Source: Summit Daily News
Wire Service: AP
http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20050916/NEWS/109160026
On September 16, 2005 the Associated Press reported, "More than 15,000 people, including business leaders, congressmen, former ambassadors and just plain folks gathered in this mountain resort to listen to the Dalai Lama this week during a series of speaking engagements commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Celebrities came on million-dollar jets. Schoolchildren came by the busload. On a high school football field where public events were held, Tibetan and Nepalese immigrants prostrated themselves on the grass to the man they consider the 14th reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, next to Idaho natives just curious to hear what the winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize had to say. From the time Buddhism was formally introduced to the United States at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, this 2,500-year-old religion from the Indian subcontinent has been on the march in America. The nation now has an estimated 2.9 million Buddhists."