Most Tibetans will tell you that despite the lack of religious institutions and buildings, practicing Buddhism is the same no matter where you are. But many of them will admit that struggling to make a living as an immigrant leaves little time for prayers and prostrations. Only a handful of the thousands of Tibetan refugees living in New York City ever attend any of New York's 40-odd Buddhist centers, which are mostly frequented by Westerners interested in learning meditation.

Most of the centers were founded to teach Buddhism to people who know little about it and are therefore more appropriate for spiritually curious Westerners, said Lobsang Tenpa, a Buddhist monk who lives in Brooklyn.

"Tibetans, because they grow up in a Buddhist culture, already have a strong foundation in the Buddhist teachings," he said.

Some Tibetans are wary of the numerous Buddhist centers in America because they feel the Tibetan monks who teach there aren't really qualified teachers, said Tenzin Gelek of the Trace Foundation for Tibetan Development. In Tibet, a monk would have to earn a khenpo or geshe degree, a doctoral degree in Buddhist philosophy that takes roughly 20 years to complete, in order to be considered a legitimate teacher. In the West, however, such rules do not apply, Gelek said.

"People are suspicious when lamas they've never heard of are suddenly gain a reputation as a high teacher in the West," Gelek said.

Buddhist lamas who immigrate to America often end up teaching Buddhism to Westerners who can help fund their monasteries in India and Nepal rather than tending to the Tibetan community. Gelek said many Tibetans feel resentful when they see lamas becoming rich off their Western patrons while Tibetan refugees living in settlements in India are still struggling to meet basic needs. The fact that many dharma centers in the West charge for teachings alienates many Tibetans, who see putting a price on religion as anathema.

"Tibetans still can't get used to the idea of paying money for religious teachings," he said.

As a result, the Western Buddhists and the Tibetans rarely attend the same centers or teachings, unless the Dalai Lama or other high lamas visit.

"For many Tibetans, the whole question of religion has become problematic, because they become more secular sometimes and they don't experience their own religion in the same way Westerners do. Westerners have very selective ideas about Tibetan religion and think that Buddhism is all about meditation," Barnett, lecturer at Columbia University said.

Perhaps another reason that most Tibetans in New York do not follow a particular lama or join one of the many Buddhist centers is that the structure of Tibetan Buddhism is changing in response to the pressure to unify the religious community in exile.

"Within Tibet, religion was very atomized," Barnett said. "There wasn't this sense of an overarching religious structure like the Catholic church."

The concept of a unified Buddhism under a single hierarchy headed by the Dalai Lama is fairly recent, Barnett said, and was in part constructed to strengthen the religious unity of exiled Tibetans.

Barnett explained that in Tibet, people traditionally related to their own lama, who came from their own region or was connected to their family, whereas in exile Tibetans have rallied behind the Dalai Lama, who they collectively regard as their leader with few exceptions. Under the new model of a unified Buddhist hierarchy, most Tibetans in America will attend the Dalai Lama's teachings when he visits, but do not maintain a relationship with another lama.

However, now that so many Tibetans are born and raised in secular societies, their grounding in Buddhism may be slipping. Second generation refugees may come to rely on Western Buddhist teachers and institutions for guidance.

Yangchen Lama attended a Christian missionary school in north India where she grew up and consequently came to know more about Christianity than her native Buddhist religion, she said. But here in New York, she has reconnected with her Buddhist roots by reading dharma books in English and attending meditation retreats lead by prominent Western Buddhist teachers like Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman.

For Lama, coming to Buddhism in the West has given her an understanding of essential Buddhist teachings than she might have gained practing her religion growing up.