 2003 he wrote to the Dalai Lama and came clean about his relationship with McNally. He also claimed he had grasped the nature of emptiness directly and wanted His Holiness to write a cover blurb for his next book. Well, maybe this was not sincerity as much as chutzpah on steroids.

Shortly after this His Holiness made it clear that Michael Roach is no longer sanctioned by or allowed to be a part of the Gelug school, although Roach continues to wear the order’s robes.

The Death of Ian Thorson

The story of how McNally and Thorson were expelled from a three-year meditation retreat and chose to continue the retreat by themselves in a nearby cave can be found in many sources, and I’m not going to repeat the entire story here. Carney’s account differs from some others in that he thinks Michael Roach alone was behind McNally’s and Thorson’s expulsion, and the Diamond Mountain board merely went along.

By the time of their retreat to the cave, McNally had come to believe she was an emanation of the Hindu goddess Kali. The couple had a water filter but refused to use it, Carney says, thinking they could purify the water with their minds. They both got very sick, McNally first, then Thorson. And as Thorson was dying of dehydration, McNally apparently believed she could cure him with her goddess-powers and chose not to use her cell phone or the locator beacon at hand to summon help, until it was too late.

This is as pathological as spiritual bypassing gets.

Since her husband’s death Christie McNally has remained out of public sight. I hope for her sake she is receiving competent psychological counseling. The retreat center she and Michael Roach built together, and from which she was expelled, is still drawing followers and still being led by Michael Roach. So we probably have not heard the last of him, unfortunately.

[This is an article I wrote for the Buddhism section of About.com. However, since About.com has removed it from their servers, all rights revert to me.]