c. 2003 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ The 14th Dalai Lama, both an exiled statesman and a world spiritual leader, glided easily between his dual roles during his recent visit as he met with U.S. politicians to discuss the plight of Tibetans under Chinese occupation and addressed crowds in San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston and New York about the importance of human compassion and kindness.

But for hundreds of thousands of Buddhist lay practitioners in America who look to the Dalai Lama as a religious authority, the most significant event on his 16-day tour may have been a closed-door meeting in Garrison, N.Y, where the India-based lama met with 275 Tibetan Buddhist teachers and scholars to discuss the challenges of teaching and practicing Buddhism in America.

Leaders of local Buddhist centers in the Western Hemisphere cite the lack of a church structure, poor communication between Buddhist sects, and the need to update a centuries-old ethical code as some of the difficulties that have arisen as Buddhism gets incorporated into mainstream America.

Buddhist leaders said the meeting, the first of its kind, was long overdue, reported Tsewang Phuntso of the Office of Tibet, the office that represents the Dalai Lama to the Americas.

“Everyone agreed this should not have been the first meeting of Tibetan Buddhists in North America,” Phuntso said. “His Holiness feels there should be more dialogue between centers.”

Promoting a more cohesive structure for American Buddhists has been a priority for the Dalai Lama, said Matthew Weiner, the director of programming at New York’s Interfaith Center and its Buddhism analyst.

“The Dalai Lama believes in the structure,” Weiner said, speaking of the hierarchical order that typifies Buddhism in Tibet. “His reason for coming here is probably to get people organized.”

Despite the fact that the Dalai Lama has repeatedly urged people not to convert, his growing celebrity as both a Buddhist master and a moral leader has contributed to the spread of Buddhism in America, where there are now more than 1,000 Buddhist centers and an estimated 800,000 converts.

Still, American Buddhism remains difficult to categorize.

“There’s probably no one thing we could call American Buddhism,” said Charles Prebish, professor of Buddhism at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “The Faces of American Buddhism.”

“All the Buddhist traditions are represented here, and they all do very different things.”

Buddhism in America today is unlike any other point in the religion’s history, Prebish said. Whereas different sects in Asia were separated by geographical boundaries, one finds all the Buddhist traditions being practiced side by side in America.

But proximity hasn’t always lead to fraternity.

“American Buddhists from different sects don’t talk to each other very much,” Prebish said.

The diversity of Buddhism in America makes it difficult to define, and perhaps even more difficult to harness under a single ecumenical structure.

Jeffrey Hopkins, the Dalai Lama’s former interpreter and professor of Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Virginia, said American Buddhism will likely remain decentralized.

“American Buddhism will never become very structured,” he said. “There’s no central authority. They’re very independent-minded.”

Recent attempts at building ecumenical organizations, such as the Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California, which represents all Buddhist centers in the region, have failed for the most part, Prebish said.

Occasional visits by the Dalai Lama, who wields a good deal of influence among all Buddhist sects because of his global stature, may unify Buddhists temporarily, but not for long, Prebish said.

“The Dalai Lama doesn’t ultimately help because after he finishes his speaking tour and goes back to Dharamsala, are people going to follow his message? Probably not,” he said.

The Dalai Lama, who leads only one of Tibetan Buddhism’s four schools, doesn’t have the authority among different Buddhist schools that the head of a church hierarchy might. “He doesn’t serve like a pope who appoints this person or that person and makes new rules,” Hopkins said. “He’s more of a person who leads by moral example.”

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