American Buddhism is usually told as a story about the 1960s. The actual history begins more than a century earlier, and the largest part of it has nothing to do with converts at all.

The immigrant beginning #

Chinese labourers arrived in California from 1849, and by the 1850s there were Buddhist and Daoist temples in San Francisco. By 1875 there were reportedly several hundred Chinese temples on the West Coast. Almost none survive; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and sustained hostility ended most of them.

Japanese immigration followed. The Buddhist Churches of America, the Jodo Shinshu organisation, traces its origin to missionaries sent from Kyoto in 1899. Its name is itself a historical artefact — “churches” was adopted deliberately to appear less foreign, and the organisation developed Sunday schools, pews, hymns, and a weekly service on the Protestant model.

During the Second World War, Japanese American Buddhists were interned along with the rest of the community, and Buddhist priests were among the first arrested. Services were held in the camps. The BCA’s history is inseparable from that experience, and it is a piece of American Buddhist history that the convert narrative routinely omits.

The intellectual thread #

A parallel and quite separate strand ran through American letters.

The Transcendentalists encountered Asian texts early; Emerson and Thoreau read what was available, and the first English rendering of part of the Lotus Sutra appeared in The Dial in 1844, translated from Burnouf’s French — by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, though it was long attributed to Thoreau.

Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879), a long narrative poem on the Buddha’s life, was a substantial bestseller and the route by which most nineteenth-century English speakers first encountered the story.

The World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 was the pivotal public event. Anagarika Dharmapala spoke, as did the Rinzai abbot Soyen Shaku. Shortly afterwards, Charles Strauss became probably the first person to formally convert to Buddhism on American soil.

Soyen Shaku’s student D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) then did more than any other individual to shape American understanding of Buddhism. Working first with Paul Carus in Illinois, later teaching at Columbia in the 1950s, he presented Zen as direct, experiential, anti-doctrinal, and compatible with modern life. His influence on artists, writers, and psychoanalysts was enormous — and his presentation was a Buddhist modernist construction, considerably removed from Japanese temple Zen.

The Beats and the counterculture #

The 1950s and 60s brought Buddhism into American popular culture, mostly through Zen and mostly imprecisely.

Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958) put a version of Buddhist practice in front of a mass readership. Gary Snyder, the poet on whom Kerouac’s protagonist was based, actually trained in Japan for over a decade and represents the serious end of that generation. Alan Watts popularised Zen through radio and books with great charm and considerable freedom of interpretation. John Cage’s work was directly shaped by Suzuki’s lectures.

What this period produced was an enormous audience and very little practice. That changed when teachers arrived.

The teachers arrive #

The decisive shift came with the immigration reform of 1965, which ended national-origin quotas, and with the Tibetan diaspora.

Zen. Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco in 1959 to serve a Japanese American congregation and found young Americans turning up to sit. He founded the San Francisco Zen Center and, in 1967, Tassajara — the first Zen monastery outside Asia. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970) remains the most widely read Zen book in English. Taizan Maezumi, Eido Shimano, Philip Kapleau, and others established other lineages.

Tibetan. Chögyam Trungpa arrived in 1970 and established Karma Dzong, Naropa Institute, and the Shambhala organisation — the most culturally influential Tibetan presence in America, and the most controversial, for reasons discussed below. The fourteenth Dalai Lama first visited in 1979 and became a major public figure. Kalu Rinpoche, Dezhung Rinpoche, Lama Yeshe, and Zopa Rinpoche established lineage centres.

Insight. In 1974–75, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg — all of whom had trained in Asia in Burmese and Thai lineages — founded the Insight Meditation Society at Barre, Massachusetts. Kornfield later founded Spirit Rock in California. Insight is the most distinctively American development: lay-led, largely without robes or ritual, meditation-centred, and closely connected to psychology.

Theravada monastic. Immigrant communities from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos — the last arriving in large numbers as refugees after 1975 — established temples across the country, and the Thai forest tradition established monasteries including Abhayagiri in California.

Vietnamese. Refugees after 1975 built a large temple network. Thich Nhat Hanh, exiled since 1966, became one of the most widely read Buddhist authors in English.

Soka Gakkai International-USA, the Nichiren-derived lay movement, grew rapidly from the 1960s and is notable for being, from early on, the most racially diverse Buddhist organisation in the country.

The two Buddhisms #

Scholars have long observed that American Buddhism consists of two largely non-overlapping populations, and the observation still holds.

Asian American Buddhists — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Lao, Burmese, Sri Lankan, Tibetan — practise in ethnic temples, often in heritage languages, with emphasis on ritual, festival, ancestral observance, merit-making, and community. They are the numerical majority of Buddhists in America.

Convert Buddhists, predominantly white and disproportionately highly educated and affluent, practise in meditation centres, with emphasis on sitting practice, minimal ritual, and a modernist framing.

The two rarely meet. The critique — made forcefully by scholars including Charles Prebish, Jan Nattier, and Chenxing Han — is that media coverage, publishing, and academic attention have overwhelmingly gone to the smaller convert population, and that “American Buddhism” has come to mean convert Buddhism by default. Han’s Be the Refuge (2021) documents how young Asian American Buddhists experience that erasure.

The terminology itself has been argued over: “two Buddhisms,” “ethnic” versus “convert,” “immigrant” versus “elite.” Each framing has been criticised, and none is fully satisfactory, partly because the categories leak — there are Asian American converts, white heritage Buddhists, and a growing number of people who fit neither.

Race and inclusion #

From the 2000s, convert communities began to confront their demographic narrowness seriously.

People-of-colour sitting groups, teacher training programmes explicitly aimed at diversifying a very white teaching cohort, and a body of writing by teachers including Angel Kyodo Williams, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Larry Yang, and Ruth King have changed the conversation in the last two decades. Radical Dharma (2016), by Williams, Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah, is the best-known statement.

The work is ongoing and contested, and the demographics of convert Buddhism have shifted less than the discourse has.

The scandals #

American convert Buddhism’s institutional history includes a series of documented abuse cases that materially changed how these organisations operate.

Chögyam Trungpa’s conduct, his successor Ösel Tendzin’s knowing transmission of HIV to students, Joshu Sasaki Roshi’s decades of sexual misconduct documented in a 2013 independent report, Eido Shimano’s resignation in 2010, and the Shambhala allegations of 2018 are the most reported.

The common pattern — charismatic authority, doctrines of devotion, institutions dependent on one figure, and complaints disbelieved — and the resulting reforms are discussed in Women Teachers in Buddhism and Finding a Teacher.

The numbers #

Estimates of the American Buddhist population cluster around one percent — roughly three to four million — with substantial uncertainty because surveys struggle with non-exclusive religious identity and undercount immigrant communities.

Rather more people report Buddhist practice or belief without Buddhist identification, and the mindfulness population, which is much larger, mostly does not identify as Buddhist at all.

Common questions #

Is American Buddhism a distinct tradition? Not formally, and arguably in practice. Convert American Buddhism is markedly lay-led, meditation-centred, psychologically framed, and gender-egalitarian relative to its Asian sources. Whether these amount to a new vehicle or to a regional adaptation of the kind Buddhism has always undergone is a real question.

How many Buddhists are Asian American? Most. Estimates of the proportion vary by methodology, and the majority finding is consistent.

Which tradition is largest? Counting is difficult. Among converts, insight and Zen are prominent; Soka Gakkai has large membership; among Asian American Buddhists, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese traditions predominate by community size.

What is the best-known American Buddhist institution? By public profile, probably Spirit Rock and IMS in the insight world, San Francisco Zen Center in Zen, and Naropa University — the first Buddhist-inspired accredited university in the United States.

Sources & further reading #

Richard Hughes Seager, Buddhism in America (Columbia, rev. ed. 2012) — the standard survey. Chenxing Han, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic, 2021). Ann Gleig, American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale, 2019) — on the contemporary turn, including race and the abuse crisis. Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake (Shambhala, 3rd ed. 1992) — the classic narrative history. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens & Jasmine Syedullah, Radical Dharma (North Atlantic, 2016).