This article first appeared in print journal Jan./Feb. 1998.

One of the biggest buzzes in Hollywood isn’t about the newest multimillion dollar superstar or the latest high-profile celebrity divorce or even the ever-escalating cost of both making movies and buying movie tickets. Instead it seems that increasing numbers of entertainment industry types are high on a guy who was born more than 2,500 years ago.

You thought Buddha was big before? Well, he’s getting bigger.

Last October, moviegoers took a break from murder, mayhem, sex, and big explosions to see the Brad Pitt vehicle, Seven Years in Tibet, a moving film about one man’s redemption. In addition to oodles of prerelease publicity, including a Time cover story featuring Pitt’s famous mug, Seven Years in Tibet has an unlikely but unbeatable story line: Hunk hikes the Himalayas and finds holiness.

Pitt delivers an understated but powerful performance as Heinrich Harrer—a real-life figure who, earlier this century, was a world-class Austrian mountain climber who was a third-rate husband, father, friend, and human being—at least until his transformation.

The Himalayas, the fabled “Roof of the World,” have long been majestic mountainous magnets for those seeking the ultimate climb. Harrer—in a letter to the son he’s never seen—described the region as “a place rich with all the strange beauty of your nighttime dreams.”

But these heavenly heights are also home to Lhasa, the holy city of Tibetan Buddhism. Under the thumb of the Chinese since 1950, Tibet was off-limits to film crews, which instead painstakingly recreated Lhasa’s exotic grandeur in Argentina.

The redemption Harrer finds in Lhasa is a painful kind of emotional purification that springs from two sources: Deep regret over a life full of selfishness and “bad deeds”—and a touching friendship with the teenaged Dalai Lama.

For Harrer, there’s no come-to-the-altar conversion or night-and-day transformation. In fact his gradual enlightenment doesn’t even appear to be very religious at all. But that’s part of what makes Buddhism so hard to pin down. Many of America’s nearly one million Buddhists see their religion as a philosophy or even an approach to psychology, but not a religion.

And that’s part of why Buddhism is enjoying a renaissance in the West. Millions of people seem to be looking for a spiritual path that’s Eastern, slightly exotic, compassionate, provocative, inclusive, ancient, and hip—in short, just about everything they perceive to be lacking in more familiar faiths. And many are finding what they’re looking for in Buddhism.

Pop culture is producing a flurry of Buddhist-inspired works. In addition to Seven Years in Tibet, 1997’s other Buddha film is Kundun—which premiered this Christmas—and is acclaimed director Martin Scorsese’s look at the Dalai Lama’s life. There are other hints the Buddhism has been emerging to the forefront, as even rock bands (Nirvana) to TV shows (ABC’s “Dharma and Greg”) tip their hats to Buddhist concepts.

But it wasn’t just yesterday that America’ cultural leaders began boosting Buddhism. It’s been happening for a century and a half.

East Comes West
In the early 1800s, few Americans knew anything about the message of the Buddha, who was born more than 2,500 years ago, found enlightenment while meditating under a bodhi tree, and taught that peace could only be found in nirvana—a state of detachment from all worldly desires and passions. Now there are around 300 million Buddhists in the world, most of them in southeast Asia.

Then in the 1840s, transcendentalist writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau introduced the American masses to Eastern concepts.

“They were the first American literary figures to take the East seriously,” says Rick Fields, author of How the Swans Came to the Lake, a 400-page history or Buddhism in America. “In doing that they kind of broke the ice.”

In the 1950s, a new group of literary figures called the “beats”—which included poet Allen Ginsburg and novelist Jack Kerouac—popularized Buddhist concepts for a new, spiritually curious youth subculture (one of Kerouac’s acclaimed novels is Dharma Bums).

In the 1960s, the Beatles were high on Hinduism and Transcendental Meditation and had frequent, highly publicized audiences with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. While the Fab Four eventually cut ties with the Maharishi after they found him courting the affections of their female companions, the Beatles’ music—and the music of countless other bands—continued to be influenced by Eastern thought.

During the 1990s, a variety of celebrities from the worlds of film, sports, and music have exhibited varying levels of dedication to branches of the Buddhist tradition.

Actors Steven Segal, Richard Gere, and Patrick Duffy Chicago Bulls basketball coach Phil Jackson, and musicians John Cage, Tina Turner, and Adam Yauch have all claimed some level of commitment to Buddhist thought. Yauch in particular has been among the most explicit in articulating his beliefs. In the process, he’s helped transform his rock/rap trio the Beastie Boys—formerly a testosterone-driven group most famous for their 1986 hit, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)”—into a more spiritually mature outfit that condemns sexism and lust, promotes universal harmony, “listening to the elders,” and the “Bodhisattva Vow,” which is a song from their 1994 album, Ill Communication: “As I develop the awakening mind/I praise the Buddhas as they shine.”

Yauch also organized two Tibetan Freedom Concerts in 1996 and 1997. This summer’s installment featured U2—along with plenty of Buddhist monks—and raised both consciousness and money for the Milarepa Fund, which provides money to help fight state-sponsored persecution of Tibetan monks.

Buddha at the Box Office
But these days, movies may be doing more to promote Buddhism to the masses than any other medium in recent history—with the exception of the tireless work of the Dalai Lama, a human cyclone who has the spiritual allure of the late Mother Teresa and the travel schedule of Pope John Paul II.

In 1993, it was Hollywood hunk Keanu Reeves who played the Buddha in Bernardo Bertolucci’s strange film Little Buddha. It juxtaposes scenes from Buddha’s life with the story of a Seattle couple (Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda) who find out that their young son may be a reincarnated Tibetan monk. Although the two stories never mesh, the film provides audiences with an interesting introduction to Buddha’s life and beliefs.

The Razor’s Edge, like Seven Years in Tibet, is an adaptation of a book, this time W. Somerset Maugham’s story of a rich young man’s search for truth in India. Tyrone Power starred in the classic 1946 version. A 1984 remake featuring Bill Murray failed to catch fire, in part because many moviegoers couldn’t adjust to Murray, a “Saturday Night Live” alum, going from a mumbling golf course groundskeeper (Caddyshack) and leechy camp counselor (Meatballs) to the role of an angst-ridden religious seeker.

While brooding Brad Pitt’s role in Seven Years in Tibet is rumored to have made thousands of instant Buddhist converts among his legions of female fans, the movie suffered one scrape with scandal before it hit the silver screen. Germany’s Stern magazine revealed that Harrer had been a member of the Nazi SS—a problem that was quickly remedied by Pitt, who added new voice-overs.

But one of the movie’s most reassuring messages is that anyone can journey toward redemption—even those who’ve hobnobbed with Nazis. Movies like Seven Years in Tibet, musicians like Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, and Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama are making Buddhist-styled redemption look inviting and practical to growing numbers of American young people. Unfortunately for many of these youths, Christianity’s promised redemption often looks remote or specially reserved for the deserving.