BY JEFF DIAMANT
Star-Ledger Staff
When among many, guard your speech: when alone, guard your thoughts.
The Dalai Lama — the 14th Buddha of Compassion, Nobel Peace Prize winner and best-selling author — arrives in New York today, riding a wave of Western fascination with the quiet, elegant messages of the Buddhist faith.
The highlight, for those unable to obtain seats for his Buddhism workshops tomorrow through Saturday in Manhattan, will be his public lecture in Central Park at noon Sunday on virtuous living, to a crowd expected to number in the tens of thousands.
Buddhists will take up most of the workshop space, but many in Sunday’s crowd will be non-Buddhists drawn to the 68-year-old Dalai Lama’s message, even though they also embrace other, more traditional Western religions, his followers say.
A few decades ago, Americans saw the Dalai Lama as the distant leader of an obscure movement, a mystical figure living in exile. But in recent years, he has become something akin to a celebrity.
His followers say his appeal is no surprise. They say his message of love, compassion and tolerance is right for the times.
“I think he lives that through his pores, and I think people just get it,” said Rob Gabriele of the Garrison Institute, an interfaith center in Garrison, N.Y., which will host the Dalai Lama at a Tibetan Buddhist learning conference next week. “Of all the religious, spiritual and nonspiritual leaders alive in the world today, he’s the one who really envisions and lives out the vision of humanity as one.”
So far, on his first trip to America since 1999, the exiled spiritual leader has visited California, Washington, D.C., Indiana and Boston, publicly sharing his views on a wide range of topics.
He has spoken on the war in Iraq and whether it was warranted (too soon to tell, he said); on Tibetan autonomy talks with China (they’re going slowly), his hope that scientific research will show that meditation makes people physically healthier.
In the East Meadow of Central Park, he will discuss an 11th-century Buddhist text on cultivating virtuous habits — the quote at the top of this story is taken from a Web site publicizing his speech. The Dalai Lama knows, his followers say, that he will be speaking to an audience whose spiritual needs may have been changed by the realities of a post-9/11 world.
Still, his traditional message of compassion and nonviolence will be relevant, said Josh Baran, a former Buddhist monk who is spokesman for the Initiatives Foundation, a group sponsoring the Dalai Lama’s trip to the region. (See www.dalailamanyc.com for more details.)
“Buddhism has been around 2,500 years,” said Baran. “It addresses issues about suffering and confusion and violence. It definitely has a strong message for dealing with the issues of today’s world. People may come to Central Park because of concerns about this.”
“There are still studies that show the people of New York City are not sleeping as well, and are more fearful and so on,” since Sept. 11, 2001, he said. “Meditation and Buddhist philosophy will help people address these concerns and issues. Violence is not new in the world.”
Buddhism’s growth in America is hard to measure. Various estimates put the American Buddhist population at 2.4 million to 4 million, including American converts, according to Harvard University’s Pluralism Project.
The interest in Buddhism has also been bolstered in recent years by celebrity followers like Richard Gere and books like “The Art of Happiness,” a 1996 best-seller by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, a Bronx psychiatrist.
Tibetan Buddhism is a division of Vajrayana, the most mystical of the three main branches of Buddhism. It is practiced mostly in the Himalayan region, in Tibet and Nepal.
Buddhism’s other two main branches, which are bigger, are Theravada, practiced in most of Southeast Asia; and Mahayana, practiced in China, Japan and the Koreas.
The 14th heir to Tibet’s 600-year-old religious dynasty, the Dalai Lama, born Tenzin Gyatso, has been in exile since 1959, when he fled to India from Tibet during a failed uprising against Chinese Communist leadership, which conquered Tibet in 1951.
Thirty years later, in 1989, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent struggle against Chinese rule.
With his home base in Dharamsala, India, he has used trips abroad to lobby foreign leaders to pressure Chinese leadership to allow Tibetan autonomy. Discussions between the two sides have recently begun but have not moved substantially, he has said.
Last week, against the Chinese government’s wishes, President Bush met with the Dalai Lama. A White House official said Bush “would seek ways to encourage China to continue the dialogue on a substantive basis,” and that the president “hopes the Chinese government would respond favorably.”
Even as he sleeps in New York this week, the Dalai Lama — known to followers as “His Holiness” — will have an apartment where he can stay in New Jersey, at the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center in Franklin Township, Warren County.
The Dalai Lama has stayed there, and spoken, on seven occasions from 1979 to 1998 when visiting the metropolitan area, said Diana Cutler, who runs the center with her husband Joshua.
“When he comes to New York, sometimes I get excited and I’ll clean sheets just in case he decides to come,” she said. “He’s always welcome here. His room is always ready.”
Jeff Diamant covers religion. He can be reached at (973) 392-1547 or jdiamant@starledger.com.
