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And now crests the Tibetan wave, building roughly since the Dalai Lama's 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. Richard Gere pioneered the full religiopolitical embrace years ago, but he may have found a successor in Adam Yauch, 33, singer for the punk-rap group the Beastie Boys. Not only has Yauch guided his famously irreverent band into songs like Bodhisattva Oath; he is also primary architect of two Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits that became instant touchstones for a Gen X phenomenon quickly dubbed Tibet Chic. Like the new movies, the concerts' first concern was political but they too opened with that signature chanting, and Yauch, a convert, made sure spiritual seekers could find low-key "monastery tents" on the concert grounds.
Then there are celebrities whose exact commitment to the faith is a guessing game. Oliver Stone publicly conscripts Tibetan "wrathful deities" to fend off his detractors; Courtney Love is said to be a practitioner, while Harrison Ford simply supports Tibetan freedom (his wife Melissa Mathison wrote Kundun's script). Composer Philip Glass, yes. REM singer Michael Stipe, maybe. And in one of the more peculiar occurrences along the Hollywood-Lhasa axis, action-film star and all-around surly guy Steven Seagal was recognized by the head of the venerable Nyingma Tibetan lineage as the reincarnation of a 15th century lama.
Pulled down raw out of the ether, the new Buddhist vibe can seem surrealistically jumbled, as a poem in a recent New Yorker acknowledged: "The huge head of Richard Gere, a tsonga blossom/ in his hair, comes floating like a Macy's/ Parade balloon above the snowcapped summit/ of sacred Kailas." But in fact intrigued Americans need not remain perplexed: they can investigate a vibrant, if small, U.S. community of believers. This does not mean the hundreds of thousands of Buddhist immigrants, who have yet to have an impact on mainstream culture. Rather, it refers to some 100,000 American-born Buddhists, many of whom have been practicing for decades and have, as sociologist Don Morreale puts it, "gone mainstream." While the Dalai Lama bestrides the globe, Zen Buddhists in San Francisco run two of the better-respected AIDS hospices, and their philosophy infuses the entire "good death" movement. In New York City and elsewhere, fans flock to talks by Thich Nhat Hanh, a French-based, socially engaged Vietnamese monk whose book Living Buddha, Living Christ sold 100,000 hardcover copies. In cyberspace the Manhattan-based Asian Classics Institute has transferred 100,000 deteriorating pages of scripture from Tibetan block prints onto the Internet. Mirabai Bush, a devotee of the non-Tibetan Vipassana school, teaches Monsanto executives nonreligious meditation techniques out of Williamsburg, Mass. Since 1988, reports Morreale, the number of English-language Buddhist teaching centers has jumped from 429 to more than 1,062.