2011 Devdaha
Marici at Devdaha Lake, Halkhoriya Jungle in spring 2011, around a year before being kidnapped by Ram Bomjon and chained to a tree in this jungle. This was the only trip we had been allowed to make to this lake, just around half an hour from our Halkhoriya settlement, although from ouside Bomjon’s compound villagers had been coming to this lake regularly for fishing and picking Niuro and Kurilo wild vegetables. The lake had dried out after 2012, when Bomjon’s settlement and construction activity destroyed the area.
I am one of the more than forty victims of Ram Bahadur Bomjon, the ‘Buddha Boy’ of Nepal. After narrowly surviving his 3-months long torture, I decided to inform the public about his crimes. I loved the Nepalese culture and the amazing nature of the land, including the Halkhoriya Jungle, and this connection and my extensive travels, as well as the ability to speak the Nepali language, helped me to understand the background of the prolonged and repeated crimes that “Maitriya Guru” Bomjon continues to pursue even to these days.
I had been a long-time Bomjon-supporter and volunteer in translations of his teaching in 2011, invited to Halkhoriya in Nepal to help his Sangha in the terrain, by Andrea Good, the then leader of Western followers. But I was long before that an active online manager of the “Buddha Boy Google Group” (already deleted) with more than 700 members, assistant in many translations about Bomjon and the proof-reader of Andrea’s book on Bomjon, Reflection on Palden Dorje.
After I have arrived to Nepal in January 2011, I stayed in his Halkhoriya compound, constructed around his “meditation place”, between January and March 2011. Later I was unexpectedly, without any given reason excommunicated, but remained an outspoken propagator of the Buddha Boy, devoted to him and supporting him and humbly accepting his “ban”, as they called it.
After one year of stay in the area of Halkhoriya, when my main prayers and support continued to be directed towards Bomjon, I had been suddenly enticed to return to his compound by a lie that he wished to have an urgent conversation with me, on 28 December, 2012. I had been then kidnapped and held hostage by him for three months till 24 March, 2012, beaten by him and his monks and civilian attendants, tortured by countless bizarre ways, and sexually assaulted at his order. The heavy chains he used to tie me damaged my neck bone and ankles. He had also robbed me of my computer, phone and other devices and of my Czech ID card. He had ordered many of his attendants, Buddhist monks, to torture me and beat me regularly, while I was left on the chains alone in the deep jungle. The only time when he ordered me to unchain from the tree was for the Big Beating during a new moon night, when my two wrists had been broken by Bomjon himself and Molam lama, he broke a hole into my forehead, before I was carried back to the tree and chained to it again.
During the World Peace Maitri Puja that he organized in the same place in March 2012, he ordered his attendant Darshan Limbu to add to my suffering by sexually assaulting me on repeated occasions, in a sick and desecrating way, in between the mantra-chanting of his Puja While there were tens of thousands of people, including hundreds of foreigners just a few minutes’ walk from the tree I was chained to, the torturing, terrorizing with “we will kill you tomorrow” and sexual defiling continued. I guess it was the same in the case of the other hostage of Bomjon, the Nepalese Mata Ani, about whom I did not know that time.
Tomasz Henryk Tarnawski, khenpo Dawa (Buddhist monk-teacher), Khaiba (Buddhist Thangka-painter), Budha lama (monk), Shyangbo Dong Tamang had been directly torturing me, apart from Darshan and Molam lama, and hundreds of Tamang Nepalese villagers, residents and visitors, witnessed this, assisting the torturers with “logistics” (torture tools, chains, preparing the places etc.).
Ram Bomjon released me only after the pressure by the media and my Nepalese friends, just to call immigration authorities on me immediately,  in March 2012, claiming that I had no visa to stay in Nepal (obviously during the three months chained in the jungle I could not visit the Immigration Office to solve this issue ). Without treatment of my multiple fractures (made by Bomjon and Molam), of the extreme exhaustion and trauma, I was detained just the next day from my release from Halkhoriya, treated like a criminal, while my torturers had not been prosecuted. Staying one week in the horror of awaiting a four-year-long jail if failing to pay, I was not even able to properly wash myself after the three months on chain. I was forced to pay the visa fee also for the three months that I was held hostage by Bomjon in his jungle. (Nepal is apparently the only country of the world where a kidnap and torture victim has to pay for the visa during the time of being kept against her will).
After begging my European friends (not having a family) to save me, the 2600 dollars were sent by one of my friend’s pensioned father, who was moved by my situation, and I was deported on my own costs to Europe. Half of my things had been missing and never returned. They are still being held by Ram Bomjon and his followers.
Bomjon and his torture assistants continued to enjoy impunity and protection from politicians and rich donors. Soon he continued to kidnap, hold against their will, beat and torture numerous other people, not being prosecuted or criticized in Nepal till today. The Nepali media, which was realistically covering his crimes up to 2012, had abruptly stopped to do so, and returned to this topic only after 5 years,  in 2017, in a celebrating and propagatory tone, elevating Bomjon to Nepal’s pride, a god and higher than Gautama Buddha.
Nepali authorities, politicians and Buddhist leaders had never condemned Ram Bomjon’s criminal deeds against more than forty people and had never offered compensation and support to his victims.
Still, I do not feel resentment towards those who are still his followers, and read this text about me, the author of this website, with an agenda to find my vulnerabilities, so that they could strike down at me with “proofs” of what they are desperately trying to spread about me, that I should be an unreliable source, an evil enemy (a witch – Bokshi – in Bomjon’s own words), filled with hatred towards Nepal’s Buddha Boy, a mentally ill, e.g. “crazy woman” (as Bomjon called me), anti-Buddhist and many similar stamps. I know much too well how innocent but fanatic devotion towards a charismatic spiritual personality can turn into strong negative emotion towards his critics, and, G’d-forbid, people who claim to be even his direct victims of violence or sexual harm.
After all, I used to be on the “other side” too, between around 2007 and 2012. I can very easily remember how I was trying to justify even the most extreme negative news leaking out about him already during those initial years, like his sword violence against the Ratanpuri villager boy, the holding hostage of an anonymous Spanish tourist for weeks in his jungle and releasing her in dire condition, or hearing about his desire to let bring himself five virgins in his dark forest for who knows what reason…
I know much too well how blinding is that “drugged state” called “devotion” towards a “guru”, how all logical and moral reasoning and feeling gets twisted, deformed and dissolved by its “light”. Even more I can understand those unfortunate misled beings who mix this devotion, as I myself did, with motherly and protective feelings towards the “Little Buddha”, a now 27 years old strong Tamang man, who but started his meditation as a cute teenager. Watching the videos spread around YouTube we have been all fooled that Ram Bomjon is a solitary teenager living in the jungle, absorbed in deep meditation, but we arrive to Nepal, we are faced with a sophisticated organization, hundreds of attendants and volunteers around him, established compounds on illegally encroached jungle land with concrete buildings, kitchens, water pumps, electricity generators, loudspeakers, tractors, jeeps, computers and politicians taking the first seats in meetings… And we realize that the ‘Buddha Boy’, who was presented in videos and websites as a Nepali “Maugli” living in the open jungle, is actually a twenty-something muscular man carrying a sword under his Ariel-washed perfumed robe, perfectly combed and sitting on elevated thrones, expecting people to throw themselves on the ground in front of him, living in his hidden jungle villa and having beautiful nuns and girls visiting him regularly in his secret chambers…
Instead of a spontaneously enlightened ecology-oriented Jungle Ascetic we meet a well-established cult with strict rules and regulations based on inequality of genders, castes, religions and nationalities, we meet  armed guards, and totally non-ecological settlements cut out from lush jungles, where the “guru” is inaccessible, not communicating and interested only in rich donors and influential visitors.
I went through all this illusion, delusion and disillusionment till the end. Yes, till nearly my own end…
Kantipur newscut 2012
Bomjon’s Slovak torture victim Marici in Nepali newspaper Kantipur in March 2012