Ram Bahadur Bomjon / Bodhi Shrawan Dharma Sangha

Ram Bahadur Bomjon, born around 1989–1990 in Ratanapuri, Bara District, first drew national and international attention in May 2005 when, as a 15-year-old, he began sitting in meditation among the roots of a pipal tree, reportedly for months without eating, drinking or moving. Dubbed 'Buddha Boy' by international media and known to followers by the monastic name Palden Dorje, he attracted thousands of pilgrims and, eventually, a following that read his endurance as evidence he was a reincarnation of the historical Buddha — a claim the president of the Nepal Buddhist Council and Buddhist scholars have publicly disputed. Out of that following grew an ashram network — documented across Bara, Sarlahi (notably the Pattharkot ashram), Sindhupalchok and Sindhuli districts — that constitutes the organisational substance scored here, distinct from any single claim about Bomjon's spiritual attainments.

The pre-2016 record already shows a pattern of alleged coercive control radiating from the ashrams. In 2010, Bomjon was investigated after 17 villagers who had approached his meditation site looking for vegetables said he assaulted them; Nepali press accounts collected by Wikipedia say he struck them with an axe handle over roughly three hours, while the BBC's contemporaneous report instead quotes Bomjon admitting he slapped them two or three times after they tried to manhandle him, and notes that villagers alleged a more serious assault without specifying the axe-handle detail. Bomjon refused to attend any resulting court hearing, telling reporters he had acted 'as per divine law' — an explicit assertion that his authority superseded the state's. No conviction followed. In 2012, Nepal Police said they had rescued a Slovak woman connected to Bomjon's followers; other reporting describes her as tied to a tree for roughly three months on an accusation of practising witchcraft to disturb Bomjon's meditation, and released with a broken arm, while some accounts describe a more voluntary departure — the record does not resolve this conflict. In the same period, Bomjon's own siblings publicly accused him of holding them captive overnight and beating them, and followers reportedly assaulted five journalists and destroyed their cameras after they recorded one of his sermons.

The case that produced Bomjon's only criminal conviction to date centres on an allegation that, on the night of 4 August 2016, he raped a girl — reported as 13 on her arrival at the ashram and 15 at the time of the alleged assault — who was staying at the Pattharkot ashram as an 'Ani' (nun), and threatened her with unspecified consequences if she disclosed it. The alleged victim came forward publicly at a Kathmandu press conference in 2018 (Setopati's reporting identifies her as Gangamaya); an initial police complaint was refused as time-barred, and a formal case was built once Nepal's Act Relating to Children took effect. Bomjon evaded a February 2020 arrest warrant for roughly four years — reporting on the case attributes the delay partly to his network of loyal followers and, according to one explainer, political connections — until Nepal Police's Central Investigation Bureau arrested him on 9 January 2024 at a house in Budhanilkantha, Kathmandu, after he attempted to flee by jumping from a window; police reported seizing Nepalese and foreign currency from more than a dozen countries worth roughly US$230,000. The Sarlahi District Court convicted him on 24 June 2024 and, on 1 July 2024, sentenced him to 10 years in prison plus a Rs 500,000 fine; two co-accused, Jit Bahadur Tamang and Gyan Bahadur Bomjan, were acquitted in the same proceeding.

That conviction did not stand. On 19 March 2025 a Janakpur High Court division bench of Justices Khemraj Bhatta and Narishwar Bhandari acquitted Bomjon; the full judgment, released 17 April 2025, held that the case had been filed after the statute of limitations under the Act Relating to Children — the court found the complaint should have been lodged by 1 February 2017 but was filed on 5 February 2017, and stated explicitly that it was not ruling on the merits of the rape allegation, only quashing the conviction on that procedural ground. (One outlet, Khabarhub, described the ruling on the day as based on 'insufficient evidence'; this profile follows the fuller Kathmandu Post account of the published verdict text, which specifies the limitations ground and the court's own disclaimer that it did not reach the merits. Separately, the Kathmandu Post's own 17 April 2025 acquittal article contains an internal inconsistency: its subheading and lead reference the district conviction as covering 'ten minors'/'ten children', while its own closing paragraph — and the same newspaper's 1 July 2024 sentencing report — both describe a single 15-year-old victim in the case that produced the conviction. This profile follows the single-victim reading, which is corroborated by the Kathmandu Post's own sentencing article and by Setopati's account naming the victim.) Bomjon was released from Sindhupalchok District Prison around 20 April 2025 — he had been held there in connection with a separate missing-person case tied to his ashram network, not the Pattharkot case. The Office of the Attorney General decided on 22 July 2025 to appeal, arguing the high court had misapplied Section 74(2) of the Act Relating to Children (which extends the limitations period to one year after a child victim turns 18) and that Bomjon should be tried on the original charges; the appeal was filed with the Supreme Court around 18–19 August 2025 and remained pending at the time of this review. Bomjon has not been reconvicted, and the underlying allegation's merits remain judicially unresolved.

Beyond that case, several matters document the ashram network's pattern independent of any single verdict. Police investigations opened from January 2019 into the disappearance of at least five people connected to Bomjon's ashrams across Sindhupalchok, Nuwakot, Bara and Sarlahi districts; Nepali press outlets report these cases with inconsistent names, spellings and district attributions for the missing individuals across outlets, so this profile records the count and districts rather than naming private individuals in still-pending investigations. A Sarlahi District Court arrest warrant issued 6 February 2020 led to the arrest of Bomjon's disciple Gyan Bahadur Bomjan in connection with one of these cases, with trial reported as still pending. A separate money-laundering case alleging roughly Rs 82.7 million in illegally acquired funds was filed against Bomjon in Sarlahi District Court and remained unresolved as of the most recent reporting reviewed here (April 2025). None of these matters has produced a conviction; they are documented as open police investigations and pending prosecutions, not established findings.

Taken together, the record supports a moderate-to-high score on documented behavioural and thought-control patterns — an ashram network built around a self-proclaimed reincarnation whose founder has explicitly placed his own conduct above secular law, whose ashrams have generated a multi-district cluster of confinement, assault and disappearance allegations spanning fifteen years, and whose founder has evaded and outlasted repeated legal process — while confidence is held at Medium rather than High because the central legal proceeding against Bomjon himself is currently unresolved: a conviction vacated on procedural rather than merits grounds, with the state's own appeal against that vacatur still pending before Nepal's Supreme Court.