By Suzane Goldenberg, The Guardian London

4 October 1995

In need of some good karma, a growing number of celebrities are seeking escape through Buddhism

THE middle-aged woman juggling her bags of shopping at the taxi stand is in powerful need of a chat, as you would be too if you spent several days in a rude wooden hut where the only diversion was chanting your mantra. One hundred thousand times; to be precise.

That accomplished, Marianne wants nothing better that to tell the would how much better she, feels for it, It's a fairly common, experience in McLeod Ganj, a lit-tie yawn of a place in the Indian Himalayas.

Marianne is part of a growing community of westerners, who are seeking escape from the pressures of life at the end of the millennium in a 2500-year-old religion. Practitioners are already talking of a Buddha boom.

Buddhism was founded in north India by Prince Siddharth'a Gautama who taught that life is a process of suffering until one can gain release from worldly desires. Followers of its Tibetan varient gravitate towards Dharamsala to bask in the presence of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetan people who teaches that the essence of life is compassion.

For the largely illiterate refugees who followed the Dalai Lama over the mountains from Tibet in 1959, Buddhism was just part of ordinary life. But ever since the Dalai Lama won the Nobel peace prize in 1991, they have had to share their leader with visiting western devotees. These days, it is unusual for the Dalai Lama to hold a public audience without some star-struck westerner filing past to seek his blessing or shake his hand.

McLeod Ganj and Dharamsala have played host to so many celebrity Buddhists they could turn them into a tourist attraction. The tour could start with the rather modest Green Hotel or Kashmir Cottage where Richard Gere has slept.

Harrison Ford, John Cleese, Koo Stark, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, and Tina Turner, sort of - she is thought to be a follower of Japanese rather than Tibetan Buddhism - all are interested in Buddhism or have visited Dharamsala. In the category of children of the famous, there is Annnbel Heseltine, who attended the Dalai Lama's annual teach-in last March; John Avedon, son of Photographer Richard, and Nicky Vreeland, grandson of Diana, who is studying to become a monk.

Tibetans are quietly proud of the attention, and are eager to share out gossip about Richard Gere (disappointingly tame).the most committed of the celebrity Buddhist, he tries to visit Dharamsala at least once a year.

Although western interest took off fairly recently, Buddhism had been slowly catching on in the West for decades. In the early 1960s, the Dalai Lama dispatched four teenage lamas to the US to learn English, and to spread the faith.. Thirty years on there are, more than 500 Buddhist centres in the US, and dozen more in Europe.

Alexander Berzin arrived in Dharamsala from New Jersey 26-years ago after earning a Ph D In near-eastern studies from Harvard. At that time, he and a former girl friend ofBob Dylan's were among the few westerners interest enough in Buddhism to have made the pilgrimage. "I chose to go more deeply," he says.

Since then, he has served as a translator for the Dalai Lama and taught Buddhism in 60 countries, In recent years, Berzin has made 10 trips to the former Soviet Union where he says 'there is a hunger for information about Buddhism.

Berzin says his task is made easier by the Dalai Lama's insistence that western Buddhists need not abandon their lifestyles, and that they may choose to incorporate only some elements of Buddhist practice into their lives. "In some places what people like most is that it explains everything, in other places it's the exotic side," he says.

In Dharamsala, most people have their first Buddhist encounter at the retreat centre of Tushita, Set up in 1972 to cater for westerners. It regularly gets 70 people a session for the 10-day Introductory courses - a bargain at 2,100 rupees including vegetarian food and dormitory lodgings. It is hoped unscrupulous free-loaders would be put off by the 6am gongs, the compulsory silence, he lectures and meditation sessions.

Graduates of a recent course -'Israelis, Americans, Britons and other Europeans - all claimed to have learnt techniques to deal with anger and negative emotions. "The most importance difference I see in people is that they are coming in stressed out and when they leave, it's a big group of friends and everyone is relaxed," 'says director Rudy Hardenijk.

"People never or rarely thought for such prolonged periods about the important questions in life. That's our maximum goal, not converting people to Buddhism but getting them to think about things," he says.

Although there are guest appearances by Tibetan lamas, many of the instructors at Tushita are westerners, including a lapsed Italian monk.

Rudy, a former petrochemical engineer from Holland, arrived in 1989 after spending 10 years in the oil industry. "Okay you make lots of money and then what. Somewhere within you are unsatisfied.

He says he was attracted to Tibetan Buddhism for its intellectual approach. "Usually If you get into mysticism everything starts turning vague, in any tradition. That Is for me what appealed: I don't have to dump my intellect to do something with spirituality. For me a lot of contradictions about religion fell away as soon as I discovered Buddhism. Christianity didn't make sense to me."

Rudy says he has seen all nationalities at Tushita, but more than any other citizens in recent months there have been Israelis. Berzin claims the Israelis are part of a trend - he calls them Jew-Bu's, short for Jewish Buddhists.

"What I find as a Jew and Israeli, as a person from a people who have suffered, is that it's hard to open up to other religions, but it's not with Buddhism," says Ilana Noskowicz, who is travelling around Asia in her year off after serving in the army. "Buddhism helps you to deal with life. It really gives people the tools to be happy."