Little Buddhas: 'Tibetan Buddhism' is all the rage - although it has little to do with Buddhism, or Tibet.

###DAVID KLINGHOFFER

'Tibetan Buddhism' is all the rage -- although it has little to do with Buddhism, or Tibet.

ON bus stops across New York City, a poster for Smirnoff vodka shows two cartoon characters a la Jules Feiffer, one holding up a bottle of non-Smirnoff spirits. The man boasts: "This vodka comes in a bottle designed by albino monks from Tibet." Unimpressed, the woman asks: "How's it taste?" The question hadn't occurred to him: "Taste?"

In vino veritas, or anyway in vodka. The poster neatly captures a cultural vortex that has snagged upper-middle-class white people by the tens of thou- sands. These folks have got their hands on a bottle with a particularly enchanting label, "Tibetan Buddhism," but what's inside has proved to be of less interest than the container. As Professor Donald Lopez writes in an intriguing new book, our homegrown "Tibetan Buddhists" have yet to notice that the entity they have embraced has little to do with the religion practiced for centuries by Buddhists in Tibet.

The phenomenon of white Buddhists has been amply chronicled in newspapers and newsweeklies. The emphasis there is on show-business celebrities who are into the stuff -- Oliver Stone, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, the inevitable Richard Gere, and action star Steven Seagal, recently celebrated as the rein- carnation of a fifteenth-century Tibetan lama. But the popularity of this transplanted Oriental faith exceeds the city limits of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, as I can personally attest.

So for instance, not long ago I had high hopes for a sweet-hearted Jewish girl I had started dating. Hope began to dim when she revealed that she was a Tibetan Buddhist and showed me the big picture of a bulging red Buddha's Eye in her bedroom, suitable for worship. Around the same time I met a Jungian psychotherapist who recommended The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which, he explained, documents the researches of Tibetan psychonauts who pierced the veil between life and death and saw the fantastic portmortem future that awaits us all. Meanwhile, my friend Ira is always telling me about the mandala he saw in a dream the night before.

Tibetan boutiques are popping up all over Manhattan. In my neighborhood on the Upper West Side we've got a Tibetan restaurant plus two boutiques within a block of each other, the latter offering Tibetan furry hats, "healing incense," "religious artifacts," and "Tibetan singing bowls." (I stopped by Tibet Himalayan Gifts & Accessories the other morning to hear a Tibetan bowl warble or yodel or whatever Tibetan bowls do, but the shop was closed.)

The number of Americans who are Buddhist fellow-travelers, such as Ira, dwarfs the number of signed-up converts. Even so, the latter total more than 100,000. Both groups buy the requisite accessories, gadgets, singing bowls, magazines, and books -- amazon.com lists 1,200 titles on Buddhism. They attend the nation's 1,062 Buddhist instruction centers -- up from 429 since 1988. They see the movies: lately Hollywood has released three swank tributes to the Tibetan religion: Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha, Martin Scorsese's Kundun, and Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt.

For all this we can thank the Chinese. Had they not brutally cracked down on Tibet in 1959, causing the Dalai Lama and many others to flee, there would be no Tibetan lamas teaching in American cities and writing books for Americans to read. The Dalai Lama would still be ensconced in the Potala palace at Lhasa, instead of globe-trotting wherever spiritually malnourished white people are to be found, declaiming at the United Nations, and appearing, as he did last month, on the cover of New York magazine to plug alternative medi- cine.

Yet as Professor Lopez explains in his wry and enlightening Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago), the romance of Tibet goes back farther than the Tibetan diaspora. When fleeing Tibetan monks arrived in America they found they had been preceded by a religion, thought up by Americans and Englishmen, going by the same name as their own. The best-known Tibetan text circulating in the West continues to be one that the vast major- ity of actual Buddhist scholars never encounter in their monastic studies, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. In reality an obscure mortuary text read over fresh corpses to inform the departed of the demons and deities they might expect to encounter in the hereafter, the Book of the Dead was picked up by an oddball from San Diego called Walter Evans-Wentz. In 1927 he published an extensive commentary based on Theosophy, the hoax religion founded in New York in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky. Since then, other editions have appeared. Their introductions and commentaries -- which typically far overshadow in length the slender Tibetan document itself -- tend to be unanchored in real Tibetan teaching; instead, they serve as a vehicle for whatever bee has got into the bonnet of the individual commentator. So there is a Theosophist Book, a Jungian version depicting the journey of the dead as psychological allegory, and another by Timothy Leary presenting the Book as a road map for an eight-hour acid trip.

Yet the various Books of the Dead seem almost conservative when compared to the output of the all-time best-selling author of works on Tibet and its reli- gion: T. Lobsang Rampa, a/k/a Cyril Hoskin, an Englishman allegedly possessed by the spirit of a lama. In the 1950s, "Rampa" channeled three volumes of autobiography, which included tales of communication with space aliens and were marked by an odd emphasis on the religious significance of cats. He later produced a memoir of life with himself authored telepathically by his own cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers.

In general, the tendency of pseudo-Buddhism has been to reinvent thorny, par- ticularistic Tibetan concepts as non-threatening, universalizing allegory. In a fascinating chapter about Tibetan art, Mr. Lopez demonstrates that authentic Tibetan Buddhism was always uninhibitedly idolatrous. It posited a multi- plicity of gods that literally inhabited works of Tibetan religious art. When you prostrated yourself before a statue, you were bowing not to a symbol but to the god itself. Propitiating these deities was a key activity for Tibetans. This fact got decidedly lost in the American version, which presents the gods, if at all, as mere "projections" pointing to a "deeper reality," and empha- sizes meditation, compassion, and environmentalism.

As Lopez reports, even Tibetan lamas have tended to absorb Westernized Buddhism at the expense of real Buddhism. In his view, the foremost Buddhist "modernist" is the Dalai Lama himself -- which explains the wrangle the high lama has got himself into with followers of his who persist in worshipping a god by the name of Dorje Shugden. Shugden is just one of many regional Tibetan spirits, notable for an ability to flap his ears vigorously so as to create a super-powerful wind. But for reasons having to do with the politics of the Tibetan diaspora, the Dalai Lama decided to stamp out Shugden worship. Now when he travels in the U.S. and Britain, he is shadowed by Shugden-loving protestors who accuse him of suppressing their religious freedom.

Stubborn particularism like that is among the fading embers of the old, non-modernist Buddhism. Presumably, that Buddhism wouldn't go over well in America, where idolatry still carries a hint of taboo. But the reinvention of the faith doesn't entirely account for its popularity in the West.

Other factors come into play. Buddhism looks great in feature-article photos. Devotees are invariably found sitting on beautifully waxed hardwood floors meditating with attractive potted plants and Buddha statues all around. No doubt, too, there is genuine substance, for good or evil, in that part of the religion which has survived the great American anti-weirdness filter. Interestingly, the Bible mentions "gifts" the patriarch Abraham gave to his concubines' children before sending them off "eastward to the eastern coun- try," on which a tradition comments that these were spiritual gifts involving the "name of unclean powers." Who knows what real weirdness was preserved in cut-off places like Tibet?

Probably what American Buddhists love most is exactly this idea of old wisdom long hidden away. The extreme remoteness of Tibet, locked behind the Himalayas, is a note you often hear struck. Brad Pitt makes the point in Seven Years in Tibet. While hiking into Tibet he remarks to the audience in an awed voice: "This is the highest country on earth, and the most isolated."

The Bible has something to say about this, too. We are told to "love your neighbor as yourself," with the emphasis on neighbor. Presumably God doesn't bother to command in favor of an activity or attitude unless its opposite comes to some of us more naturally. There seems to be an indestructible human temptation to value whatever is farthest away from our immediate environment.

The more alien -- in appearance, demeanor, values -- the more seductive. Why do some liberals assume that any aspect of a Third World culture must by auto- matic right be morally superior to its counterpart in the West? To blame Western "self-hatred," as conservatives like to do, begs the question; anyway, most liberals don't really hate America and Europe. They're just loopy in love with Africa and Asia.

Which, in the long run, is bad news for "Tibetan Buddhism." The Dalai Lama can appear on the cover of New York magazine, or People, or Paris Vogue, only so many times before his boat starts to leak its exotic fuel. The lure of the foreign is a quality which, once lost, cannot easily be won back. Maybe those fans of Dorje Shugden have a point, after all.