So long as their high mountains kept the Tibetans isolated, their attitude toward Westerners - which was generally dismissive or indifferent - remained an academic matter. But with the Chinese invasion in 1959, an academic matter turned into one of life and death. During the 1960s, the Communists leveled monasteries and forbade the teaching of Buddhism, and the world’s power brokers forgot Tibet in favor of China’s potential billion-customer market. The “last ancient civilization,” as it was called, was under a death sentence. Under such circumstances, the fate of Tibet’s religion was not hard to predict.

But Tibetan Buddhism did not fade away in the night, as the Chinese Communists (and Western secularists) expected. The lamas who managed to escape Tibet were suddenly thrown into the West’s dizzying hypermodernity, barely speaking English, not comprehending secular ways, carrying only the robes on their backs and their bizarre faith. Though seemingly doomed to fail, within a dozen or so years they were successfully teaching Westerners in droves, and in doing so, they rewrote notions of sacredness and piety.

One lama in particular - known simply as Lama Yeshe - attracted Westerners with his joie de vivre, his emotional warmth, his ability to connect; indeed many people thought they had never seen someone so vibrant. Whatever it was that he was exuding, the young Westerners who met him wanted to acquire it for themselves. Strangely enough, Yeshe was happy to teach them. (Teaching Westerners was all but taboo for Tibetans then; Yeshe’s sister volunteered to support him, if only he would stop such a shameful activity.)

Lama Yeshe managed to surmount the language barriers and other obstacles, too. He strung together every English word he learned and added body language and pantomime, to talk with his new young friends from the West. Since his English was picked up from hippies in India, out of his mouth came the most improbable sentences: “Dharma is like American bed - everybody can join in.” “Change misery into blissful chocolate.” “Now you going to say, 'He crazy, he Himalayan gorilla,’ but I say, 'You check it out.’ “ “Question-answers?” He called everyone “dear,” and indeed he made each of his students feel that he or she was dear to him. He was always saying “thank you,” as though whatever happened gave him some reason to be grateful. Once he was driving in California - his car zigzagging down the road as he took in the scenery, oblivious to uninteresting things like stop signs - when a state trooper pulled him over. As the policeman wrote out the ticket, Lama Yeshe kept repeating, “Thank you, thank you, so kind.” (Fortunately, he did not call the trooper “dear.”)

As for the Tibetan in Tibetan Buddhism - the cultural Himalayan superstructure that has so perplexed foreigners - Yeshe simply sawed it off. He thought differences between East and West were a matter of taste, and demonstrated that even a lama from Tibet can have a taste for the West. Tibetans are nearly addicted to their salty butter tea, but Lama Yeshe preferred Earl Grey. For the incense used in Tibetan religious rituals he substituted bottled spray cologne - so much easier, and besides, he liked the aroma better. He asked some Italian followers, “Can’t you find a way to insert into your rituals, you know, spaghetti?” During the rituals he conducted, he would suggest the participants hold each other’s hands, which had never been done in Tibet (and predated the New Age hugging fad). Hitherto Tibetans had tended to view Caucasians as idiot savants, preternaturally good at, say, constructing engines but dumb to the subtleties of the spirit. But Yeshe observed that the Europeans and Americans he met had attended school since age five or six, and their education and skills, although different in content, rivaled any rinpoche’s.

In Buddhism (and Asian religions in general), the stumbling block for most Westerners is the guru - that mysterious being to whom the seeker must surrender his life. Yeshe dismissed exalted guru worship as unnecessary; if his students wanted an all-wise sage, he referred them to their own inner nature, which differed not a jot from the Buddha’s. Instead of an off-putting authority figure, young Westerners discovered in Lama Yeshe a lovable man who was curious about them, who wanted only to help them.

As ever more Westerners met Lama Yeshe and other lamas like him, a doomed faith of the past came to seem, just possibly, a plausible religion for the future. By the year 2000, Yeshe and his students alone had founded one hundred thirty centers in twenty-nine countries. Who was this Tibetan man, who had grown up never seeing a Westerner yet suddenly was teaching thousands of them?