Truth: In the New Kadampa Tradition, to cover the costs of running a Center or a branch group at a hired venue we charge a facility fee or a suggested donation, which is perfectly normal for any organization. For weekend or longer courses we also need to charge for accommodation.
However, the prices charged by the NKT are kept deliberately as affordable as possible. Compared with other courses, conferences, seminars or retreats, they are often substantially less expensive.
Truth: Very reasonable suggested donations (compared to many other religious and non-religious organizations) are requested for drop-in classes, courses and retreats, and in residential Centers a rent is charged for accommodation. In accordance with NKT Center constitutions, none of the income or property may be paid by way of profit to its directors, trustees, staff, teachers, members or any other individual person.
Many NKT members are supported with sponsorships to fulfil responsibilities such as teaching and other administrative tasks. The NKT has already created hundreds of jobs worldwide and trained many people in skills that they have used later to find other jobs.
Truth: The NKT has never been involved in benefit fraud. In the mid-nineties such allegations were made, but a government investigation found no truth in it and the NKT was exonerated (unfortunately not before the Guardian and Independent newspapers had irresponsibly reported these allegations without checking with local unemployment or housing benefit offices.)
Truth: This is not true, and not a shred of evidence has been produced to support this repeated claim. In the Internal Rules (§3) it says:
The New Kadampa Tradition shall always be an entirely independent Buddhist tradition and the NKT-IKBU shall have no political affiliations.
The NKT has never had, and never will have, any political affiliations with the Chinese or Tibetan Governments. This is because mixing religion and politics is the cause of many problems, such as those evidenced by the Dalai Lama’s political interference in the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism. It is common for critics of the Dalai Lama to be labelled “Chinese sympathizers” (or usually far worse epithets) or to be accused of being on the payroll of the Chinese Government but, in the case of the NKT-IKBU, this is an entirely false accusation.