The Actor and His God/King : Faith: Richard Gere lends his support to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Dalai Lama’s ‘Pilgrimage for Active Peace.’

Witness the Buddhist blessing of the mountain: monks chanting, shrill Tibetan horns splitting the quiet morning with peals of goose-like blats and green juniper branches burning with a sweet, white pungent smoke that dissolves into the blue skies above San Francisco.

It was a perfect setting for mantra to meet media, bodhisattva to meet show biz and the Dalai Lama to meet the movie actor.

Richard Gere, the Buddhist, sat quietly in his three-piece suit, as gray and inconspicuous as his perfectly coiffed hair. He went unrecognized by the dozens of reporters on hand for the Dalai Lama’s first Lhasang, or mountain blessing, since the Tibetan god/king won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize 10 days ago.

While reporters raced up and down the aisles, straining for celebrities to interview, the celebrated star of “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “American Gigolo” and a half-dozen other movies that touched on the rough-hewn situational ethics that characterized much of the 1980s, shut his eyes behind a pair of eyeglasses. Gere’s personal publicist and several other members of his entourage sat alongside him, where he was joined by an invited Times reporter--ninth row back behind the press corps and 10 yards from the stage where the hourlong tea-and-meditation ceremony took place.

But nary a microphone was stuck in his face. Gere didn’t mind. He didn’t come seeking exposure. His hands were clasped together in prayer throughout most of the ritual.

The media did find beat poet Allen Ginsberg (“That’s A-L-L-E-N and ‘berg’ with an ‘e,’ not a ‘u,’ ” Ginsberg told a pair of reporters) and LSD guru Richard (Baba Ram Dass) Alpert (“Dass is spelled with two ‘s’es,” Alpert explained to a photographer scribbling down his name).

Maybe it was the glasses or the stockbroker’s suit or the premature silver in his naturally curly locks. But, for some reason, one of the Dalai Lama’s biggest and best-known fans went undetected by the roving TV crews who wanted to know how the Nobel laureate beat out the other Nobel nominees, where he was going next on his whirlwind, worldwide “Pilgrimage for Active Peace” and what he was going to buy with his $469,000 in Peace Prize money.

Gere listened with quiet tolerance. To him, the 54-year-old Dalai Lama is addressed only as “His Holiness” and such questions completely missed the point.

But Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama in a line dating back six centuries, seemed mildly bemused by it all. He giggled as he answered the press, speaking of love and compassion and something Gere knows about firsthand: promotion.

“How to promote love and compassion is the thing,” the exiled god/king of Tibet told the curious army of journalists. “Education, this is the thing. I have no such qualifications (to be such an educator/promoter). I am a simple Buddhist monk.”

Perhaps the little man in saffron and maroon robes was simple. Perhaps he was unacquainted with the ways of promotion and publicity. But he took full advantage of the hoards of minicams and shotgun microphones aimed at him Tuesday during the first U.S. stop in his “Pilgrimage for Active Peace,” organized by Buddhist leader Tai Situpa XII. (On Sunday, this leg of the Dalai Lama’s pilgrimage will end with a similar mountaintop ceremony at Mt. Shasta, 200 miles northeast of San Francisco.)

When a handful of cynics sang “Hello Dalai” to the tune of “Hello, Dolly!” upon his arrival by helicopter for the Lhasang ceremony, the pacific grin never left the Nobel laureate’s face. When an NBC cameraman stepped on the sacrosanct red carpet leading from the Dalai Lama’s helicopter pad to the Lhasang ceremonial site, the Buddhist leader’s advance men got much more worked up about the faux pas than the god/king himself.

“It is best to be an optimist because, if you are a pessimist, you will only be depressed and no one wants this depression,” he said in one of many homilies he punctuated with the tinkle of his trademark laughter.

Since his elevation by the Nobel Committee and, subsequently, the media, to the instant international status of Peace Prize winner, he has become a very different kind of god/king. Like it or not, the Dalai Lama is now a media hero. And the perennially smiling prelate from Tibet seems to like it. He has lost no opportunity during the last week to promote his favorite subject: freeing his 2 million countrymen from 40 years of Chinese rule.

And Gere, who normally spurns the press, says that he stands ready to help him do it.

“The Chinese have acted like barbarians,” he said flatly.

After more than a year without a movie in release, Gere is coming out in two starring roles this winter: “3000,” a Pygmalion-type tale directed by Garry (“Happy Days”) Marshall for Touchstone, and “Internal Affairs,” a cop drama for Paramount.

But he really doesn’t care to talk about either one very much. That’s something he does for money and career and the Hollywood machine with which he made a Faustian deal more than a decade ago. A man who rarely does interviews, Gere cringes at the thought of making the talk show rounds or submitting himself to gossip columnists. It isn’t that he doesn’t know how to promote his films. In an odd show-biz paradox that smacks of Zen, his well-known refusal to publicize often creates its own publicity. On the way to not talking about this movie or that movie, he talks instead about promoting something he considers more worthwhile, like the religious philosophy of the Dalai Lama. The movie winds up with a plug, but almost by default.

“One is required to explore everything that is being said as one tests a precious metal to find out if it’s real,” he said, offering a quick course in the Eastern religion that he took up 10 years ago, after his first visit to Nepal. “There’s a very deep and strict philosophical and logical basis to the system that this extraordinary man, Gotama Buddha, came up with.”

When he agreed to take a break from filming at Disney studios and accompany the new Nobel laureate on his pilgrimage, Gere had planned to use his celebrity to help the Dalai Lama past the worst of the predatory press. It would not have been the first time the actor has sought out “quality” publicity for his causes.

He is an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central America and an active environmentalist. His chief cause remains the freeing of Tibet, however. Two years ago, he helped establish Tibet House in New York--a museum and research facility dedicated to promoting Tibetan culture sanctioned by the Dalai Lama.

But the “simple Buddhist monk,” as the Tibetan leader calls himself, seems to have learned the lessons of promotion in Western culture as well as Gere. If the Dalai Lama is unsophisticated, it is the simpleness of the late Sen. Sam Ervin, who liked to characterize himself as a “simple country lawyer.”

After the Lhamansa ceremony atop Mt. Tamalpais, Gere joined the Dalai Lama in one of the helicopters heading for the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, 30 miles to the south.

After the Dalai Lama delivered a noontime speech at the hotel, Gere agreed to emerge from anonymity and do what he rarely does: join in a press conference.

But that was before the Dalai Lama hammed it up a bit for the Western press. He flew in helicopters. He laughed his disarming, infectious laugh. He donned a tennis hat to keep the sun off his shaven skull and waved happily to the predatory press.

“Gee, he’s cute!” remarked one veteran photographer.

So when the Dalai Lama chuckled, finessed and breezed his way through the press conference without inviting Gere to the dais, the Dalai Lama’s own public relations firm, Daniel J. Edelman Inc., thought there might be some hurt feelings.

“Gosh, Richard, I hope you don’t mind not being up there,” said Edelman account supervisor Mara Brazer. “We were going to bring you up but he just. . . .”

Gere bowed slightly and waved off the rest of her sentence with his hand. He smiled as enigmatically, if not as broadly, as the Dalai Lama.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I am here to serve.”