Michael Roach, also known as Geshe Michael Roach, is a 67-year-old male who was born in Los Angeles, California. His title of Geshe/ma is a Tibetan Buddhist academic degree for monks or nuns. Geshe Michael spent twenty-five years studying to receive a Geshe degree which is the equivalent to a doctor of theology. Using this degree to write more than twenty books and be the founder of both the Asian Classics Institute and the Andin International Diamond Corporation. In 1999, Geshe Michael was approached by Doubleday Publishing / Random House of New York to write a book about his experiences in helping build Andin Diamond into the million-dollar operation it is today by using ancient Buddhist principles of generosity and wisdom. With that the publication “The Diamond Cutter” came to be. Geshe Michaels book became an International bestseller, and made in over 20 different languages, Used by millions across the world in Universities, Companies, and your normal everyday people. Six years after he was born Geshe Michael and his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona where he completed his elementary and high school education. His life from beginning to end has in some way revolved around religion starting with All Saints Episcopal Church, where he served as an altar boy, sang in the chair, and was the President of the youth group. In 1970, Geshe Michael accepted a full scholarship to Princeton University where he majored in Religion and graduated with honors. He also received the Presidential Scholar Medal from the United States President who at the time was Richard Nixon. Getting a full ride to an Ivy League school such as Princeton is no small feat. During his teenage years he allotted much of his time to social activism. In High School the administration accepted a constitution written by him which allowed the students greater rights. Geshe Michael spent several years volunteering and protesting for many groups such as Cesar Chavez, United Farm Workers, and was briefly jailed for a non-violent disruption of Napalm weapons research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton during the Vietnam War. While at Princeton Geshe Michael was going to continue his beliefs towards being a Protestant. He served as a student member of the board of the Procter Foundation of the Episcopal Church at Princeton where he helped write a revised church liturgy. While studying at Princeton he stayed at the church parish house where he was scheduled to attend seminary (the study to become a priest, minister, or rabbi) after he graduated. This was his plan before his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and became gravely ill. Upon her passing, Geshe Michael’s father also passed away from cancer and his brother committed suicide. As every person does in their lifetime Geshe Michael was filled with doubt and decided to take a year off to travel to India in search of answers towards life’s purpose. Coming in contact with refugee Tibetan Monks in 1973, when he first arrived, he decided he wanted to stay. He used the help of an old contact from Princeton by the name of Professor William LaFluer to help apply for a grant through Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs and return to India. Geshe Michael was awarded an additional scholarship under the circumstances that he would study the conditions of Tibetan refugees. There he completed his thesis and graduated. Soon he began his twenty-five years of study into Buddhism. Buddhism in a nutshell is a practice and spiritual development leading to insight into the true nature of reality. Their practices are a means of changing yourself in order to develop the qualities of awareness, kindness, and wisdom. This experience within the Buddhist tradition has developed over thousands of years and has created an incomparable resource for those who wish to follow a path of Enlightenment one in which Geshe Michael was in desperate need of. With his new found knowledge Geshe Michael wanted to make the Geshe Program available to westerners in their own language. He opened the Asian Classics Institute in New York. Along with this in 2003 Geshe Michael and Lama Christie McNally founded Diamond Mountain University near Tucson Arizona where the main course of study in Buddhist Philosophy. Geshe Michael followed up with public talks, seminars, and training to help real people with everyday problems in their life. Named as the “Diamond Cutter'' philosophy, this basic doctrine follows as though our reality is shaped by how well we take care of and treat others. Acts of kindness towards others creates seeds in the mind that complete everything about the people and the world around us, as reflected in everything from our finances, health, and partner, on up to happiness, peace of mind, and enlightened self. Geshe Michael’s life as a businessman started when he learned carpentry from his father and worked for the family business of construction during the summers. The family values followed him to Princeton where he worked as the student manager of the Express Reunion Agency, where he oversaw a small fleet of trucks along with employees which provided the university moving services. In 1981 he was directed by a teacher to start a business in Manhattan in order to help support Tibetan refugees. He went on to join two entrepreneurs from Israel to start the Andin International Diamond Corporation. Andin eventually attained the world’s most sought-after gemstone website “jewlery.com.” Andin started out as a low-level company scraping by with a loan of fifty-thousand dollars and less than five employees. Sales grew to an excess of one-hundred million dollars per year before Geshe Michael retired as Vice President in 1999. Geshe Michael’s division was in charge of acquiring and handling over thirty-thousand diamonds. While AID was being purchased by Warren Buffets Richline Group and making over two-hundred million Geshe Michael was busy taking a journey on a three-year silent meditation retreat in Arizona and earning his Graduate Gemologist degree. Geshe Michael stated “the goal of every human activity is to achieve both internal and external prosperity. We need to find new ways to make that prosperity something meaningful for everybody,” (Biography.) This is a part of his teaching today. He studied for twenty-five years a concept of life, but applying those teachings to your everyday life is the most intricate part. That’s what Geshe Michael is teaching, a better understanding of the true causes behind human’s successes and failures.
There are constant controversies between whether his contributions are positive or negative. On one hand he has turned to the task of helping republish hundreds of missing Tibetan books and founded charities to help refugee monks providing food and clothing for thousands. Along with constructing buildings and dormitories, and elementary school, textbooks, optometrist services, teacher salaries and student scholarships, a major water system, vocational and agricultural training, an infirmary, a fully equipped computer center, a complete library, a solar-run kitchen facility, and cottage industries to the refugee monks of Sera Mey Tibetan Monastery. On the other hand, he misleads his audiences about the effectiveness of his methods. Since 2011, Geshe Michael has regularly given them a dishonest self-introduction. Most believe DCI’s cheerleaders and facilitators are just too blinded by devotion to separate fact from fantasy. MRF a writer for WordPress said it best when they quoted Geshe Michael on a more credible account that he became a novice monk at the small Rashi Gempil Ling Temple in Howell, New Jersey right after graduating from Princeton University in 1975, and about six years later asked Ofer Azrielant, an immigrant fresh from Israel for a job:
I remember I couldn’t get a job … I went to thirty different companies; they all threw me out. And then finally I met this guy and I begged him, “I’ll do anything, I’ll wash the windows, I’ll, I’ll clean the floor, I’ll do anything, just teach me the diamonds.”
And so, the Princeton graduate started out as an “errand boy … carrying nondescript canvas bags” for the 30-year-old Jew and his wife Aya Azrielant:
And I had to carry things from 33rd street to 47th street and that was my job. And then one day he gave me eight dollars, and then later on he gave me nine dollars, and then he gave me ten dollars, and then he gave me a salary and then I got a position and then it was fifty thousand, and sixty thousand and it kept going, escalating, you know and then finally it reached this point where I’m the vice president and I have to have all these things. You know, at the beginning I didn’t know what to do with the money. I, I just put it in the bank account and I didn’t know what to do with it, you know, I just collected it. And now it seems like I can’t bear, I’m, I’m overspent usually [laughter] and I can’t live without it, you know, and… And, and my mind still wants more, you know your mind wants more. (ACI Course 8, 1996.)
Since 2009, when he founded the Diamond Cutter Institute, Geshe Michael Roach and his top students have traveled the world to teach “the ancient secrets for having everything in business and life.” (Biography.) Focusing on wealth, health, and relationships, Geshe Michael starts out in each country with a seminar on how to use principles of karma to plant “oxygen money”, and introduces the idea of having money in abundance, readily available like the air we breathe:
This system really works. For us money can become like oxygen… I don’t have to worry about the air, there’s enough air… If I want to breathe, I just {inhale} and the air will come in… When I want money, I just use the Diamond Cutter System and then money comes to me.
In one country after another he constantly is tells the audiences that his seed system can help them achieve financial freedom and much more:
Tonight we’re going to talk about oxygen money… In 15 minutes I will teach you how you can make a two-hundred and fifty million dollar business, have a beautiful partner, have energy and save the world…just listen! …Oxygen money, beautiful partner, youth, and inner peace— you don’t need to choose, you can have them all.”
Geshe Michael had a student by the name of Christie McNally in 1996 where they began a “spiritual partnership.” With this they had a secret marriage where their vows included – never to be more than 15 feet apart, eating from the same plate, reading the same books together. It’s a bit hypocritical that this was a Christian ceremony because he wanted to honor their Christian heritage and wanted McNally to be entitled to his possessions if anything was to happen to him. But, was questioned about the wisdom of the partnership as it was a breach of Gelug monastic vows. Professor Robert Thurman urged Geshe Michael to “renounce his monastic vows and to stop wearing the robes that mark him as a member of monastic order.” Through all of this he decided to stick with his title of Geshe, even though his and McNally’s downfall in 2009. So, could Geshe Michael use his own methods to get him through his marital and financial issues? MRF comes back to question him about it. They had “$30,000 in credit card debt and little else”, he wrote a letter to students and supporters asking for money to buy him a new home: “… I would like to unashamedly ask if any of you would consider helping me to purchase the Rainbow House, with either a gift or a loan,” (Biography.) Having failed to make oxygen money to pay for his own house, he now owes people a debt of gratitude:
‘Home’ for me means Rainbow House… This place was bought and paid for by a huge group of my friends and students about 5 years ago, and I would like once more to express my grateful thanks to each of you who contributed. This is the first time in my life that I have had my own home, and it means a lot to me.
So again putting into question if he couldn’t really handle his financial issues on his own, did his “karmic management” actually help build a multimillion dollar company? Roach’s methods show how concerned he is with his influence, because he is so concerned about the money he is making. In Stephen Mack’s article, “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past?” Mack articulates how past public intellectuals, the real public intellectuals were primarily focused on the spread of knowledge, although Roach is doing so, his primary focus is gaining followers for the money that follows them. Geshe Michael’s method of oxygen money has been a heartbreaking deception born of his misinterpretation of karmic principles.
Comments