Sogyal Rinpoche, a charismatic Tibetan Buddhist teacher and best-selling author who abruptly retired after several of his students accused him of multiple acts of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, died on Aug. 28 in a hospital in Thailand . He was in his early 70s.

The cause was a pulmonary embolism, his care team announced . He had received a diagnosis of colon cancer in September 2017.

Two months earlier, his reputation as a popular teacher of Buddhism and longtime friend of the Dalai Lama’s unraveled when eight students wrote a damning, heart-rending letter that outlined allegations of years of abuse by Sogyal Rinpoche against them.

“Why did you inflict violence upon us and our fellow Dharma brothers and sisters?” they wrote, describing incidents that had set him off, like his food not being hot enough, his assistant being inattentive or his girlfriends upsetting him. (Sogyal Rinpoche was not a monk.)