KARMA LONG WAY

Nuanced' doc captures a heartbroken community coming to terms with shock of sexual abuse scandal

- SEAN MURPHY

A NEW film airs on RTE tonight about Ireland's first Buddhist temple and the serial sexual predator who was appointed as its leader.

The feature-length documentary first explores how an international group of hippies arrived at the wild and beautiful landscape of west Cork in the 1970s and quietly set up the temple.

Their traditional Tibetan Buddhist temple, the first of its kind in Ireland, was called Dzogchen Beara and it remains to this day an important centre of faith today, with hundreds of visitors each year, as the film shows.

The Irish TV premiere shows how key co-founders Peter and Harriet Cornish set it up in 1973 on west Cork's Beara peninsula.

In 1994, they appointed a spiritual director called Sogyal Rinpoche, who was a renowned Buddhist teacher and a serial sexual predator.

The truth of his hidden dark secret did not emerge for more than 20 years later and is now the focus of a documentary made by filmmaker Maurice O'Brien over a five-year period.

He has tried to capture the community's efforts to come to terms with this scandal and with the death of Peter Cornish, while constructing Ireland's first Tibetan Buddhist temple.