THE STAR IN TRIMPHU a few days later is Thurman himself, who's slated to meet with students and dignitaries for a discussion about gross national happiness, followed by dinner with Bhutan's best and brightest. The whole entourage is invited. But first we head downtown to support the economy.

A mountain-wrapped city of 55,000 along the banks of a river, Thimphu is the only national capital on earth without a traffic light. The buildings, trimmed with latticework, give off a Swiss vibe, and the shops have suspiciously Western names, like the Buzz Club and U.S. Enterprises. There's no shortage of Internet cafés, either.

"Thimphu is looking grotty," Brent Olson says, as we pass gangs of dogs and a crew of workers manually raising a streetlamp.

He has a point: After the stillness of the countryside, the cacophony of dogs barking, horns honking,

Some of us will find serenity; others will keep trying. I'm wavering in the middle, but at least tenet 18 in "The Way of Purification" has become clear to me: It is hard to attain a peaceful mind.

and jackhammers hammering is overwhelming. And everywhere, people are shopping—for high heels, for a 50-gallon plastic rain barrel, for an entertaining read like The Da Vinci Code (displayed in English in a bookstore window). Of course, everyone in our group is shopping for made-in-Bhutan kiras and ghos.

The only souvenir I want is a hand-sculpted clay Buddha from the local crafts school we just toured. But they aren't for sale. And then it hits me—for two weeks I've been surrounded by paintings, statues, and drawings of divine beings, from mustached Guru Rinpoches to Milarepas (a skinny saint from Tibet) and every other possible manifestation of enlightened ones. Their visages appear in temples, on truck dashboards, and carved into rock faces in so many incarnations that I've started taking them for granted—just as I've started taking the companionship of my fellow psychonauts for granted.

And now, after meditating jointly on death and selflessness—and after sharing the last 42 meals together, eating things like wild boar and topping it off with an excess of Dragon Warmers—we'll disperse to all corners of the globe. Some of us will have found serenity, others will keep trying to muscle their way to it, and some just won't get it. I'm wavering in the middle, but at least tenet 18 in "The Way of Purification" from The Teaching of Buddha has become crystal clear to me: It is hard to attain a peaceful mind. Or, as it occurred to me at the confluence of the Paro and Thimphu rivers, I can either drive myself mad trying to distinguish where one river begins and the other ends, or I can let myself be mesmerized by the raucous crash they make as they flow downstream as one.

At the festivities a few hours later, Thurman is in exquisite form. He works the crowd like a Buddhist Seinfeld ("Nirvana is that which one seeks through orgasm and death!") and then launches into a heartfelt plea for Buddhist education. Teaching traditional spiritual values, he says, is the best way to maintain the country's identity at its most crucial turning point, when it could go the way of isolationism and risk poverty and despair or go the way of globalization and risk being consumed by the beast of Western values.

At dinner, I sit near Chencho Dorji, Bhutan's only practicing psychiatrist; his clientele's number-one disorder is anxiety, a result, he says, of fast-paced lifestyle changes. Across the table is Tshewang Dendup, the scruffily handsome actor who starred in the 2003 movie Travelers and Magicians, the first feature film shot entirely in Bhutan. Ironically, he plays the character who is desperately trying to leave Bhutan and get to America, the land of his dreams.

It seems that even Buddhists, the masters of finding nirvana in the here and now, can't always overcome the urge to search elsewhere. But when I ask Dendup, who is currently making his living as a cameraman for Bhutan's sole television station, why he's not heading to Hollywood, he laughs, then sets me straight. "Why would anyone want to go there?"