He started teaching yoga, and formed a series of nonprofits. "What Yogi Bhajan accomplished," says his nephew, Surjit P.
If you meet a white hippie in a Sikh turban who practices Kundalini yoga, odds are pretty good he or she is a member of Sikh Dharma. (See sidebar, page 20.) Yogi Bhajan added a New Agey twist to traditional Sikh practice, with his embrace of yoga (more of a Hindu thing), astrology and "tantric numerology."īut the most obvious difference between Punjabi Sikhs and followers of Yogi Bhajan is that most of the latter are American converts. Sikhism is only 500 years old, but it is the eighth-largest world religion, with more than 30 million followers. In a day before Bollywood and Slumdog Millionaire, he helped introduce America to traditions from the Indian subcontinent. By 1972 there were people wearing turbans," says Sat Hanuman Singh Khalsa, a Troutdale TSA agent who joined Sikh Dharma in 1971.īhajan later made friends with U.S. Certainly, his first few decades did not hint at the prominence he would achieve: Yogi Bhajan worked as a customs agent for 15 years before emigrating to North America to teach yoga. He was born with the name Harbhajan Singh Puri to middle-class parents in the Punjab region, in an area that is now part of Pakistan. And they claim Yogi Bhajan left them rightfully in charge after his death.ĭepending on who tells his story, Yogi Bhajan was either a charismatic spiritual leader who rescued young hippies from the 1970s drug culture, or a huckster who concocted a woo-woo sect in order to support a lifestyle he could never otherwise have attained. They say they earned every penny of the raises they bestowed upon themselves. The defendants insist they've done nothing wrong. "My mother-in-law was an absolutely saintly person, but the people running her church were basically criminals.… They may look like they're saints, and talk like they're saints-but you dangle 5 cents in front of them, and what do you know?" "It's like the Catholic Church," Hari Nam adds. It really reads like a spy novel," says Hari Nam Singh Khalsa, a longtime Portland Sikh convert now living in New York City. The legal process has, for the first time, opened a window into opaque business dealings at the highest levels of their church. Many members of the faith are pained by the disputes, but also amazed. Yet because the will belonged to the head of an obscure church-and because this church has a great deal of money-the legal disputes represent much more. It's all the more confusing given that nearly all the parties share a surname taken after their religious vows: "Khalsa."ĭespite the complexity, this is a familiar kind of story: A family argues over a will.
The legal cases are extraordinarily complex, with over 800 trial exhibits and thousands of pages of filings aimed at sorting out the byzantine structure of Yogi Bhajan's organization. District Court in Portland, alleging racketeering he is also the subject of a related Oregon State Bar complaint.) Instead, the suit targets a few Portland Sikhs who have assumed control of the corporate and nonprofit empire built over four decades by Yogi Bhajan's followers. (He is a named defendant in a separate civil complaint filed by Yogi Bhajan's widow and children, in U.S. The civil suit, brought by a group of Yogi Bhajan's followers from New Mexico and later joined by the Oregon attorney general, does not name Lambert as a defendant. Six years after Yogi Bhajan's death, on a late spring day in 2011, Lambert took the stand in a courtroom in downtown Portland, a key witness in a civil trial fraught with alleged deception, theft, sex and sacrilege.