Essential Tibetan Buddhism.

THE New York Times noted recently that the number of Buddhists in the U.S. had reached 800,000, and there are probably two or three times that if you include the legions of chic white people who don't know much about the religion but fancy it nevertheless and call themselves ''Buddhists.'' There are even Buddhist celebrities, including Richard Gere and Columbia's Professor Thurman, father of Uma. I have never seen anything in NATIONAL REVIEW's pages to suggest that it has a very large number of Buddhist readers. But to those who are, I would unreservedly recommend Professor Thurman's book. Can I recommend it to non-Buddhists?

Suppose a Catholic were asked to collect the ''essential'' texts of his religion. We might have the texts of the great Councils, the writings of the early Fathers, some Aquinas, some Augustine, de Caussade, Newman, extracts from the Bible, the Missal, the Divine Office, perhaps one encyclical on modern times. Of course we --Catholics, other Christians, and non-Christians in Christian cultures -- can read these and understand them in part. So we might take it for granted that people from other cultures can. I doubt it. It is what you bring to the text that counts. It exists in a tradition. Those Christians who have fled the modernizing Catholic and Anglican churches for Eastern Orthodoxy report a continuing strangeness. And Orthodoxy is a branch of the same religion.

Essential Tibetan Buddhism produced three sets of reactions in me. They were interest and respect, bafflement and refusal, and alarm. The book starts with a long introductory essay which is a masterpiece, in the sense that it shows enough of a strange religion to arouse interest and respect. Tibetan Buddhism has found a very effective champion in Robert Thurman. His essay discusses the centrality to Tibetan Buddhists of real Buddhas living among them. It discusses the founding teacher and his ''angelic disciples,'' the essential teaching, the enlightenment movement, the history of Buddhism and its spread through India and Asia, asceticism and monasticism, the renaissance of Buddhism and the great flowering of the Tibetan variety and its spread beyond Tibet, the sad story of the Chinese occupation and the exile, and the way Tibetan Buddhists read spiritual intent into plain history. The second section is a collection of essential Tibetan Buddhist texts: ''Mentor Worship,'' ''Seeing the Buddha,'' ''Meeting the Buddha in the Mentor,'' ''Practicing Transcendental Meditation,'' ''Practicing the Loving Spirit of Enlightenment,'' ''Practicing the Liberating Wisdom,'' ''Practicing the Creation Stage,'' ''Practicing the Perfection and Great Perfection Stages.'' These are the equivalent of Augustine's Confessions or de Caussade's letters. Here are a few lines:

NAMO GURU MANJUGHOSHAYA!/May the glorious, precious root Mentor/sit in the lotus of my heart/and sustain me with his great kindness./May he grant attainments of body, speech, and mind./I invoke the glorious Losang Drakpa,/who lovingly teaches just as he sees/the complete essence of the path of all Sutra and Tantra,/who holds the complete holy Dharma of the Victor.

The reaction of a non-Buddhist, or at any rate of this non-Buddhist, to this and most of the other extracts is complete bafflement. Then bafflement turns to rejection. This stuff is completely foreign. Either I determine to take it seriously, and that means not just study it but somehow become a part of it, or I stop now. To toy with it, dabble in it, extract helpful bits from it would be sheer cultural tourism. It's a bit like French cooking. Do it properly or not at all. You can embrace it, reject it, even persecute it. But don't play with it.

The last text is an address given in Oslo by the Dalai Lama upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. This great, baffling religion and one of its greatest men suddenly give way to ecumenical internationalese, a United Nations type of address on the interrelatedness of all things and the centrality of the planet. And oh what familiar cliches: ''Today we are truly a global family . . . to pollute the air or the oceans, in order to achieve some short-term benefit, would be to destroy the very basis of our survival . . . We must develop a sense of universal responsibility . . . in respect of the different issues that confront our planet . . . the young people of many countries have repeatedly called for an end to the dangerous destruction of the environment . . .'' There's more and worse, such as the idea that vicious regimes can be made to change through peaceful protest -- not a mention of the willingness of the West to spend on arms to contain and defeat vicious regimes. No, it's not rot. It is talk calculated not to offend: insights about personal renewal preceding political renewal but diluted with eco-speech and the obligatory genuflections to ghastly young people.

Christian leaders, of course, do this sort of thing all the time. Vatican II and papal encyclicals are full of it. The style and rhetoric are horribly familiar. At least the strangeness of the ancient texts induces respect. The greatest problem that religions have today is that people see them as small things, hobbies, easily mastered, lightly worn. The great religions are, on the contrary, ''thick,'' deep in the sense of profound but, more important, wide in the sense of impinging on all aspects of life. Why do their present-day leaders, holy men like the Dalai Lama or Pope John Paul II, men usually so robust, allow themselves to be caught talking, albeit on untypical occasions, in a way that sells religion short?