Buddhism in the West

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism in the West has roots older than most people imagine. Greek colonies existed inside India as early as the 6th century BCE, during the Buddha's own lifetime. That fact alone should reframe everything. The story of how a philosophy born in South Asia crossed oceans, infiltrated empires, scandalized missionaries, inspired philosophers, and eventually filled meditation centers across North America and Europe is long, tangled, and full of surprises. What turned a foreign faith into one of the fastest-growing religions in Australia? Why did Friedrich Nietzsche simultaneously admire and despise it? And how did a small group of Americans returning from Asia in the early 1970s permanently change what Buddhism looks like in the English-speaking world?

• 2. Greeks, Romans, and Early Crossings

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  Menander I, an Indo-Greek king who ruled from around 165/155 to 130 BCE, appears as the central character of a Buddhist scripture called the Milinda Panha, meaning "The Questions of King Milinda." The text states plainly that he adopted the Buddhist religion. His coins carried Buddhist symbolism, and the Buddhist tradition counts him as a great benefactor of the Dharma, placing him alongside Ashoka.

  The Greek philosopher Pyrrho traveled with Alexander the Great's court during the conquest of India. He built his philosophy, Pyrrhonism, partly on influence from the Buddhist three marks of existence. Pyrrhonism promotes suspending judgment about dogma as the path to ataraxia, a state of tranquility that scholars describe as soteriologically similar to nirvana. Later scholars Thomas McEvilley and Matthew Neale have suspected that the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna was in turn influenced by Greek Pyrrhonist texts imported into India, making the philosophical exchange genuinely two-directional.

  The contact extended into the Roman world. Around 13 CE, an Indian king named Pandion sent an embassy to Augustus. One member of that delegation, called Zarmanochegas, was a religious man who burned himself alive in Athens to demonstrate his faith. The event was witnessed by Nicolaus of Damascus at Antioch and recorded by Strabo and Dio Cassius. Then in March 2022, an American-Polish archaeological team excavating a Roman-era temple to Isis in Berenice, Egypt, found a marble Buddha statue in the temple forecourt, a reminder that these currents of contact left physical traces in places no one expected.

• 3. Missionaries, Scholars, and the First Books

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  When Jesuit missionaries reached Asia in the early 16th century, they sent back detailed accounts of Buddhist doctrine. Ippolito Desideri spent an extended period in Tibet learning the Tibetan language and Buddhist doctrine before writing an account of his travels. He also composed several books in Tibetan that promoted Christianity and critiqued Buddhism. By the late 17th century, according to Stephen Berkwitz, "the existence of a religion across Asia that worshiped images of the Buddha, known and referred to by many different names, was a well-known fact among European scholars."

  Catholic missionaries struggled to explain how Buddhism could resemble Christianity in certain ways (monastic orders, the virgin birth story, ideas of heaven and hell) while deviating from what they regarded as divine revelation. Some Portuguese writers resolved the tension by describing Buddhism as a form of Christianity corrupted by the devil.

  With the arrival of Sanskrit and Oriental studies in European universities in the late 18th century, a more systematic examination became possible. The French orientalist Eugene Burnouf produced a French translation of the Lotus Sutra from Sanskrit and laid groundwork for the study of Sanskrit Buddhist texts. He and Christian Lassen published an early Pali grammar in 1826. Then 1881 emerged as a seminal year: Thomas William Rhys Davids founded the Pali Text Society; Hermann Oldenberg published his influential study on the Buddha based on Pali texts; and Volume 10 of Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East series carried the first English translations of the Dhammapada and the Sutta-Nipata. The first Pali dictionary had appeared six years earlier in 1875, compiled by Robert Caesar Childers.

• 4. Philosophers and the Western Mind

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  Arthur Schopenhauer read about Buddhism and other Indian religions and praised their way of life in his works as the highest ideal. He later claimed that Buddhism was "the best of all possible religions." His view of human suffering as arising from striving and his compassion-based ethics have been compared to Buddhist thought by scholars.

  Friedrich Nietzsche addressed Buddhism directly in his 1895 work The Anti-Christ, calling it "a hundred times more realistic than Christianity" because it is atheistic, phenomenalistic, and anti-metaphysical. He also wrote that Buddhism "already has - and this distinguishes it profoundly from Christianity - the self-deception of moral concepts behind it." Yet Nietzsche also saw Buddhism as life-denying. Writing in 1883, he called himself a potential "Buddha of Europe" but immediately qualified it, adding that he would be "the antipode of the Indian Buddha." Scholar Robert Morrison identified what he called "a deep resonance between them," noting that both thinkers emphasize the centrality of humans in a godless cosmos without turning to any external being for solutions.

  Sir Edwin Arnold's book-length poem The Light of Asia, published in 1879, reached an audience Schopenhauer and Nietzsche never aimed for. It was a life of the Buddha, arriving at a moment when Christianity was being challenged by critical Biblical scholarship and Darwinism. The book eventually went through eighty editions and sold between half a million and a million copies.

• 5. The American Shore

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  The first Buddhists in North America were Chinese immigrants who arrived during the 1848 Gold Rush. By 1875 there were eight Buddhist temples in San Francisco and many more smaller ones along the West Coast. Japanese immigrants followed, arriving as laborers on Hawaiian plantations and in central-California farms. In 1893, the first Jodo Shinshu priests reached San Francisco and formally established what was later renamed the Buddhist Churches of America in 1899.

  The 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago brought a different kind of encounter. The Sri Lankan Anagarika Dharmapala gave a speech in English that stirred the audience. On his third North American visit, he attended a lecture by the psychologist William James, who gave up his own speaking spot for Dharmapala. After Dharmapala finished speaking on Buddhist psychology, James reportedly said: "this is the psychology everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now."

  In 1897, the Japanese Zen philosopher D. T. Suzuki arrived in the United States to work and study with Paul Carus. Suzuki became the most important single figure in popularizing Zen Buddhism in the West. His writings shaped psychologists Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and thinkers including Alan Watts and Edward Conze. His reach was wide enough that his philosophical thought was itself shaped by Western esoteric traditions like Theosophy and Swedenborgianism, making him a genuine two-way bridge.

• 6. The Postwar Wave

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  Between 1900 and the early 1960s, only twenty-one Buddhist meditation centers had been established across the United States. By 1997, The Complete Guide to Buddhist America listed more than one thousand. That is the scale of what happened in roughly four decades.

  The beat generation and later the hippies, disaffected from consumer culture and mainstream Christianity, turned to Buddhism partly through literary figures. Jack Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums and The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. Gary Snyder and Alan Watts, author of The Way of Zen, also carried Buddhist ideas into wider circulation. The steady arrival of Tibetan refugees following the Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1960s, and of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1970s, brought teachers and traditions that gave Western seekers direct access to living lineages.

  In 1959, Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco at a moment when Zen had already become a point of fascination among beatniks. He founded the San Francisco Zen Center in 1962, during the height of the counterculture. His book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, published in 1970, quickly became one of America's Buddhist classics. Three years earlier, in 1967, the first Tibetan Buddhist centre established in the West, Kagyu Samye Ling in Scotland, had opened under two spiritual masters, Choje Akong Tulku Rinpoche and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Trungpa later founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado in 1974, and introduced his Shambhala Training system in 1977.

• 7. Institutions, Scandals, and Structures

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  Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky, described by Stephen Prothero as "the first European-Americans to publicly and formally become lay Buddhists," took their formal step in 1880. Olcott's Buddhist Catechism, published in 1881, remains in use today. It contains a section devoted to Buddhism and science, promotes the theory of evolution, and argues that Buddhists are "earnestly enjoined to accept nothing on faith" and should believe only what is "corroborated by our own reason and consciousness." That framing defined what scholars came to call "Buddhist modernism" or "protestant Buddhism."

  The institutions that grew from this modernist impulse took on considerable scale. The Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, founded in the 1970s by Lamas Thubten Yeshe and Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, grew to encompass more than 142 teaching centers in 32 countries. Lama Ole Nydahl founded 640 Buddhist centers around the world after the 16th Karmapa asked him to establish centers of the Karma Kagyu lineage in 1972. The New Kadampa Tradition, founded in England in 1991 by Kelsang Gyatso, expanded more rapidly than any other Buddhist tradition, listing more than 200 centres and around 900 branch classes and study groups in forty countries, though it has also been officially rebuked by the Dalai Lama.

  Growth brought authority problems alongside organizational ones. Sandra Bell, analyzing scandals at Chögyam Trungpa's Vajradhatu and the San Francisco Zen Center, concluded that these kinds of crises are "most likely to occur in organisations that are in transition between the pure forms of charismatic authority that brought them into being and more rational, corporate forms of organization." Stuart Lachs pointed to the uncritical acceptance of lineage narratives and dharma transmission as mechanisms that gave teachers unchecked power. The Insight Meditation Society, founded in 1975 in Barre, Massachusetts by Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Joseph Goldstein, took a deliberately different organizational approach: according to James Coleman, both the IMS and the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, which Kornfield helped found in 1984, are organized around communities of teachers with collective decision-making.

• 8. Buddhism Today in the West

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  Buddhism makes up 1% of the population of the United States as of 2024, 0.3% in Europe as of 2020, 2.4% in Australia as of 2016, and 1.5% in New Zealand as of 2013. These are small numbers, but the institutional presence behind them is substantial. The largest Buddhist temple in the Southern Hemisphere is the Nan Tien Temple in Wollongong, Australia, translated as "Southern Paradise Temple." The largest in the Western Hemisphere is the Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California, translated as "Coming West Temple." Both are operated by the Fo Guang Shan Order, founded in Taiwan.

  A general distinction holds in describing how Buddhism arrived: "ethnic Buddhism," brought by Asian immigrants who may practice Mahayana, Theravada, or a traditional East Asian mix; and "convert Buddhism," practiced by Western converts who tend toward Zen, Pure Land, Vipassana, or Tibetan Buddhism. Some Western Buddhists are non-denominational and accept teachings from a variety of traditions, a pattern far less common in Asia. A small number of authors have proposed that this non-denominational Western form might constitute a distinct "new vehicle" alongside Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana.

  Demographically, convert Buddhism appeals more to white, middle- and upper-middle-class, politically left-leaning, and urban populations. The Benalmadena Enlightenment Stupa in Malaga, Spain, 33 metres high and the tallest stupa in Europe, was inaugurated on the 5th of October 2003 as the final project of Buddhist master Lopon Tsechu Rinpoche. That a Tibetan-style stupa now stands on the Costa del Sol, overlooking the Mediterranean, is as concrete an image as any of how far Buddhism has traveled from the Gandharan monasteries where Greek sculptors first taught their stone-carving skills to Indian craftsmen more than two thousand years ago.