January 16, 1997

Far Eastern Economic Review - By Jeff Wise

In 1997, aliens are once again invading the cineplexes of America. This time, though, they're dressed in orange robes and spinning prayer wheels.

Two big-budget Hollywood movies about Tibet are in now production for release this year. Brad Pitt is starring in Seven Years in Tibet, Columbia Pictures' film about the Austrian adventurer who reached the then-closed Himalayan kingdom in the '40s and became the personal tutor of the Dalai Lama. Disney is planning to release Kundun, a biopic about the Dalai Lama himself, over vehement objections and threats from the Chinese government.

"There are at least five or six pictures in the works altogether," says veteran China-watcher Orville Schell, who was so impressed with the "rising tide of fascination with Tibet" in America that he's writing a book on the topic. Tibet, he says, is hip, and it's getting hipper."

Tibetans, for their part, welcome the upsurge in interest. "It's great news for us," says 24-year-old Yeshi Choden, co-owner of one of Manhattan's four Tibetan restaurants. And not just because her sister has been flown down to Argentina to work as an extra on the Brad Pitt movie: 37 years after Chinese troops annexed their country, the plight of the Tibetan people is finally being taken to the American mainstream. "Tibet has been suppressed for years by China, but for a long time there was not much interest here," says Choden.

These days, Tibet is busting out all over. A Tibetan Freedom Concert held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park last June drew a crowd of 50,000 to hear such rockers as the Beastie Boys, the Smashing Pumpkins, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Fugees and Bjork. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a spiritual guide based on the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, has sold over 300,000 copies since publication in 1992.

Where there's media, there's marketing. In addition to Manhattan's Tibetan eateries, where New Yorkers can learn the delights of such Himalayan fare as (Tsampa) roasted and ground meal made from barley or maize), 0]0-010 (dumplings)and tsey-thukpa (fried noodles), there are now a dozen Tibetan shops in the city, peddling prayer bowls, offering scarves, embroidered vests and prayer flags.

Why such interest in a place to which the United States has no historical ties, no economic interests, and virtually no past dealings of any kind? Novelty value, some say. Sealed off for many years from the outside world, Tibet has maintained an aura of mystery and intrigue.

"There are aspects of the culture that are very mystical and romantic," says 42-year-old Gregory Durgin of the Samaya Society, a New York-based group dedicated to spreading the message of Tibetan religion. The fact that few Americans have ever met a real live Tibetan-there are only some 300 in the states of New York and New Jersey combined-only helps preserve a sense of mystery.

Another major factor is politics. Americans love a good cause, and China's occupation of Tibet since 1959 is seen in the U.S. as a classic case of a big bad bully roughing up an underdog. In getting its case across, Tibet has been blessed with an energetic and charismatic spokesman: its leader-in-exile, the Dalai Lama, who writes and lectures extensively on his country's plight. His winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and the success of his 1990 autobiography Freedom in Exile helped the Dalai Lama to almost singlehandedly propel the Tibetan cause onto the radar screen of American consciousness.

The hunger of ordinary Americans for a glimpse of Tibetan culture was in evidence on a recent rainy Sunday after-noon in the funky East Village neighbour-hood of New York, where dozens of stalls had been set up at a "Tibet Fair" held in the gymnasium of a public secondary school. Along with silk prayer scarves and brass censers, merchants were peddling the sorts of Americanized goods that, in the commercial climate of the U.S., have be-come popular hybrid items baseball hats decked out with Tibetan-language slogans and T-shirts silk-screened with holy mandalas.

Nearby at the Samara Society's booth, a computer ran the ultimate in East-meets-West synthesis: a screen-saver program that automatically drew the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) mandala in a matter of seconds, thus obviating the painstaking weeks of toil otherwise required by monks working in sand. Though such mandalas are now familiar trappings of Tibetan culture, it is only very recently that their creation has been moved out of the back rooms of monasteries. "Many parts of traditional Tibetan religion were secret," said the Samara Society's Durgin, as the intricate pattern unfolded on the computer screen. "It wasn't that something like a mandala was restricted information, but there was no reason for the public to be witness to its creation." At the society's urging, though, monks agreed in 1988 to create an elaborate mandala in sand at New York's American Museum of Natural History, as a way of drawing attention to their belief system and to their country. The response among the public to the mandalas was ent

husiastic, and since then, says Durgin, mandalas "have been presented all over the world as cultural offerings." Mandala spectacles, though, are drops in the ocean compared with the media frenzy created by Hollywood celebrities who have turned their attention to the Himalayan kingdom.

After the Dalai Lama, the public figure in the U.S. most closely associated with Tibet is Richard Gere, the actor/sex symbol who sparked a hubbub when he used the 1992 Academy Awards ceremony as a forum to denounce the occupation of Tibet. The audience of showbiz professionals, used to an evening of industry platitudes, watched aghast as Gere called on viewers to "kind of send love and truth and kind of sanity" via their thoughtwaves to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

A follower of Buddhism since the 1970s, Gere met his first Tibetan lamas in the early '80s and swiftly converted to their branch of doctrine. Before long, Gere was hobnobbing on a regular basis with the Dalai Lama himself. Together with Uma Thurman's father, Robert, Gere founded a New York-based study centre, Tibet House, and a charitable group, the Gere Foundation to Promote Awareness of Tibet and Her Endangered Culture. Now some other celebrities boast affiliation with Tibetan Buddhism, including rock musicians Adam Yauch and Natalie Merchant and movie star Harrison Ford.

Indeed, Himalayan doctrine seems to have taken over from cocaine as the mind-expander of choice among discerning celebrities. "In Hollywood, there's a real fascination with Buddhism," says Schell. It's gotten to the point, he jokes, where stars "have their gardener, their personal trainer and their lama."

Gere sees nothing odd in the celebrity embrace of an ascetic creed. "People are trying to do the best they can, wherever they are," he explains. "You see the same problems in a Tibetan monastery as you do in New York City. Everyone wants to be happy; we all have that in common. You can be a saint sitting in a New York restaurant the same way you can be a saint sitting in a cave in Tibet. In fact, it's harder to be a saint here."

What everyone agrees is that the coming collision between America and Tibet, to take place in movie houses across the country, is going to be one with ramifications far beyond the ordinary the world's most powerful hype machine tunes to a higher plane of karmic vibrations. "This could be the moment when Tibet enters the popular consciousness of America with a vengeance," Schell. "It's going to be powerful drug."