MORE ENTERTAINERS JUMPING ON FREE-TIBET BANDWAGON.

Byline: Kathleen Sampey Associated Press 

Divine inspiration on the Lollapalooza tour?

That's where Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan says he had an epiphany to lend his whiny pipes to the cause of a free Tibet.

``I met a lot of monks on Lollapalooza in '94 from Tibet and got to know some of them,'' Corgan explains.

The man who penned the lyric ``the killer in me is the killer in you'' isn't alone: Everywhere you turn in the entertainment world these days, celebrities are imploring the Chinese to stop oppressing Tibet - from Michael Stipe to Sharon Stone to Steven Seagal.

It was bound to happen after Richard Gere got up at the Academy Awards before an estimated 1 billion television viewers worldwide to tell of the social injustices against Tibet. Ever since Gere wondered in his unscripted moment in 1993 if something ``miraculous and movielike could happen here,'' people have been jumping on the Buddhism bandwagon.

To wit: Two feature films about Tibet are near completion - Martin Scorsese's ``Kundun,'' about the Dalai Lama's life until age 24, when he was forced to flee Tibet, and ``Seven Years in Tibet,'' in which Brad Pitt plays an Austrian prisoner of war in India during the 1940s who manages to escape to Tibet, where he lives for seven years before the Chinese invasion.

And thousands of people gathered in San Francisco last year for the Tibetan Freedom Concert, featuring musicians such as Bjork, Yoko Ono and her son, Sean Lennon, in an event organized by the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch.

Does all the attention from celebrities, some not particularly known for Buddhist-like self-denial, bother those who spend their lives earnestly devoted to Tibetan freedom?

``The Tibet situation day by day is worse,'' says Thubten Norbu, director of the Tibetan Cultural Center in Bloomington, Ind., and the older brother of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.

``The world should say something about that,'' Norbu says. ``I don't think it's self-serving on the part of entertainers. Many people are because it gets the word out about Tibet.''

The cause has captured the imagination of celebrities because of the 1980s tradition of helping underdogs, says Robert Thurman, father of Uma, a religion professor and Asia expert at Columbia University.

``There's been this thing, `We are the world, we are the children,' '' says Thurman, who also is a Tibet activist.

Corgan and a group of performers that included R.E.M.'s Stipe, Patti Smith, Natalie Merchant and poet Allen Ginsberg all performed recently at Carnegie Hall to raise money for Tibet House, which is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan language and culture - something China has been eradicating ever since it annexed the neighboring country in 1959.

The evening's reverent, dirgeful tone was set early on by the haunting, guttural sounds of the Drepung Loseling Monks who lined up onstage for some Tibetan mountain-throat singing.

Corgan contributed an acoustic song called ``Death,'' and Merchant sang in Latin about Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Stipe offered a cover of Eddie Vedder's ``Long Road,'' from the soundtrack of ``Dead Man Walking.''

Stipe, who also works on behalf of East Timor in its struggle against Indonesian oppression, notes that, ``For me, Tibet provides an example of a people under great duress who have never resorted to violence. I think that's a lesson every nation in the world could learn from.''