It would seem that an event with the United Nations logo plastered all over it should inherently try to be representative. As such, it seemed logical to assume that all of the various strands of Buddhism would be represented at the recent UN-sponsored conference for the Buddhist holiday of Vesak. This, however, proved far from the case. Indeed, top priority seemed instead to have been given to avoiding what can be referred to as 'Angry Monk Syndrome'.
Immediately upon arriving at the United Nations Day of Vesak Conference, held on 14-17 May in Hanoi, it became apparent that there were very few Burmese or Tibetan monks in attendance. After tracking down one of the few Tibetan monks in the vicinity, I asked him whether this was so. He nonchalantly said, "Yeah, it's very political. I'm here as a teacher, not as a lama." He said that he teaches occasionally in the US, and that he is a personal student of the most famous Buddhist to not be invited to the conference, the Dalai Lama. Accounts differ here, of course: members of the International Organizing Committee, which put together the conference, claimed that an invitation had indeed been sent to the Dalai Lama's office, but his representatives say that no invitation was ever received.
The rumour was that Thich Nhat Hanh, the renowned Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, had lobbied very hard to get the Dalai Lama invited. Indeed, the conference would have come close to being a genuinely global event if the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh had been in attendance together. The fact that Thich Nhat Hanh himself was at the Hanoi conference at all was significant, though. After all, it was only in 2005, after four decades in exile, that Thich Nhat Hanh had returned to Vietnam.
Upon my return from the conference, I offered to show some photographs to a Tibetan monk whom I will call Lama Tenzin. He wanted to know whether there were many Tibetans at the conference, and became slightly impatient as I searched through my 700 or so pictures. When I finally showed him a photo of one Tibetan teacher at the conference, a monk named Lama Gangchen Rinpoche, who had presented a paper at the 'War, Conflict and Reconciliation' panel, Lama Tenzin almost spit on my computer screen. "He supports Dorje Shugden!" he said.