I left a little over two years ago, and when people reach out asking whether they should do the training, I generally recommend they don’t. In very rare cases, I do recommend it—but this is based on my assessment of their developmental readiness and whether it’s truly a fit for them given what they want and what MAPLE offers.
Our culture needs a more nuanced understanding of what appropriately constructed developmental spaces look like. It’s actually quite rare to find someone well-positioned to take advantage of what MAPLE is offering. Most people are drawn there not because they’re ready for that style of training, but because there’s nowhere else for them to go, or because they see in Soryu and the institution an authority they don’t have internally—which opens them up to problematic cult dynamics.
This is tricky territory because you do the training in part to develop that clarity...but there’s a developmental threshold of a relatively secure attachment system that I believe is necessary to benefit from the training while minimizing potential harms. I don’t recommend MAPLE to people with significantly insecure attachment (which many, perhaps most, seekers have) because the institution does not know how to work with that skillfully and can end up creating more harm. This is not unique to MAPLE...you can find similar stories of harm that Sasha references from places like Korinji and Dai Bosatsu in the US, and even more harrowing stories from training centers in Japan.
If you do have relatively secure attachment, MAPLE can be a powerful place to clarify the nature of being and learn to commit yourself deeply to service. But MAPLE lacks sophisticated psychological and developmental filtering, which, given our cultural context and the kinds of people typically drawn there, is a huge issue. I believe MAPLE has an obligation to develop more psycho-emotional literacy around attachment, projection, authority dynamics, and boundaries.
I left due to ideological differences, partly around this very issue—what I saw as a lack of adequate understanding of these dynamics. Unfortunately, my sense is that over the two years since I and many close friends left, the culture has become more insular and rigid. For a time, MAPLE’s culture maintained a generative tension between the more conservative traditional Buddhist perspective and a more meta-modern approach (circling, IFS, bio-emotive work). Without that tension, I think it’s headed in the wrong direction.
All that said, I’m deeply grateful for my time there. My life is better for the experience, even as I continue integrating challenging material it brought up. As an otherwise arrogant and comfortable educated white dude I’m grateful it held me in a sufficiently uncomfortable position where I now have to integrate difficult perspectives and experiences. My life and relationships are better for it. I believe I’m an example of someone who could benefit because of my relationship to authority (generally skeptical and insubordinate), character (autodidactic and willing to do things my own way), and support network (lots of friends and mentors outside of the training).
For certain people, working with Soryu and living at MAPLE can be transformative. I wouldn’t frame it simply as a “bad cult”—I’d say the training program isn’t calibrated for where most people actually are developmentally in our culture right now and that MAPLE has throughout it’s history failed to filter for that reality.
As others have mentioned, the sleep schedule isn’t unique and is more or less consistent with other intensive Buddhist contemplative spaces. But coupling that schedule with the intense focus on existential risk work can create problematic dynamics.
All that nuancing aside, I basically agree with the sentiment in Sasha’s post. MAPLE is not for the vast majority of people, and for lack of a more nuanced consideration of appropriate developmental dynamics and containers, simply saying “Stay Away” is probably a good heuristic for most people at this time, unfortunately.
I should add that MAPLE’s failure to appropriately filter individuals throughout its history is partially my failure—I was director of admissions for some of that time. This isn’t an easily solvable issue.
I have heard that Goenka centers, for instance, have byzantine filtering systems involving complex decision trees and multiple stakeholder phone calls based on responses. The psycho-spiritual intensity MAPLE works with is far greater than Goenka centers, yet its filtering system is significantly less sophisticated.
I thought this commentary on MAPLE by a former resident was interesting: