And the monster that kept rearing its head: teacher ethics - alcohol abuse, 'sex in the forbidden zone.' Out of this chaos emerged the issues of primary concern: adaptation of the teachings, tradition versus culture, sectarianism, the role of the teacher, the use of psychotherapy, sexism, monasticism. The ensuing debate generated myriad hand-scribbled sheets of paper taped to every available beam and pillar in the room. Our task was to define the themes for each session and select people to summarise our perceptions to His Holiness. The first couple of days were spent preparing for our eight two hour sessions with the Dalai Lama. Within the course of our first session together, it became clear that a common experience united us far more than our different traditions divided us. Some of us bore titles and robes, some had founded centres, some had explored more than one tradition, some had spent years in retreat, some had authored well-known books. We had all been involved full-time with the dharma as students, teachers and writers for most of our adult lives. We represented most of the Buddhist traditions: Theravada, Zen, the Tibetan schools. Its roofs had spawned satellite dishes.ДЄt the instigation of a burly, bearded American lama called Surya Das, twenty-two of us were gathered here for nine days of discussions, four of which would be with the Dalai Lama. But the village had become more packed, its puzzle of buildings scrambling ever further up, down and along the hillside, its smells more pungent. The rhododendrons, the snow-speckled rock wall of the Dhaoladhar range, the pine forests, the sheets of rain and mist, the tattered prayer-flags - none of this had changed. Now, older, balder, disrobed and married, my enthusiasm well tempered by the cynicism of experience, I now returned, for the first time in eighteen years, with a mixture of nostalgia and trepidation, along those same dizzying hairpinned roads. And if history teaches only one lesson, it is this: no one ever guesses the future.ДЄLMOST TWO DECADES AGO TO THE DAY I had arrived in the same Himalayan village to embark on a course of study, monastic discipline and meditation. 'In our cities we are dominated by a thousand years of history,' pleaded Sylvia Wetzel from Berlin. The disquieting features - institutions, sectarianism, scandal (the things we were here to talk about) - had conveniently evaporated. For the Americans, the Buddhist future unfolded as a kind of hi-tech Walden Pond peopled by dharma-intoxicated bodhisattvas. We took it in turns to present our visions. The tedious rain was still streaming down the windows. What role does the dharma have there?' Fifteen minutes later we opened our eyes and returned to the brash furnishings of the Surya Resorts Hotel in McLeod Ganj, the former British hill-station above the town of Dharamsala where the Dalai Lama has been living in exile since 1960. The practices, the centres, the world itself. 'Close your eyes and imagine the kind of Buddhism you would foresee in twenty or thirty years time. 'I'D LIKE TO SUGGEST AN EXERCISE,' announced Jack Kornfield during a preliminary meeting before the formal sessions with the Dalai Lama began.

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