The Mystery of Artist and Buddhist Leader Dorje Chang

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ucked between a taqueria and a discount tobacco store on downtown San Francisco’s Market Street sits the International Art Museum of America (IAMA). The white-column-framed double doors open into a towering hall with a pond and a mossy wooden treehouse. Upstairs, past a pair of imperial guardian lions, the collection begins — a mishmash of statues, Chinese ink paintings, European landscapes, and modern art. It’s odd, but not remarkably so, until you see it: Behind heavy wooden doors sealed with three metal bars that act as bolt locks is the Treasure Room. Inside sits a sculpture created by His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III; it’s a cave-like structure that holds a fog that never dissipates. The sculpture is a miracle, the museum guide will tell you, proof that this artist, born in the Sichuan region of China, who arrived in America in the late Nineties, is the third coming of the primordial Buddha. 

The artist and Buddhist leader is himself a mirage. The museum in San Francisco — as well as the one named after him outside of Los Angeles, in Covina — claim they’re unaffiliated with Dorje Chang. The captions on the wall tell a different story. The description next to a painting by a Dutch master might say: “View of a Riverside Town, Johan Hendrik van ­Mastenbroek, Oil on Canvas”; the one beside a painting by Dorje Chang is six paragraphs long and includes this sentence: “Anyone who lifts a brush in an attempt to paint such a painting will appreciate the fact that this scholarly style cannot be accomplished by anyone other than a literary giant who is a great master of art.” 

I ask my tour guide at the sister museum in Covina if it’s best to understand Dorje Chang as the pope of Buddhism. She corrects me, explaining that while “the pope is more like a representative of God, Dorje Chang Buddha III is the God.”  

The assertion by the tour guide was not a hyperbolic outlier. To his followers, “the accomplishments of H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III are the highest in the entire world,” as one writer puts it. Zhaxi Zhouma (née Carol Welker), Dorje Chang’s most prominent white American follower, writes in her memoir, Thus Have I Seen, of many miraculous acts she witnessed during her two decades studying and spreading the word of Dorje Chang. At one point, she shares side-by-side photos: The first shows an elderly Chinese man, tan and wrinkled with long, black hair; the second, which, she says, was taken the next day, shows an airbrushed face with no lines, bright-white complexion, full lips, and what appears to be a black wig. It’s a look that can best be described as Michael Jackson-esque.

Art and religion are subjective. They’re hard to pin down and both take a certain suspension of disbelief. One painting is worth nothing, and another is sold for millions. One ancient tale is just a myth, and another is a text studied by believers for centuries. But the story of Dorje Chang was different, and the more the pieces of the story came into focus, the less sense it made. The mystery became something like a scab at which I couldn’t stop picking for nearly 10 years. How could a diasporic dharma teacher remain a mystery to professors and mainstream Buddhists while being trumpeted as the singular leader of international Buddhism by his followers across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States?

I’ve been in touch with experts, government officials, and a handful of followers, hoping to understand the strange man at its center. I searched and searched, looking for the thread that connected disparate worlds — art auctions and real estate, universities and congressmen, a World’s Strongest Man and a small archipelago near Australia. I was chasing three answers: Why did the third coming of the Buddha come to Pasadena? What did he hope to achieve? And how did the strange art play into it all? 

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here’s a video posted to the YouTube page of a San Francisco Buddhist temple affiliated with Dorje Chang that recounts a 22-day trip their Buddha master took to Taiwan in 1995. In it, Dorje Chang, barely 30, has a jet-black bowl cut and wears a white robe and black dress shoes. He’s greeted at the airport by a marching band and swarms of admirers chanting, “Hello, Master!” The artist, not yet recognized as the reincarnated Buddha, is escorted by a massive motorcade and received at receptions by major Taiwanese political, military, and police figures. At one point, we watch as multiple officials prostrate themselves before Dorje Chang, becoming his disciples. 

Throughout the 30-minute video, presented like a mid-century newsreel, Dorje Chang, often seated among dignitaries and smiling easily for dozens of photographs, receives scores of bouquets and laudatory remarks. He rarely speaks in the video, though when he does, he speaks simply, usually just wishing his audience well. Instead, the video communicates his power through the awe of crowds and dignitaries; the cosmic draw of the man himself remains elusive to the uninitiated viewer.

Interestingly, throughout the video, Dorje Chang refers to Taiwan as the “precious island of our mother country,” signaling, in the view of Charles B. Jones, an expert of Chinese and Taiwanese Buddhism, “a show of unity between Taiwan” and the People’s Republic of China. At the end of the film, the narrator claims that the crowds for Dorje Chang were larger than those for Mikhail Gorbachev or Michael Jackson, but Jones — who wrote the book Buddhism in Taiwan — had never heard of the visit. “I find it very, very interesting that the film never shows him going into any ­recognizably Buddhist establishment or meeting any eminent Taiwan Buddhist leaders,” Jones says.

Something happened in the four years following that 1995 trip to send Dorje Chang halfway across the world to Southern California. He and his wife, Yuhua Shouzhi Wang, arrived in Los Angeles in 1999 with their two elementary-school-aged children, Hang Kung and Pui Chu. They purchased a 6,800-square-foot home a few blocks from Pasadena’s Wrigley Mansion for $1.8 million. At the time, Dorje Chang was known by two other names — Yi Yungao and Master Wan Ko Yee. Though the facts of his past in China are hard to verify, both his followers and an exposé from a 2013 issue of Hong Kong Phoenix Weekly — which the BBC explains as “a Communist Party-controlled outlet” — agree on aspects of his early history: Dorje Chang was born in Sichuan, worked as a painter at temples before achieving the title of master artist, and was aided in his rise by wealthy Taiwanese supporters. 

The Hong Kong Phoenix Weekly article claims Dorje Chang “brainwashed” two prominent followers into donating millions of dollars to open a Master Wan Ko Yee Museum in Hong Kong before fleeing the country. Followers of Dorje Chang counter that “this so-called case of ‘Wan Ko Yee’s Fraud’ was actually a falsely fabricated case to persecute H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III by some individuals in China who were in powerful positions at that time.” In their telling, the fraud blamed on Dorje Chang was, in fact, pulled off by one of his corrupt former disciples. In 2004, five years after Dorje Chang and his family arrived in California, China placed an Interpol red notice on “Mr. Yungao Yi and Ms. Yuhua Wang,” asking police forces worldwide to arrest and hold them pending extradition. The request was canceled without explanation in 2008, but in 2015, Zhu Haiquan, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in ­Washington, D.C., told the Pasadena Star-News that Dorje Chang was still a wanted man: “From 1984 onwards, Yi and his accomplices ­committed fraud by means of deception, causing losses of CNY 60.8 million (USD $7.32 million).”

In the early aughts, living with his wife and two young children in Pasadena, his growing flock began to include new American followers. Over the next decade, temples opened in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and later in Las Vegas, North Carolina, Atlanta, and New York. Zhaxi Zhouma spent time at Dorje Chang’s home with other devoted followers in the early 2000s. “We needed to be quite discreet. The Buddha Master actually lived in several places at the time. He needed to be protected from both his loyal disciples and people who wished Him harm,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir. Her time there consisted of doing chores and sitting for his teachings, which would sometimes continue late into the night. “Those of us who had the good fortune to be in the inner circle or mandala and could visit at almost any time were expected to stay until dismissed for the day.” 

At the time, the students understood their teacher as a Buddha master and miracle worker, able to summon “silver-white nectar resembling silk threads” from the sky that turned to a healing nectar and to perform rituals to remove negative karma. They said he had created medicines to grow hair, cure frostbite, help with inflammation, and cure malignant sores, and was “a vocalist whose songs are unique masterpieces.” Soon, they’d begin to make an even more remarkable claim. 

Becoming Buddha

In 2008, Dorje Chang’s followers began to assert that their 44-year-old Buddha master was actually the third coming of the primordial Buddha. In a giant 557-page tome, H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III: A Treasury of True Buddha-Dharma, they shared letters from more than 40 Buddhist leaders from around the world who had allegedly recognized the artist and religious teacher Master Wan Ko Yee as the reincarnated Buddha, giving him the name His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III. (Their proof has since been contested.) As followers tell me, Dorje Chang’s Buddhism is not a sect; it’s the true Buddhism.

Reincarnation is a tenet of Tibetan Buddhism, and tracing lineage of Buddhist leaders is a common practice. At age two, the current Dalai Lama was recognized as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, who himself traced a lineage back to the patron saint of Tibet. But the Dorje Chang claim is something starker: that their leader is the original Buddha returned to correct the muddled teachings across the many different branches of the ancient religion. “That’s not a thing. That’s how rare it is. I mean, that’s not a claim that gets made,” says Justin Ritzinger, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Miami, whose work focuses on Chinese Buddhism. 

“The pope is more like a representative of god; Dorje Chang Buddha III is the God.”

So, unsurprisingly, the third-coming claim has been a point of contention ever since. In 2022, I came across two YouTube videos claiming that one Tibetan leader’s recognition of Dorje Chang had been forged by a monk. As I returned to the links a couple of weeks later, both had been pulled from YouTube. I found new versions, and quickly downloaded them. In one, His Holiness Dharma Sakya Trizin Rinpoche denies ever giving the recognition he’s credited with in the 2008 book. In the other, a bespectacled monk explains, “I humbly admit that I forged this ‘letter of authentication.’” These videos, too, were soon gone. 

For true believers, the doubters can be rebuffed straightforwardly: They’re dishonest, fearful, or “demons,” as a letter from the 2008 book’s publisher put it. But on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and dozens of blogs, the third-coming claim is repeated enough to dominate any online search. 

Over the past two decades, Dorje Chang’s American following has grown, though accurate figures are hard to come by. A recent post boasted that “over a thousand Buddhists from around the world” attended his 2023 two-day birthday celebration at the Glendale Civic Auditorium, and in an email, Zhouma, one of the group’s few American-born Rinpoches (an honorific given to Buddhist teachers), wrote that she “was told there were twice what there was last year” at the 2024 event. An article from Zhouma’s blog about this year’s birthday celebration explains that more than 2,000 volumes of audio recordings of Dorje Chang’s dharma sermons are being transcribed into published manuscripts. “Over the years, tens of thousands of dharma-listening centers have been established around the world to learn Buddhism from the audio recordings of H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III.” Of course, those figures are even harder to check. 

What is clear is there is a substantial gap between the official plaudits bestowed upon Dorje Chang and his wider renown among American Buddhist leaders and academics. Most I spoke with had never heard the name. In response to my queries, a couple responded that if I wanted to understand Dorje Chang’s sect of Buddhism, I needed to follow the money. 

Throughout my research, I kept coming across prominent followers explaining that Dorje Chang was different from other Buddhist leaders because he “does not accept money or properties from other people.” In the 2008 book, there is a section that shows photocopies of letters from wealthy followers attempting to give Dorje Chang everything from $3 million in stock to property in Shanghai, Guangdong, Taiwan, San Francisco, and Pasadena, to multiple wire transfers of more than $1 million that he refused to accept. 

Following the Money

Yet, as I dove into the group’s finances, drowning in a sea of Form 990s and property records, I noticed that a handful of addresses and names, including those of Dorje Chang’s wife and children, continued to appear on tax forms for its temples, museums, publishing houses, and other LLCs. And the property holdings across California, Nevada, Georgia, and New York are staggering in scale. In 2018, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that the World Buddhism Association Headquarters (WBAH), the nonprofit that proclaims Dorje Chang as “the supreme Buddhist leader in our world,” bought 12.2 acres at Sahara Avenue and Paradise Road, near the Las Vegas Strip, for $17.5 million cash. The organization’s lawyer told the paper Dorje Chang “has no relation whatsoever” to the group; that lawyer himself served as vice president of the San Francisco museum as well as director of a Virginia-based nonprofit whose mission is “to protect and promote all thoughts and conduct that are just and beneficial to mankind such as the H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III.”

Matthew Borden, a prominent San Francisco lawyer, was hired by followers of Dorje Chang after the publication of the Hong Kong Phoenix Weekly article. His letter demanding a retraction helps demonstrate the scale of support for Dorje Chang’s movement by wealthy true believers. “We have documented several instances, including one $12,000,000 donation, where prospective donors withdrew their commitments to donate funds to my clients upon reading Phoenix’s defamatory publications,” he writes. 

Borden tells me he can’t share much about the process of writing the letter because of attorney-client privilege, but he remembers that a group of people (which did not include Dorje Chang) approached him, and that in researching the Hong Kong Phoenix Weekly article, “we traced [the allegations] to some Chinese media.” The magazine never did retract the article, he says, and the groups that hired him never pursued the threatened litigation.

“Every time i’m in his presence, there is a feeling that I feel down to my bone.”

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n the decade since I entered the IAMA’s double doors, Dorje Chang began to feel to me like that statue hidden away in the Treasure Room. He was divine, publicly lauded, but also seemingly shrouded in a fog. When I’d ask for an interview, his followers would explain that he was too modest to grant one. Instead, I found myself trying to decipher the outlines of a divine figure as painted by true believers. 

Nick Best, a World’s Strongest Man contestant and also a white American Rinpoche, says in one video that a failed attempt to lift a Buddha scepter weakened his latissimus dorsi muscle to the point that he eventually tore it off in competition. “The only person that ever lifted the Buddha scepter is Buddha master,” Best says, with his massive arms exposed by a sleeveless shirt as he stands in the corner of a gym, “and basically that is 59 levels over what is normal for people.”

Glenn Gauvry, the former mayor of the small Delaware town of Little Creek, says it was Dorje Chang’s wisdom rather than miracles that made him a devotee. When I speak to the soft-spoken Gauvry, he moves the focus away from the supernatural. “Those who follow it do see things that are quite remarkable. And I have seen them, too,” he says. “But was that the reason that made me committed to this? The answer is no.” He shares a story of sitting with Dorje Chang not long before our 2021 conversation and his Buddha master guiding him through a tough period in his life with open-ended questions. “Every time I’m in his presence, there’s a feeling that I feel down to my bone,” Gauvry says. “I mean, it’s hard to explain. You wouldn’t be able to explain it. You wouldn’t be able to write about it. Nobody would read it and feel it.”

Still, unlike Gauvry, the reams of blog posts and the bulk of the published work about Dorje Chang place the miraculous front and center. As I read of monks chanting mantras to raise two-ton pools of water into the air and of Dorje Chang summoning otherworldly nectar from the sky, I understood that using journalism as a scalpel to dissect the spirit world is a folly. Certainly, to this writer, stories of a middle-aged Buddha master lifting a 437.2-pound weight with only four fingers seem unlikely. But the beliefs of the faithful live in an arena beyond a fact-check. 

That’s what makes Dorje Chang’s art such a compelling wrinkle. The exhibited work is a central tenet of the messianic claim; conveniently, it’s also a visible miracle to behold. To have a follower recount a feat of superhuman strength, or even an apparition, is hard for a layperson to fathom but has the advantage of having happened in the past and out of the view of nonbelievers. But hanging art on a wall and inviting the public in for free is a high-wire act. What if, to them, the art looks unremarkable? 

For months in early 2020, I sent emails to more than two dozen professors of art and professors of Buddhism at universities across the country, as well as to California-based Buddhist leaders. To my surprise, nearly every professor and Buddhist leader responded that they’d never heard of Yi Yungao, Wan Ko Yee, or Dorje Chang. The professors who did recognize the name declined to comment; one deferred because “what I have to say about the individual in question might not be kind,” while another passed, explaining, “Nobody I know wants to talk about this guy in public. I suspect that most reputable figures in this tradition would not want to appear in an article where he is the main figure. Who wants to be linked, even by proximity, to that?” 

But finally, one professor mentioned that a colleague “had some interactions with the group” and shared his contact. That professor, who agreed to speak anonymously, says he was approached in 2008 by David Gonla Wu, charge d’affaires to the U.N. for Vanuatu, a small archipelago near Australia, and president of a nonprofit called the Ritz International Foundation. Wu asked him what it would cost to buy a professorship for Dorje Chang at his prestigious West Coast university, and the professor tells me he responded that professorships were not for sale. (Wu did not respond to requests for comment.) 

Building Credentials

In 2000, Auburn University shared news of a gift. “David Wu, president of the Ritz Foundation of Pomona, California, presented the university with a painting by Chinese master artist Wan Ko Yee,” the May 2000 story in the AU Report read, “and signed an agreement to fund a scholarship in art and a graduate fellowship in the College of Liberal Arts.” Much of the writing about Dorje Chang and his wife, Yuhua Wang, claims they both worked for years as professors at the school, but Jennifer Wood Adams, the director of public affairs in Auburn’s Office of the President, couldn’t find any information about them aside from that May 2000 story. “I have asked around about the couple you mention below,” she wrote via email. “Since it was so long ago and before we kept any kind of computer records, I can’t find anyone who knows anything about this.”

Barry Fleming worked in the Auburn art department back in 2000, when Dorje Chang and Wang had supposedly been professors there. He remembers reading about a gift of original art at the time. “And that’s about all. I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t that odd?’” he says. “ ‘And we don’t know anything about it in the Department of Art?’” He says Wang and Dorje Chang never taught in the Department of Art and Art History.

Fleming’s friend Dan Neil worked for Auburn’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art and remembers taking Dorje Chang’s gifted art to the museum’s vaults. “It never hung,” he says of the painting. “It was never exhibited.”  

A few years later, Fleming says, the museum director called and asked him to grab the art from the vault. When he got there, Fleming couldn’t believe what he found: a book of spin art (“like someone smoked some bad Alabama homegrown and spun for a couple hours,” Fleming says), a sculpture (“a maybe three-foot-long piece of fake jade made out of some kind of plastic,” as Neil remembers it), and a large hologram of a polar bear in an ice cave displayed within a faux-gold frame. “It was like a baseball card from the old days where you could turn it and it would kind of change on you,” Fleming says. “It was this printed plastic thing of some sort of technology that’s pretty low-tech and not in focus and really bad.” There was a $10,000 price tag still on it. 

A puckish lover of art, Fleming muses that the work is amateurish, sure, but maybe there’s some genius in it, in an Andy Kaufman-esque way. “This stuff is either way up here,” he says, raising his hand above his head, “or it’s just cuckoo crazy.” He grins, remembering the gift to his university in the Deep South. “The polar-bear cave that he made specially for Auburn University, out of the love and understanding of our culture? Man, like, that is so good it’s not even funny.”

Though Fleming never met Wang or Dorje Chang, the supposed professorships at Auburn became oft-repeated hallmarks of the couple’s stories for years to come. The positions were mentioned in forwards to books about both Dorje Chang and his wife, and even made their way into the Congressional Record when, in 2007, Rep. Barbara Lee delivered an Extension of Remarks titled “In Recognition of Master Wan Ko Yee” that began: “Madam Speaker, I rise to recognize Master Artist Wan Ko Yee, a distinguished scholar who resides in the 9th District of California. His areas of expertise include literature, painting, sculpting, calligraphy, music, martial arts, and traditional medicine. As a professor at Auburn University, Master Yee is a well-renowned author, researcher, and philosopher.” (A representative for Lee declined to comment.)

“This [artwork by Dorje Chang] is either way up here or it’s just cuckoo crazy.”

Her statement was one of the many times that Dorje Chang, his wife, and even his daughter were lauded by public officials, including by Reps. Stephanie Tubbs, Lacy Clay, Tom Lantos, and Corrine Brown, and by Sen. Bob Menendez, among others. Former California Gov. Gray Davis named March 8, 2000, “Master Wan Ko Yee Day.” I spoke with former staffers of Tubbs, Clay, Davis, and the late Lantos, who explained they didn’t remember the specifics but that constituency requests for official recognition were not rare. (Brown and Menendez could not be reached for comment.) Like the honorary professorship, the flood of congressional commendations appear to be a legitimizing tool for Dorje Chang. They’re cited repeatedly online, a ­bulwark against those who’d question him: How could this all be false if these Western institutions show their Buddha master such reverence? 

In 2008, according to OpenSecrets, the International Buddhism Sangha Association (IBSA) spent $100,000 on lobbyists. Andrew Wahlquist, whose firm was hired by IBSA, says the effort was to “arrange for entry in the Congressional Record, with some recognition of his being named by some Buddhists as Dorje Chang Buddha III.” Wahlquist tells me he was first connected to Wu by a lawyer friend a few years earlier to see if Dorje Chang and his family could qualify for a streamlined citizenship via Congress.

“The immediate answer was ‘No, that’s not possible. You’ve got to go through the regular channel,’” Wahlquist says. But in the mid-2000s, Wu, Zhaxi Zhouma, and a California businessman who was a follower gave Wahlquist a draft copy of the 2008 book that made the reincarnated-­Buddha claim. “So the idea was: Is there a way of recognizing this accomplishment in some fashion?” he says. Wahlquist talked to two congressmen from California who agreed to congratulate Dorje Chang for being recognized as the third coming of the Buddha.

Wahlquist also was asked to distribute the 2008 book to members of Congress and to arrange for a copy to be delivered to the Library of Congress. “There was a distribution of members who were interested in actually accepting the book,” Wahlquist says. “And then we arranged a short ceremony at the Library of Congress. About 100 monks showed up to present a copy of this book to the Library of Congress, along with copies of his art books.”

Later that year, Reps. Brown and Robert A. Brady submitted a House resolution that “(1) recognizes Master Wan Ko Yee as the true incarnation of the primordial Buddha, namely H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha III; and (2) commends him for his outstanding contributions to his community, his new country, his religion, and all human beings throughout the world.” (Brown’s former press secretary and the Philadelphia Democratic Party, where Brady is chairman, did not respond to emails.) I ask Wahlquist if he was involved in Brown and Brady’s resolution. “Ambassador David Wu, I think, did that directly with Congresswoman Brown and whoever else,” he says. 

All these years later, Wahlquist still can recall the oft-repeated accolades, and recites them for me: the world-famous art output, the Buddhist leaders coming together to confirm his true identity, the exorbitant prices his art has sold for. He repeats them not to embellish a wild story, but to explain the stature of this religious leader he once lobbied for. It’s clear he was never a disciple, but he did seem to believe the tangible parts of the story. The intangible stuff wasn’t his concern. “I was told at the time that Dorje Chang Buddha was above the Dalai Lama. Not everyone can check that out,” he says. “What can I say? A lot of people believe he’s Dorje Chang Buddha III, and who am I to say he’s not?” 

Understanding the Art

In reading the published books about Dorje Chang and the many blogs, the quality and the breadth of styles of the Buddha master’s work is often held up as proof of his divinity. Intriguingly, so is the art’s exorbitant value. For a time, the reported, and constantly cited, auction prices — with one piece reportedly selling for $16.5 million — appeared as hard to square as the other miracles.

According to the database at Artnet.com, which tracks auction prices worldwide, three paintings by Master Wan Ko Yee have been bought at auction. The first two were sold by Unique Art Collections International Co. Ltd. in Thailand in May and November 2000 for more than $2 million apiece. The third, “Two Flowers; One Lotus Capsule, One Dharma Nature,” sold for $750,000 at a 2007 auction held at a temple affiliated with Dorje Chang in San Francisco’s Mission District. After Wan Ko Yee became Dorje Chang, he reportedly sold two more paintings, both at an auction house called Gianguan Auctions, for $16.5 million and $10.2 million, in 2015. Four years later, the same auction house sold a painting by his wife for $1.27 million.

“A price like this does not appear out of thin air. It’s basically a created illusion,” says Leon Wender, an expert on Chinese painting who owns a New York City gallery. “I’ve never heard of that auction house. Where is it?” When I tell him Gianguan Auctions is in Manhattan’s SoHo district, he’s incredulous. “Forget it, forget it, forget it,” he says. “I mean, if it’s not Christie’s, Bonham’s, or Sotheby’s, it’s of absolutely no consequence.” 

“Nobody I know wants to talk about this guy in public. Who wants to be linked to that?”

Kejia Wu, an art historian who wrote the book A Modern History of China’s Art Market, tells me of Dorje Chang, “His name, in the art markets that I interact with, is pretty much nonexistent.” She explains that the process by which a Chinese artist reaches a status to sell his work for those prices is the same as a Western artist: The notice of art historians or critics leads to gallery shows, then museum purchases, which then can support lofty ­auction sales. “However, Yi Yungao doesn’t have the majority of that,” she says. “It’s just a very strange case. It sounds like it’s a small group of people who try to create some media headline, and whether it’s a real sale, we don’t even know, and whether that has been paid, we have no idea.”

She mentions occurrences of fake art sold as real art, but says that this feels wholly different, “more like a fabrication and a hoax,” in her view. “Can they prove any world-class museum, like the British Museum or Metropolitan or Cleveland or Nelson-Atkins or San Francisco Asian Art Museum, has any of his paintings?” she says. “That’s normally a good way to build a credential of an artist. You can’t just fabricate an auction and then there’s nothing around to support it.” (All five ­museums confirmed that they do not have any art by Dorje Chang.)

The phone number on the Gianguan ­Auctions’ website goes to a full voicemail box, so I send an email. In 2018, I get a response, confirming the sale of Dorje Chang’s art for more than $10 million, but then explaining they’re unavailable for an interview and to “please contact Dorje Chang Buddha III directly.” When I reach back out this January, I’m again rebuffed.

I then email Gina Kolbe, who used to do PR for the auction house. She tells me she can’t do an interview, explaining: “All I know about the artist is what I read on the input sheet, and I worked from that.” She shares an email address for Mary Ann Lum, Gianguan’s director, but no one writes back. So I ask a friend who works in SoHo to try to go by the auction house’s listed address. “The first floor is a kitchen store, but this is the buzzer,” she texts, sending a photo of an apartment buzzer with last names listed beside unit numbers. One belongs to “Lum.” She tries it: “No response to the buzzer.”

Jeff Durham, a curator of Himalayan art at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, tells me he walks by San Francisco’s IAMA all the time. He feels offended by the whole operation. “I’m an art professional, and I love the art of the Himalayas,” he says. “For this turkey to pretend that he’s an artist, and to pretend that he’s a dharma practitioner, let alone a master, makes me nauseous.”

I ask if he believes the auction prices could be legitimate. “It could happen,” he says. “I mean, human beings are incredibly gullible. So, if this guy is selling enlightenment, and you got $20 million, why not?” In Durham’s opinion, the prices — created or real — are important because they subconsciously underline the value of the man and his teachings. He tells me he’s impressed by the “scam.”

“This dude has an internet presence like crazy. He has slimed the web with his stuff. He is all over the place,” Durham says. “So that may be the thing that he or one of his followers has figured out: He can make himself look like a thing as long as he looks like a thing on the web.”

In early 2015, I met Vincent Helou Huang, a director on the board of the IAMA, along with Steven Meyers, a lawyer who was then the board’s vice president and served as a translator for our conversation. When I asked about the museum’s collection, Huang told me any piece of art that hangs must be worth at least $200,000 per square foot and artists (aside from Dorje Chang) must be displayed in at least two internationally known museums and have lived more than 100 years ago. He explained that it’d be a “very large financial burden” to purchase all of the Dorje Chang art they hang, so some of their collection is on loan from the artist or third-party owners. I asked how they’re funding a museum in downtown San Francisco without charging admission. He told me they accept donations, large and small.

Huang often brought up Dorje Chang’s rare artistic prowess throughout our conversation. “In my opinion, and the opinion of the board, we feel His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III has the purest moral character of all, has the most illustrious talent of all, and has contributed more than any other to humanity,” he says. So, I asked why he believes people have disparaged him.

“This is a very normal phenomenon, very normal,” he says. “I’ll give you an example: The pope, who is head of Catholicism, there are those who speak poorly of him, as well. People also say that President Obama is not good. People also say that Queen Elizabeth is not good. When Shakyamuni Buddha was in the world over 2,000 years ago, people also slandered him.”

“Or even Jesus,” IAMA Director of Museum Operations Loretta Huang, no relation to Vincent, offered.

“Yeah, even Jesus,” Vincent Helou Huang said. “The same is true with Jesus. People said and do say a lot of bad things. So, when His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III came to this planet and people spoke ill of him, that’s a very normal phenomenon.”   

Loretta Huang suggested I read her memoir, A Diamond Necklace. In it, she writes that after the first-anniversary party for the IAMA, she was among a caravan of attendees heading back to L.A., which stopped at a gas station in Lost Hills. Huang told her friend to look up at the birds resting on a tree. Dorje Chang, in earshot, responded, “This is a bird city. In a little while, you will see tens of thousands of birds come here.” Suddenly, the dusk sky filled with birds.

On her way back to her car, she writes, a man told her that “because of the auspicious scene, the board of directors of the International Art Museum of America would like to invite you to serve as the director of museum operations.” Huang writes that her adult children argued that it would be bad for her health, but by January 2013, the 70-year-old grandmother, who had recently converted to Buddhism, agreed to run the museum’s day-to-day operations as a volunteer, commuting from Los Angeles to San Francisco each week.

A Curious Museum

This year, I spoke with four former employees at the IAMA who all shared similar stories. They’d studied art and then moved to San Francisco desperate for a job. Quickly, the strangeness of their new roles in the white-columned building on Market Street began to present itself.

Maggie Pryzant, hired to do marketing, felt stifled right away. She’d float ideas for Instagram posts or partnerships with other museums and they’d go nowhere. “I was very confused because it didn’t seem like they wanted to actually market the museum,” she remembers. To kill time, she’d wander the collection, trying to familiarize herself with the paintings. “The works themselves are protected really aggressively under really thick glass. And the works themselves don’t look very real,” she says. “I wasn’t there very long, but I do know that part of the lore of this person was that some of his paintings were immaculately conceived. Like he didn’t actually create them with his physical; he created them with his mental.”

“A lot of people believe he’s Dorje Chang Buddha III, and who am I to say he’s not?”

The other former staffers, who asked not to be identified because they continue working in the art world, also investigated their workplace. Each independently told me that at some point they realized Loretta Huang — who flew in from Los Angeles at the start of every week — slept in an upstairs apartment at the museum. To the staff, she never acknowledged living there, always arriving first and leaving last. When asked about her lodgings, Huang responded via email: “Curious and Interesting Joey B-K! A person’s private life will not be revealed!” 

None of the staffers made enough to live comfortably in the city without a second job, just $17 an hour. Even that pay boggled their minds though, because they couldn’t understand how the museum managed to keep its doors open. One former staffer, who I’ll call Sarah, handled the museum’s QuickBooks, and tells me she’d input donations — most of which came from abroad — but those were all between $5 and $1,000. Pryzant explains that much of the focus seemed to be on the gift shop, which was on the street level, but even that barely brought in any funds.

Another former staffer, who I’ll call Eileen, was tasked with paying the museum’s rent. She still remembers the amount, because it was less than she was paying for her own small apartment: $1,200 a month. The museum’s Tax Form 990 from 2021 begins to explain the way-below-market rate: Matthew Kuan, the IAMA’s director and president, ­is listed as the manager of the LLC that owns the building. And it says the lease states: “This annual rental is substantially below the market rental. Lessor has forgone receiving part of the rental for the premises that lessor is entitled to receive because lessor wants to make a contribution to society.”

Though admission was free, the cost to enter the Treasure Room was $600 per group of 10. Sarah remembers days when busloads of followers would arrive, and Huang would tour them through the Treasure Room. To enter the room, Huang, Sarah, and the security guard arrived with separate keys to undo the locks. Sarah and the security guard were not invited in, but they’d listen through the large wooden doors as each group prayed by the art. Finally, after months, Huang invited Sarah and another employee in to view the crown jewel of the Treasure Room: Dorje Chang’s sculpture. “She was very serious. ‘This is what this guy can do: He can take rocks from the moon and bring them and put smoke in it and seal it in a glass box,’” Sarah says. “Me and the other guy looking were like, ‘I’m pretty sure this is melted PVC piping. This isn’t stone. This is just a bunch of crap that’s melted and spray-painted.’”

Sarah and her co-worker became obsessed with understanding more about the art. She saw a large, high-end printer in an office upstairs she theorizes was used to make prints of some of the supposedly original paintings that hung in the museum. She looked closely at the collection, believing she could see the printer lines, though she couldn’t be sure because of the heavy glass. Then, one day, the glass that covered a painting broke, and when the workers were on break, she and her co-worker ran upstairs and touched the exposed work. “And we were like, ‘Yeah, this is printer paper,’” she says. 

When I ask museum director Loretta Huang, she strongly disputes the facts of that story and writes, “H.H. DJB3 told me that all of the artwork pieces at the museum on display were original, created by Himself.” 

Despite the snooping, none of the former employees ever managed to answer the central question: to what end? “I just assumed that they were a front for the cult. But they weren’t trying to get people to join the cult, so that’s why I was OK with being there,” Eileen says. “Because if they were like, ‘We need you to start recruiting people,’ then I’d be like, ‘No, I’m out of here.’ 

“But Loretta was like, ‘We’re here to show people free art,’” Eileen continues. “And I really think that Loretta believes that.”

I

n February 2022, I received an email from a stranger with the subject line “Dorja [sic] Chang Buddha” — the body read only: “He passed away recently in Pasadena.” It took a week to prove that information half-right (the emailer has not responded to my repeated follow-ups). Despite the dozens of blogs and hundreds of online accounts that post tirelessly about their leader, the Dorje Chang-centric internet stayed remarkably silent in the days that followed. I found an obituary for Dorje Chang Buddha III on the website of Las Vegas’ Palms Eastern Mortuary and Cemetery. It said he died on Jan. 27, 2022, at the age of 58. Soon, it was deleted.

Two weeks later, the Office of His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III released an official statement explaining that Dorje Chang and his wife, Yuhua Wang, also in her fifties, died together at a Las Vegas residence. The post recounts their last moments and last words (his wife is referred to as the Fomu, Holy Mother the Great Mahasattva) in a nearly 5,000-word account. It explains that over the past few decades, the Buddha “had often borne dark karma for living beings,” appearing gravely ill for several months before making remarkable recoveries. This time, though, was different. The final paragraph begins: “Now, for the sake of saving our lives and our happiness, Namo Dorje Chang Buddha III and Fomu, Holy Mother the Great Mahasattva, have sacrificed themselves and went to the Sambhogakaya Buddha Land.” And what of those followers left behind? “We must truly repent our sins and beseech Namo Dorje Chang Buddha III and Fomu to return to this world!”

Mourning Two Losses

I called and emailed coroners, police stations, and other government agencies around Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and none had heard anything about the deaths. Eventually, I found a death record for Dorje Chang but nothing for his wife. As I searched for any information about the strange, simultaneous deaths of two supposedly world-famous artists and religious leaders, I began to wonder: Could Wang still be alive? The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department wrote, “We are unable to locate any events listing the subjects or addresses you provided.” The Clark County Coroner’s representative said they couldn’t find any records, but “if they were in the hospital under the care of a doctor and died of natural causes, their deaths would not need to be reported to us.” They recommended I contact the Southern Nevada Health District, where a representative said they couldn’t provide any details aside from confirmation that there was a death record for “Yuhua Shouzhi Wan [sic].” 

Last October, the L.A. County Assessor told me of the family’s Pasadena home, “per our records, the owner is his spouse: Wang Yu Hua Shouzhi. If she is also now deceased, we have not received any notification.” When I followed up in April, they wrote: “We received a letter from the DEKA Law Group in January 2023 that indicated that Yu Hua Shouzhi Wang is deceased. There was also a change of Ownership Statement–Death of Real Property Owner received for her; plus a claim for Reassessment Exclusion for Transfer between Parent and Child filed by Pui Chu Yee and Hang Kung Yee, claiming to be daughter and son. It says that her date of death was 2/5/2022. However, there is no copy of her death certificate. We only have the death certificate for Dorje Chang Buddha III.”

“For this turkey to pretend that he’s an artist, let alone a master, makes me nauseous.”

In August, two and a half years after the deaths, the issue remained unresolved. Now, the email response stretched to three paragraphs and the tone had changed. “If Yu Hua Shouzhi Wang reportedly died on 2/5/2022, eight months prior to the 10/18/2022 recording of her husband’s Affidavit of Death, why didn’t they also record an Affidavit-Death for her, including a copy of her death certificate — especially if she died outside of California?” the Assessor’s Office wrote. “Where is the documentation showing that Pui Chu Yee and Hang Kung Yee, claiming to be her daughter and son, are the beneficiaries?” It seemed they, too, had found themselves stuck within the strange mist surrounding Dorje Chang.

Soon after the deaths, I reached back out to the leaders of the many associated nonprofits and LLCs, and to followers of Dorje Chang, but almost everyone declined to be interviewed. Those who did respond shared no firsthand knowledge of the deaths, instead pointing me to the official release from the Office of His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III.

Zhaxi Zhouma emailed that she learned about the death in early February and was shocked. “I saw Him just before Christmas, and He was very healthy,” she wrote. “In fact, he was never sick or ill Himself, and on Dec. 23, 2021, I saw Him lift a pestle weighing almost 437.2 pounds for more than 13 seconds with a hook using only four fingers of one hand, something that no any other [sic] person in our world could do.” On a February 2022 call, Gauvry explained he hadn’t heard anything official about plans going forward, but that “for me, it doesn’t change anything other than the fact that I won’t have direct access to the Buddha master.” Loretta Huang shared that disciples had traveled from around the world to recite sutras at the Holy Miracle Temple in Pasadena three times a day and to chant continuously for 24 hours.

By then, after so many years staring at a sideways world, everything had started to appear off-kilter. I found myself wondering what, if any, of this was true. I’d heard devotional stories from followers and seen videos showing large groups praying to their Buddha master. But then I’d reach out to experts who had never heard Dorje Chang’s name. The auction prices and the professorships and even the art hanging on the wall by now seemed illusory. Yet, those claims — supernatural and all-too-terrestrial — still kept appearing atop search results like digital mantras. So, it felt important to drive east to the Holy Miracle Temple. A living Buddha had given his life for his followers; the grief, at least, must be real.

The temple’s entrance sits between two buildings behind a wooden gate. I walked up, but it was locked, so I pressed my ear against the wood. And there it was: a rhythmic chant. I was surprised by my feeling when I heard it. The low hum was strangely grounding. In the shadow world I’d fallen into, it was hard to trust anything I saw or read. But I knew I heard the sound.

On an overcast day this April, I again drive east to the Holy Miracle Temple. I’m met at the gate by a monk in a rust-colored robe, who greets me warmly but tells me she can’t speak to me about Dorje Chang, even two years after his death. “We’re still in a period where our Buddha master is entering nirvana, so we’re not doing any interviews,” she says politely. 

I set off for Monterey Park, and park across from a two-story home. The home is the listed address for the publisher of the book claiming Dorje Chang’s divine origins. It’s also the headquarters of the Office of His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III, the organization so many followers pointed me to for official answers throughout the years.

I ring the bell, and no one answers. So, I write a note introducing myself, slide it through the mail slot, and drive away.

Finally, I head to the Dorje Chang family home. The hedges around the house are high, and a black gate blocks the entrance from the quiet, tree-shrouded road. I buzz and wait. Finally, a man in his thirties, with head shaved, walks toward me. I peek over the gate, introducing myself and telling him that I’m a journalist writing about Dorje Chang. 

“Part of the lore of this person was some of his paintings were immaculately conceived.”

He waves his hand, repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Then, he walks away.

When I’d asked Gauvry who might take over for Dorje Chang during that 2022 call, he’d told me he hadn’t given it any thought. “Maybe no one,” he’d said. “We were somewhat unique in that regard, in the sense that we were following the Buddha. Anything short of that is not that.” Two years after the deaths, it’s still unclear from the outside who will ultimately steer the ship. But the ship continues to sail.

I email Loretta Huang to ask for contact information for Dorje Chang’s children. “​​It is very hard to get to see them. Regrets, I have no channel to recommend to you,” she writes. (I later sent certified letters to the family home, the Deka Law Group, and the Office of His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III — all were successfully delivered but nobody responded to my queries. There was nobody to sign for my letter sent to Pui Chu Yee’s home in Las Vegas.) Huang shares an update: A new temple has just opened in Las Vegas, and followers are working to build the Holy Heavenly Lake in Hesperia, California. “After HHDCB3’s passing, my Buddhists [sic] acquaintances and I continue to study the dharma teachings,” she writes. “Temples continue to flourish with devotees.”

I find a Las Vegas Review-Journal story about “the vibrant grand opening” of the Benevolence Temple where “elected officials — or their representatives — entered and lined up in front of the main shrine, each holding a red ribbon shaped like a flower.”

Lt. Gov. Stavros Anthony is quoted as saying, “Great day for the state of Nevada.” 

Then I check my notes on the Holy Heavenly Lake. The plan is to turn the 128-acre site, purchased for $2.2 million, into “the Buddhist ‘Vatican’ — the spiritual center for all Buddhists around the world.” I look at the tax filings and recognize the names of the LLC’s two members: Hang Kung Yee and Pui Chu Yee, the son and daughter of His Holiness Dorje Chang Buddha III.