The trouble is that when religion is leeched in this fashion of too much content, all that is left is platitudes - or worse, banalities.
Who was it that said (paraphrasing) 'little minds discuss people, mediocre minds discuss event, great minds discuss ideas'? We can only aspire, of course, but we're not aspiring at the moment, it seems to me. The article is about ideas, however trivial, which is why I find it interesting, not about who the celebrity from the pages of People magazine named Dalai Lama is, or what Kennedy did or didn't do to Tibet. And the idea this article begins to explore is the coctail party fascination of the Western bourgeoise with some exotic religions that may or may not be relevant to the Western way of life.
So, since we're all so disappointed with the way this thread has proceeded, this is my own private disappointment. Oh, well, I'll just go back to that Entertainment Tonight website that I discovered by seeing the list of websites visited by a missing intern who had a master's degree in something or other. Like heavy, man!
The bourgeois rarely stick with it, the fascination centers within the elite or wanna-be elite community. And Buddhism is a mainstream religion, nothing exotic about it. As far as Westerners being fascinated by the orient, in 1886, Henry Adams,grandson of John Quincy Adams, studied Buddhism and art in Japan while seeking comfort after the suicide of his wife. On his return, he commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt a simple memorial based on Japanese/Zen themes. "Grief" stands today--in Rock Creek Park, near where Chandra's body was discovered.