Buddhism in the United States

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 have a Buddhist population of 1%.

[citation needed] While Asian immigrants were arriving, some American intellectuals examined Buddhism, based primarily on information from British colonies in India and East Asia.

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."

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.

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.

In 1879, Edwin Arnold, an English aristocrat, published The Light of Asia,[22] 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 group was largely unsuccessful: no Americans were recruited to join as monks and attempts failed to attract a Chinese Chan (Zen) master to come to the United States.

He lived for nine months near San Francisco, where he established a small zendo in the home of Alexander and Ida Russell and gave regular zazen lessons, making him the first Zen Buddhist priest to teach in North America.

In 1951, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki returned to the United States to take a visiting professorship at Columbia University, where his open lectures attracted members of the literary, artistic, and cultural elite.

In the mid-1950s, writers associated with the Beat Generation took a serious interest in Zen,[30] including Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Kenneth Rexroth, which increased its visibility.

Maezumi, in turn, had several American dharma heirs, such as Bernie Glassman, John Daido Loori, Charlotte Joko Beck, William Nyogen Yeo, and Dennis Genpo Merzel.

It is rooted in the reformist teachings of Harada Daiun Sogaku (1871–1961) and his disciple Yasutani Hakuun (1885–1971), who argued that the existing Zen institutions of Japan (Sōtō and Rinzai sects) had become complacent and were generally unable to convey real Dharma.

In 1965, he published a book, The Three Pillars of Zen, which recorded a set of talks by Yasutani outlining his approach to practice, along with transcripts of dokusan interviews and some additional texts.

Aitken became a dharma heir of Yamada's, authored more than ten books, and developed the Diamond Sangha into an international network with temples in the United States, Argentina, Germany, and Australia.

In 1962, Hsuan Hua moved to San Francisco's Chinatown, where, in addition to Zen, he taught Chinese Pure Land, Tiantai, Vinaya, and Vajrayana Buddhism.

Dilowa Gegen (Diluu Khudagt) was the first lama to immigrate to the United States in 1949 as a political refugee and joined Owen Lattimore's Mongolia Project.

Trungpa, part of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, moved to England in 1963, founded a temple in Scotland, and then relocated to Barnet, Vermont, and then Boulder, Colorado, by 1970.

He established what he named Dharmadhatu meditation centers, eventually organized under a national umbrella group called Vajradhatu (renamed Shambhala International in February 2000).

Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo is the first Western woman to be enthroned as a Tulku, and established Nyingma Kunzang Palyul Choling centers in Sedona, Arizona, and Poolesville, Maryland.

Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron had suggested the name, as Sravasti was the place in India where the Buddha spent 25 rains retreats (varsa in Sanskrit and yarne in Tibetan), and communities of both nuns and monks had resided there.

[58] In 2006, Geshe Thupten Dorjee, educated at Drepung Loseling Monastery, and poet Sidney Burris founded the Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas, which began offering two weekly meditation courses and bringing monks and scholars to give lectures to the community at large.

The next year, Goldstein, Kornfield, and Salzberg, who had very recently returned from Calcutta, along with Jacqueline Schwarz, founded the Insight Meditation Society on an 80-acre (324,000 m2) property near Barre, Massachusetts.

His teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin of Burma, was a contemporary of Māhāsi Sayādaw's, and taught a style of Buddhism with similar emphasis on simplicity and accessibility to laypeople.

Rita M. Gross, a feminist religious scholar, claims that multiple people converted to Buddhism in the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to combat traditional American values.

After much dialogue within the community, including a series of conferences entitled "The Feminine in Buddhism", Sandy Boucher, a feminist-Buddhist teacher, interviewed over one hundred Buddhist women.

In his essay, he called attention to the narrowly inward focus of American Buddhism, which has been pursued to the neglect of the active dimension of Buddhist compassion expressed through programs of social engagement.

[128] A sociological survey conducted in 1999 found that relative to the US population as a whole, Buddhist converts are proportionately more likely to be white, upper middle class, highly educated, and left-leaning in their political views.

On the other hand, for immigrants and their descendants, preserving tradition and maintaining a social framework assume a much greater relative importance, making their approach to religion naturally more conservative.

[citation needed] Also, Buddhism has had to adapt to America in order to garner more followers so that the concept would not seem so foreign, so they adopted "Catholic" words such as "worship" and "churches".

The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas is the site of Dharma Realm Buddhist University, a four-year college teaching courses primarily related to Buddhism but including some general-interest subjects.