Accordingly, he showed up for last week’s ceremony with his 6ft 4in frame draped in a monk’s robe. The elevation of the “ballistic mystic”, as Esquire magazine has called him, shocked and divided Buddhists around the world. Some were inclined to indulge him, claiming he is a devout Buddhist.Others were less happy. The action star of Under Siege, On Deadly Ground and Hard To Kill has long been a student of Japanese Buddhism, but several years ago he started getting into Tibet, too.Last year, the martial arts hunk was declared to be the reincarnation of a great lama.

He has played vigorous part in the campaign to publicise China’s brutal policy towards Tibet and while in Nepal last week he visited a Tibetan refugee camp. His demeanour in the monastery was modest and unassuming.
Steven Seagal’s is a different kind of piety. The brother who helped her in the swindle, Shankar Das, 58, was convicted of three similar deceptions at an earlier trial and was jailed for 12 months. Accountant, Dilip Chakrabarti, 54, of Edgware, Middlesex, who was found guilty of five deceptions, received a similar sentence.. Conspicuous among the watching foreigners were the actors Richard Gere and Steven Seagal. The two actors demonstrate the contrasting ways in which Westerners can take to Buddhism.

Gere, hunched and lawyerly, almost invisible among the crowd in a maroon blouson, has been a Buddhist since he was 20 and a disciple of the Dalai Lama for 15 years. After their successes in the early Nineties, extreme right-wing parties are declining, and racist attacks have abated.Sentiments in the east make barely a blip on the national statistics, but the evidence from east German schools suggests that the racist tide there is again on the rise.. A solicitor who swindled building societies out of nearly pounds 600,000 to “prop up” her debt-ridden practice, was jailed for three years yesterday. Anita Bose, 56, of Golders Green, north London, helped by one of her brothers and her accountant during the two-year-long fraud, would have got away with almost pounds 1m if all her “entirely fictitious” mortgage applications had succeeded. Southwark Crown Court heard all the cash was used to “plug” a huge deficit in the client account of the north London practice of Lipman Bose. And a quarter of the Austrian electorate – in third place – put their trust in Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party in the last elections. Mr Haider’s dislike of foreigners and his high regard for some of Hitler’s “achievements” is common knowledge.Fourth-placed Denmark would at first sight appear to buck the trend.

Less than 5 per cent of the country’s population are immigrants Danes are prosperous and by tradition tolerant to newcomers. But in last month’s local elections, the xenophobic Danish People Party achieved a breakthrough, thanks in large part to anti-immigrant sentiments whipped up by the tabloid press. With more immigrants still coming, the party appears to have a bright future.Germany, on the other hand, is showing the opposite trend, at least in the west. “Feelings of racism co-exist with a strong belief in the democratic system and respect for fundamental social rights and freedoms”.There is, nevertheless, a disquieting link between the various countries’ position in the chart and the recent performance of the extreme right. In Belgium, where love-thy-neighbour politics went out of fashion years ago, parties preaching xenophobia have been making headway, especially among the Flemish community.France, the silver medallist, regularly comes up with a strong vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National. Only in Luxembourg and Portugal do a majority feel “not at all racist”.Padraig Flynn, the EU commissioner presenting the report, expressed “extreme concern” at the “shocking statistics”, but was also able to draw some comfort from the findings. While unemployment was described as the main cause of intolerance, several countries with very high jobless rates appeared to be relatively untainted by racism, whilst more prosperous neighbours were hostile out of all proportion.”The survey shows the complexity of the phenomenon of racism,” the report said.