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Buddhism in the West

The history of Buddhism in Europe, North America, and the wider Western world — from the first translations in the 19th century to the modern immigrant communities and convert sanghas.

by The editorial team · reviewed 2026-06-13

The history of Buddhism in the West is shorter than many Western Buddhists realise. The first European translations of Buddhist texts appeared in the 1830s; the first permanent Western Buddhist communities in the 1850s; the first large-scale convert sanghas in the 1960s and 1970s; the first major wave of Buddhist immigration to Europe and North America in the 1970s and 1980s; the first generation of Western-born teachers in the 2000s. The whole history is less than 200 years, and the central, defining development — the encounter between Western modernity and a 2,500-year-old tradition — is still in progress.

The first encounters #

The first European knowledge of Buddhism came through Christian missionaries, diplomats, and traders in the 17th and 18th centuries. The French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes reported on Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1650s; the Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri lived in Lhasa from 1716 to 1721 and wrote an account of Tibetan Buddhism that was not published in full until 1832. None of these early encounters produced serious Buddhist studies in the West; the dominant European mode of understanding Asian religions was the Christian theological framework, which interpreted Buddhism as a kind of atheistic or nihilistic system.

The first real engagement with the Buddhist texts came with the founding of European Orientalism. The Société Asiatique in Paris (founded 1822) and the Royal Asiatic Society in London (founded 1823) provided the institutional framework. The French scholar Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852) published his Introduction à l’histoire du bouddhisme indien in 1844, the first serious European scholarly work on the Buddhist tradition. The Pali Text Society was founded in London in 1881 by T.W. Rhys Davids; the society’s editions of the Pali Canon remain the standard scholarly reference in the twenty-first century.

The 19th-century Theosophical reception #

The first popular Western engagement with Buddhism was through the Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott in New York in 1875. Blavatsky had spent several years in India and Ceylon and was influenced by both Hindu and Buddhist thought. In 1880, Blavatsky and Olcott formally took refuge in the Three Jewels in Sri Lanka, the first public conversion of Westerners to Buddhism. Blavatsky’s later work, The Secret Doctrine (1888), drew heavily on Hindu and Buddhist sources, but interpreted them through a Theosophical framework that the traditional Buddhist world did not recognise.

The Theosophical reception was influential but historically limited. It introduced Buddhism to a wider audience and produced the first generation of Western Buddhist sympathisers. It also produced a particular version of the tradition — esoteric, focused on hidden wisdom, often drawing on Hindu elements — that the later, more textually-grounded reception had to correct.

A more textually serious 19th-century figure was the British colonial officer and Pali scholar T.W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922), who founded the Pali Text Society and translated the Dīgha Nikāya and other texts. Rhys Davids’s view of Buddhism was influenced by his commitment to the Victorian rationalist framework; he understood early Buddhism as a kind of ethical positivism, a “primitive science” of the mind. His translation work was excellent; his interpretation was shaped by his own historical situation.

A more traditional voice was the Sinhalese Buddhist revival of the late 19th century, particularly the work of Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933). Dharmapala, originally Christian, converted to Buddhism and founded the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891 with the aim of restoring Buddhist control over Bodh Gaya and reviving the Buddhist world. The Maha Bodhi Society had branches in India, Sri Lanka, and the West; the journal The Maha-Bodhi (1892–) is still published. Dharmapala’s work is the first major example of what would later be called “socially engaged Buddhism,” though the label was not yet in use.

The 20th-century intellectual reception #

The early 20th century saw the consolidation of Western Buddhist studies as a serious intellectual enterprise. The Harvard Oriental Series began publishing critical editions of Buddhist texts; the Journal of the Pali Text Society (1882–) and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society became the main venues for scholarship; the Pali Text Society translations of the suttas, the Sacred Books of the East edited by Max Müller (1879–1910), and the Harvard Oriental Series translations of the Tibetan Tengyur and the Chinese Buddhist canon made the texts available in the major European languages.

The first generation of Western Buddhist practitioners in the early 20th century was small. Henry Clarke Warren (1854–1899), a Boston Unitarian who studied Pali under Rhys Davids and died young in India, left a posthumous Buddhism in Translations (1896) that is still in print. D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966) began publishing on Zen in English in the 1920s, with a major series of books through the 1930s and 1940s; his An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934) and his Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes, 1927–1934) are the foundational texts of the Western Zen reception. Suzuki is a controversial figure in Buddhist studies — his interpretive framework was heavily influenced by Western Romanticism and idealism, and his work has been criticized by more recent scholars as a “modernist” construction that distorted the Zen tradition in the interests of cross-cultural appeal.

The most influential 20th-century European figure was Christmas Humphreys (1901–1983), an English lawyer who founded the Buddhist Society in London in 1924 and the journal The Middle Way (1934–). Humphreys’ Buddhism was a moderate, ecumenical version that drew on Theosophical elements and was oriented to an educated Western middle-class audience. The Buddhist Society is still active and has been an important meeting point for the British convert community.

The 1960s and 1970s #

The major shift in Western Buddhism came in the 1960s and 1970s, when Buddhism became a major cultural presence in the United States and Europe for the first time. Three factors drove the shift:

  1. The counterculture. The Beat generation had been reading Suzuki and the Tibetan translations of the Bardo Thodol since the late 1950s; by the late 1960s, Buddhism had become a significant element of the counterculture, particularly in California and the East Coast. The Zen center in San Francisco (founded 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki, who arrived in 1959), the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts (founded 1976 by Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg, all of whom had studied in Asia), the Naropa Institute in Boulder (founded 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa), and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (founded 1989) became major centres of the new practice.

  2. The Vietnamese War and the Vietnamese immigration. The Vietnamese community in the United States, France, and Australia, beginning with the fall of Saigon in 1975, brought a large population of Vietnamese Buddhists, particularly Mahayana Buddhists, into the West. The communities established their own temples, often with the assistance of the receiving countries’ governments; the Vietnamese tradition, with its strong monastic and devotional elements, became a major feature of Western Buddhism. Thich Nhat Hanh’s exile in France, beginning in 1969, and his establishment of Plum Village in 1982, became the most visible Vietnamese Buddhist presence in the West. Thich Lien Phuoc in France, Thich Duc Hai in Australia, and many others established communities and centres that have continued into the 21st century.

  3. The Tibetan diaspora. The Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1950, the Tibetan uprising of 1959, and the subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama and over 100,000 Tibetans to India brought a major Tibetan population to the West over the next decades. The Tibetan diaspora established communities in Dharamsala (the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, in India), in Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. The Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala, the Tibetan Nuns Project (founded 1987), the Rigpa network (founded 1979 by Sogyal Rinpoche), the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) (founded 1975 by Lama Thubten Yeshe and Lama Thubten Zopa), and the Shambhala network (founded by Chögyam Trungpa in the 1970s) became the major institutional forms of the Tibetan presence in the West. The 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha project, founded in 2009, is the most ambitious translation project in Buddhist history, aiming to translate the entire Kangyur into English.

The 1980s and 1990s #

The 1980s and 1990s saw the institutional consolidation of Western Buddhism. The major convert communities — the Insight Meditation Society and its offshoots, the Zen Mountain Monastery (founded 1980 by John Daido Loori), Spirit Rock (founded 1987 by Jack Kornfield), the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (founded 1985), the Santa Fe Zen Center, the New York Insight Meditation Center, and many others — established themselves as durable institutions with their own teachers, programmes, and retreat facilities. The major convert teachers — Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Tara Brach, Gil Fronsdal in the Vipassana tradition; John Daido Loori, Bernie Glassman, Peter Levitt in the Zen tradition; Pema Chödrön, Mingyur Rinpoche, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in the Tibetan tradition — became the public face of Western Buddhism. The Insight Meditation Society’s “teacher council” became a model for many other Western communities.

The 1990s also saw the publication of the most influential Western Buddhist books of the period: Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart (1993); Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness (1995); Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart (1997); Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (1998); Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness (1998); Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997). These books, several of which became bestsellers, established the popular vocabulary of Western Buddhism.

The 2000s and 2010s #

The 2000s saw the emergence of a new generation of Western-born teachers and the institutional maturation of the Western Buddhist world. Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and others began training their own students as teachers; the first generation of Western-born monastics in the Zen and Tibetan traditions (including several Western-born tülkus, recognised reincarnations in the Tibetan system, a small but interesting development) entered teaching roles. The Soto Zen tradition in North America had over 600 centres by 2010; the Insight Meditation tradition had over 1,000 by 2015. The University of Wisconsin’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds (founded 2008 by Richard Davidson) and the Mind & Life Institute (founded 1987) brought the dialogue with neuroscience to a wider public.

The 2010s saw two contradictory developments. The first was the secular mindfulness boom, with the Mindful magazine (founded 2003), the Mindful Schools programme, the Mindful Schools network, the Headspace app (founded 2010), the Calm app (founded 2012), the Waking Up app (founded 2018 by Sam Harris, drawing explicitly on the Vipassana tradition), and the Insight Timer app (founded 2010) bringing the practice to millions who would not have identified as Buddhist. The second was the #MeToo moment in American Buddhism (the Sakyong Wangchuck scandal in 2018, the Shambhala community’s reckoning, the various Zen teacher scandals) and the public discussion of race, power, and authority in Western convert sanghas. The dialogue has continued into the 2020s, with the Mindful World initiative, the BIPOC Sangha networks, the Liberation Buddhist movement (founded in the late 2010s by Tiyana Ma and others), and the Asian Buddhist communities in the West organising around their own concerns.

The state of Western Buddhism today #

As of the mid-2020s, the Western Buddhist world is substantial and institutionally mature. The major convert communities have endured; the immigrant communities are well-established; the secular applications of the practice are widespread; the academic study of the tradition is now a major field (with the American Academy of Religion, the Buddhist Studies sessions at the AAR, the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, the Buddhist Studies Review, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Buddhism); the public understanding of the tradition is more sophisticated than it was in the 1960s, though still often confused with the modernist construction.

The open questions of the field are not new but have been made more pressing by the institutional maturation:

  • The relationship between the convert communities and the immigrant communities. The convert communities have been largely white and middle-class; the immigrant communities are Asian and working-class. The two have not always communicated well. The Buddhist Council of New York, the New York Buddhist Church, and the various cross-community dialogues are working on the relationship.
  • The relationship between the modernist construction and the traditional. The MBSR-style secularisation has produced a version of the practice that is sometimes hard to recognise from the traditional side. The traditional communities have not always been welcoming of the modernist construction, and the modernist communities have not always been respectful of the traditional. The dialogue is improving but is not yet resolved.
  • The relationship between Buddhism and the social and political crises of the time. Climate change, the displacement of populations, the rise of nationalist politics in many Buddhist-majority countries — these are the most pressing questions for any living Buddhist tradition. The engaged Buddhist movement has been one response; the Faithkeepers programmes, the Buddhist Climate Action network, the various chaplaincy and hospice programmes are others. Whether the response will be adequate to the scale of the challenges is one of the open questions of the field.

Sources & further reading #

  • Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford, 2008) — the essential critical work.
  • Christopher Queen, Charles Prebish and Damien Keown, eds., The Faces of Buddhism in America (University of California Press, 1998, rev. 2003) — the standard scholarly collection.
  • David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford, 2008) — the critical examination of the Western modernist construction.
  • Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs (Riverhead, 1997) and After Buddhism (Yale, 2015) — the secular Buddhist reconstruction.
  • Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart (Bantam, 1993) — the Western Vipassana teacher on practice in the modern world.
  • Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart (HarperOne, 1997) — the Western Tibetan teacher’s most influential book.
  • Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Parallax, 1998) — the Vietnamese teacher’s main English-language summary.
  • His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness (Riverhead, 1998) — the most-read book by a Buddhist teacher in the modern West.
  • Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Noble Eightfold Path (Buddhist Publication Society, 1984, rev. 2010) — the standard Western monastic treatment.
  • Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (Shambhala, 1981, rev. 1992) — the classic account of American Buddhism, now in its third edition.
  • Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912 (University of North Carolina Press, 1992, 2nd ed. Indiana, 2000) — the standard scholarly history of the early period.
  • Erin Oneil, On the Buddha’s Trail: A Journey Through the East (Rider, 2004) — the contemporary field report.