Buddhism in the United States refers to the diverse Buddhist communities, traditions, and practices found in the United States. Buddhism was first established in the country through Asian immigrant communities in the 19th century, especially Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and later expanded through additional immigration from Buddhist-majority countries in East, Southeast, and South Asia. Since the late 19th and 20th centuries, Buddhism has also attracted non-Asian American converts and practitioners through interest in meditation, philosophy, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Theravada, and other traditions.
American Buddhism includes immigrant and heritage Buddhist communities, convert Buddhist communities, and organizations with origins in Asia that actively expanded in the United States. Major traditions represented in the country include Japanese Pure Land, Nichiren, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Theravada, Chinese Buddhism, Korean Seon, Vietnamese Thiền. Scholars have noted that these categories can overlap and that Buddhist identity in the United States is complicated: some people identify culturally or religiously as Buddhist, while others participate in meditation or Buddhist communities without adopting the label “Buddhist.”
Statistics U.S. states by Buddhist population State(s) Buddhist population (%) Hawaii 8 California 2 Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wyoming 1
The Buddhist population rapidly increased in the 1960s with the change in Asian immigration law to the United States. By the 1980's, multiple Buddhist communities began to sprout throughout the country.
Buddhism in American Overseas territories The following is the percentage of Buddhists in the U.S. territories as of 2010: Territory Percent 0.3% 10.6% 1.1% <1% unknown
Types of Buddhism in the United States Three broad types of American Buddhism are found in the United States:Charles Prebish, Buddhism:the American Experience, 2003, Journal of Buddhist Ethics Online Books The oldest and largest of these is "immigrant" or "ethnic Buddhism", those Buddhist traditions that came to America with immigrants who were already practitioners and that largely remained with those immigrants and their descendants. The next oldest and arguably the most visible group Prebish refers to as "import Buddhists", because they came to America largely in response to interested American converts who sought them out, either by going abroad or by supporting foreign teachers; this is sometimes also called "elite Buddhism" because its practitioners, especially early ones, tended to come from social elites. A trend in Buddhism is "export" or "evangelical Buddhist" groups based in another country who actively recruit members in the US from various backgrounds. Modern Buddhism is not just an American phenomenon.
This typology has been the subject of debate among scholars who have noted the problematic nature of equating "ethnic" Buddhists with Asian immigrants which elides the ethnicity or cultural specificity of white American Buddhists.
Immigrant Buddhism
Buddhism was introduced into the US by Asian immigrants in the 19th century, when significant numbers of immigrants from East Asia began to arrive in the New World. In the United States, immigrants from China entered around 1820, but began to arrive in large numbers following the 1849 California Gold Rush.
Immigrant Buddhist congregations in North America are as diverse as the different peoples of Asian Buddhist extraction who settled there. The US is home to Sri Lankan Buddhists, Chinese Buddhists, Japanese Buddhists, Korean Buddhists, Thai Buddhists, Cambodian Buddhists, Vietnamese Buddhists and Buddhists with family backgrounds in most Buddhist countries and regions. The Immigration Act of 1965 increased the number of immigrants arriving from China, Vietnam and the Theravada-practicing countries of Southeast Asia.
Chinese immigration The first Buddhist temple in America was built in 1853 in San Francisco by the Sze Yap Company, a Chinese American fraternal society. Another society, the Ning Yeong Company, built a second in 1854; by 1875, there were eight temples, and by 1900 approximately 400 Chinese temples on the west coast of the United States, most of them containing some Buddhist elements. Unfortunately a casualty of racism,Ford, pp. 59–62. these temples were often the subject of suspicion and ignorance by the rest of the population, and were dismissively called joss houses.
Japanese and Korean immigration The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 curtailed growth of the Chinese American population, but large-scale immigration from Japan began in the late 1880s and from Korea around 1903. In both cases, immigration was at first primarily to Hawai‘i. Populations from other Asian Buddhist countries followed, and in each case, the new communities established Buddhist temples and organizations. For instance, the first sanctioned Japanese temple in Hawai‘i, the Hāmākua Bukkyo Kaido (later renamed as the Hāmākua Jodo Mission), was built in 1896 by the Jōdo-shū school under the guidance of Reverend Gakuo Okabe. In 1898, Japanese missionaries and immigrants established a Young Men's Buddhist Association, and the Rev. Sōryū Kagahi was dispatched from Japan to be the first Buddhist missionary to Hawai‘i.Prebish 1999, p. 4. The first Japanese Buddhist temple in the continental U.S. was built in San Francisco in 1899, and the first in Canada was built at the Ishikawa Hotel in Vancouver in 1905. The first Buddhist clergy to take up residence in the continental U.S. were Shuye Sonoda and Kakuryo Nishimjima, missionaries from Japan who arrived in 1899.
Contemporary Immigrant Buddhism
Japanese Buddhism
Buddhist Churches of America The Buddhist Churches of America and the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii are immigrant Buddhist organizations in the United States. The BCA is an affiliate of Japan's Nishi Hongwanji, a sect of Jōdo Shinshū, which is, in turn, a form of Pure Land Buddhism. Tracing its roots to the Young Men's Buddhist Association founded in San Francisco at the end of the 19th century and the Buddhist Mission of North America founded in 1899, it took its current form in 1944. All of the Buddhist Mission's leadership, along with almost the entire Japanese American population, had been interned during World War II. The name Buddhist Churches of America was adopted at Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah; the word "church" was used in analogy to a Christian house of worship. After internment ended, some members returned to the West Coast and revitalized churches there, while a number of others moved to the Midwest and built new churches. During the 1960s and 1970s, the BCA was in a growth phase and was very successful at fund-raising. It also published two periodicals, one in Japanese and one in English. However, since 1980, BCA membership declined. The 36 temples in the state of Hawaii of the Honpa Hongwanji Mission have a similar history.
While a majority of the Buddhist Churches of America's membership are ethnically Japanese, some members have non-Asian backgrounds. Thus, it has limited aspects of export Buddhism. As involvement by its ethnic community declined, internal discussions advocated attracting the broader public.
Nichiren buddhism Soka Gakkai, which means "Value Creation Society", is one of three sects of Nichiren Buddhism. It is considered a new religious movement from Japan that expanded after World War II. Soka Gakkai came to the United States with Daisaku Ikeda in the mid-20th century. Because of a rift with Nichiren Shōshū in 1991, the SGI has no priests of its own.Prebish 1999, p. 25. Its main religious practice is chanting the mantra Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō and sections of the Lotus Sutra. Unlike schools such as Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan Buddhism, Soka Gakkai Buddhists do not practice meditative techniques other than chanting.
Taiwanese Buddhism Another US Buddhist institution is Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California. Hsi Lai is the American headquarters of Fo Guang Shan, a modern Buddhist group in Taiwan. Hsi Lai was built in 1988 at a cost of $10 million and is often described as the largest Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere. Although it caters primarily to Chinese Americans, it also has regular services and outreach programs in English.
Growth of Buddhist philosophy in America
While Asian immigrants were arriving, some American intellectuals examined Buddhism, based primarily on information from British colonies in India and East Asia.
In the last century, numbers of Asian Buddhist masters and teachers have immigrated to the U.S. in order to propagate their beliefs and practices. Most have belonged to three major Buddhist traditions or cultures: Zen, Tibetan, and Theravadan.
Early translations
The Englishmen William Jones and Charles Wilkins translated Sanskrit texts into English. The American Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, took an interest in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. They were among the first western writers to have access to translated Hindu and Buddhist texts. In 1844, The Dial, a small literary publication edited by Thoreau and Emerson, published an English version of a portion of the Lotus Sutra; it had been translated by Dial business manager Elizabeth Palmer Peabody from a French version recently completed by Eugène Burnouf. His Indian readings may have influenced his later experiments in simple living: at one point in Walden Thoreau wrote: "I realized what the Orientals meant by contemplation and the forsaking of works." Poet Walt Whitman also references Indian religions in his writing. In Whitman's well-known poem "Passage to India", he refers to Indian rivers, history and theology.
Theosophical Society
An early American to publicly convert to Buddhism was Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott, a former U.S. army colonel during the Civil War, had grown interested in reports of supernatural phenomena that were popular in the late 19th century. In 1875, he, Helena Blavatsky, and William Quan Judge founded the Theosophical Society, dedicated to the study of the occult and influenced by Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. The leaders claimed to believe that they were in contact, via visions and messages, with a secret order of adepts called the "Himalayan Brotherhood" or "the Masters". In 1879, Olcott and Blavatsky traveled to India and in 1880, to Sri Lanka, where they were met enthusiastically by local Buddhists, who saw them as allies against an aggressive Christian missionary movement. On May 25, Olcott and Blavatsky took the pancasila vows of a lay Buddhist before a monk and a large crowd. Although most of the Theosophists appear to have counted themselves as Buddhists, they held idiosyncratic beliefs that separated them from known Buddhist traditions; only Olcott was enthusiastic about following mainstream Buddhism. He returned twice to Sri Lanka, where he promoted Buddhist education, and visited Japan and Burma. Olcott authored a Buddhist Catechism, stating his view of the basic tenets of the religion.
Several publications increased knowledge of Buddhism in 19th-century America. In 1879, Edwin Arnold, an English aristocrat, published The Light of Asia, an epic poem he had written about the life and teachings of the Buddha, expounded with much wealth of local color and not a little felicity of versification. The book became immensely popular in the United States, going through eighty editions and selling more than 500,000 copies.
Paul Carus