BUDDHIST JOURNAL FULL OF CONTROVERSY.

Byline: Kennedy Fraser The New York Times

Buddhism is everywhere. Oprah Winfrey has recently been seen discussing meditation with Richard Gere. The new movie ``Seven Years in Tibet,'' with Brad Pitt, and Martin Scorcese's version of the Dalai Lama's story, ``Kundun,'' which will open soon in spite of China's disapproval, prompted Time magazine to run a cover article titled ``America's Fascination With Buddhism.''

``Perhaps it doesn't matter how Buddhism - the dharma - filters into the culture,'' Buddhist scholar and teacher Stephen Batchelor said when I met up with him last week at the Manhattan offices of Tricycle magazine. ``What matters is whether people take it up and change their lives.'' He was there for a few days to conduct a public dialogue on the subject of ``Buddhism and Creativity'' with composer Philip Glass, who wrote the score for ``Kundun.'' Batchelor would also attend the hip, not-for-profit Buddhist magazine's fund-raising benefit, which drew a benign and festive crowd on Halloween.

Although he lives in England, where he runs the Center for Buddhist Studies at Sharpham, Devon, Batchelor is better known in this country than in his native land. His book, ``Buddhism Without Belief,'' was a modest best seller here. But he may be too serious a philosopher to be invited on ``Oprah'' any time soon.

Bad karma?

Still, among the kind of people who read Tricycle magazine, he is a celebrity, albeit a somewhat controversial one. His skeptical views on karma and reincarnation, in particular, have been viewed with alarm by Robert Thurman, Jey Song Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia University, who is also co-founder with Gere of Tibet House, and like the actor a close friend of the Dalai Lama. Thurman is also the father of the movie star Uma.

Preparations for the benefit were humming all around us that day in the Tricycle office: phones were ringing, costumes were being unpacked, and people were assembling colorful masks of dakinis and mahakalas, the Tibetan deities. Helen Tworkov, the dynamic founder and editor in chief of Tricycle, was flying about the loftlike space. Her dog was there as well, a large, tortoise-shell-colored puppy with a furrowed brow that made him look as if might slip into mindful awareness, if that seemed called for. Meanwhile he'd go on bounding about and being silly.

The magazine, a quarterly with a circulation of 30,000, started up six years ago and is often itself controversial. Its first issue contained a memorable interview of the Dalai Lama by Spalding Gray, probably the only man in the world who would have had the courage to quiz his holiness about his dreams and the details of his meditation practice, even whether he found himself thinking of bathing beauties. The Dalai Lama volunteered most cordially that if thoughts along those lines, or violent thoughts came up, he simply reminded himself that he was a monk.

The latest issue is entirely devoted to a startlingly honest treatment of what Zen Buddhists call ``The Great Matter'' of death and dying: graphic descriptions of the Tibetan practice of offering corpses to be devoured by mountaintop vultures, and moving sketches of Allen Ginsberg, poet and long-standing Buddhist, on his deathbed.

Eastern goes Western

``Some of our readers complained that our fall issue was gloomy!'' Tworkov said, laughing. Loved or hated, Tricycle must be said to play a important role as a mirror of American Buddhism in the 1990s - at least the Buddhism adopted by Westerners.

Before Tricycle, with its seductively heavy paper, beautiful illustrations, and advertisements for meditation cushions and silent retreats in exquisite settings, there were only the modest, serious newsletters of scattered communities. None of these could cover all the local strands of Buddhism, air the sibling rivalries; run profiles of all the personalities, thoroughly reflect the growing influence of women or discreetly utter the truth, as Tricycle did, about the sexual scandals that rocked so many Buddhist groups in the 1980s.

Batchelor left England in his youth and spent years in Asia, living as a monk first with a Tibetan community in Dharamsala, India, and then as a Zen monk in Korea. After a period in Switzerland, he ``disrobed,'' he said, and married a former Buddhist nun.

He is known as a translator of sacred texts and is steeped in Buddhist tradition. He respects history and lineage. He thinks that some popular American Buddhist centers may be in danger of trivializing the dharma and replacing spiritual inquiry with meditation as psychotherapy. But he is also wary of clinging to Buddhism as an institutional religion.

``It doesn't tell you what to believe in, it gives you something to do,'' he says. ``It gives you techniques and practices. It doesn't insist that you adopt belief or faith in some transcendent deity. Its starting point is a recognition of your own anguish, your malaise as a human being. That's seen as the beginning of the solution.''

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Photo: The Buddhist-themed masks aren't designed to hide the identities of staffers at Tricycle. The headgear was donned instead for a Halloween fund-raiser at the magazine's New York offices.

The New York Times