ABSTRACT
With over 600 centres worldwide, the Tibetan Buddhist Diamond Way movement founded and led by Ole Nydahl (b. 1941) is a fast growing global lay Buddhist movement and the arguably largest convert Buddhist movement in Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike other Western Buddhist converts, such as Sangharakshita, the founder of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO, now: Triratna), Nydahl and his late wife Hannah (1946-2007) never saw themselves as instigators of a new, specifically western (hybrid or even eclectic) form of Buddhism; instead they have always emphasised the importance of the close, traditional embedment of their teachings within the global Karma Kagyu (bKa’ brgyud) tradition. Their Diamond Way might be described as missionary, but does not (or does only in a very limited way) fit the label “Neo-Buddhism” or “New Buddhism” (Coleman 2001); instead, it can be meaningfully described as a “neo-orthodox” (in Peter Berger’s terminology) or, better, a “neo-orthoprax” Tibetan Buddhist lay movement (see Scherer 2012).
