Buddhism in the West
Theosophy to D. T. Suzuki to the 1960s to the present
The dharma has been crossing into the West for two and a half centuries, in waves, and what was once exotic is now indigenous. The story has a half-dozen turning points worth marking.
The earliest is intellectual reception. Schopenhauer in the 1810s and 1820s read the Upanishads and the available Sanskrit fragments of Buddhist philosophy and embedded the doctrine of nirvana in The World as Will and Representation. Eugene Burnouf's Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism (1844) was the first serious European scholarly study and shaped the next generation. Thoreau, who translated a chapter of the Lotus Sutra from French in 1844 for The Dial, was the first significant American literary figure to engage Buddhism. The Pali Text Society was founded in 1881 by T. W. Rhys Davids; its program of editing and translating the entire Pali Canon, completed in successive volumes over the next century, made Theravada accessible to English readers for the first time.
The second wave was the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott traveled to Sri Lanka in 1880, formally took the Five Precepts, became one of the first Westerners ever to publicly identify as a Buddhist, and authored A Buddhist Catechism that was translated into more than twenty languages and used in Sri Lankan schools for a century. He helped design the international Buddhist flag (1885, still in use today) and was instrumental in supporting the modernist revival movement in Sri Lanka under Anagarika Dharmapala, who went on to found the Maha Bodhi Society in 1891 and to recover the Bodh Gaya site from neglect.
“The dharma has been crossing into the West for two and a half centuries, in waves, and what was once exotic is now indigenous.”
The third turning point was the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where Dharmapala, the Japanese Zen monk Soyen Shaku, and the Pure Land scholar Hirai Kinzo all spoke. Soyen Shaku's young lay interpreter was Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, who would become the single most influential figure in twentieth-century Western reception of Buddhism. D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) settled in the United States, worked at LaSalle's Open Court publishing house, married Beatrice Erskine Lane, returned to Japan, and over the next sixty years produced an enormous English-language Zen literature — Essays in Zen Buddhism (3 vols), Manual of Zen Buddhism, Zen and Japanese Culture, the translations and commentaries — that introduced Western readers to Zen in a register they could absorb. Through Suzuki's influence, mid-century Western intellectuals — Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Merton, John Cage, the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Philip Whalen — found in Zen a serious contemplative interlocutor.
The fourth wave was the 1960s. Three transmissions arrived simultaneously. Zen came through Shunryu Suzuki (no relation to D. T.), who founded the San Francisco Zen Center in 1962 and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 1967; Maezumi Roshi, who founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967; and Philip Kapleau, whose The Three Pillars of Zen (1965) became the lay practice manual of a generation. The Korean Seon master Seung Sahn arrived in Providence, Rhode Island in 1972 and founded the Kwan Um School. The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, exiled from Vietnam in 1966, eventually founded Plum Village in France in 1982. Vipassana arrived through Goenka's ten-day courses, established in India in 1969 and globalized through the 1970s; through Mahasi Sayadaw's direct American students; through Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, who founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts in 1976 and Spirit Rock in California in 1988. Tibetan Buddhism arrived through Chogyam Trungpa (Boulder, 1970, founding Naropa University in 1974), Tarthang Tulku (Berkeley, 1969), Kalu Rinpoche, Geshe Wangyal (the first traditional Geshe to teach in the United States, in New Jersey from 1955), and from the 1970s onward a steady flow of masters from every Tibetan school.
The fifth wave is the mindfulness movement. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a student of Korean Zen and Vipassana, secularized the practice as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. Over the next four decades MBSR and its derivatives — MBCT, MSC, and corporate adaptations — have brought mindfulness into hospitals, schools, prisons, the military, and Fortune 500 companies. The criticism that this represents a McMindfulness commodification of dharma is serious and ongoing; the response that the practice still seeds genuine interest in the deeper tradition is also serious. Both are probably true.
The sixth wave is the institutionalization. Buddhist studies departments exist at the University of California, Harvard, Columbia, Wisconsin, Oxford, Hamburg, and other major universities. Indigenous Western Buddhist organizations now ordain teachers in their own lineages — Sakyong Mipham (until his 2018 step-back), Roshi Bernie Glassman, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Sister True Dedication, the various Theravada bhikkhuni orders. Western Buddhist demographics are estimated at roughly 4 million practitioners in the United States, 2 million in Europe, and several hundred thousand each in Australia, Canada, and Brazil. Convert Buddhists and ethnic Buddhists (the latter often arriving with diaspora from Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Cambodia, Thailand, China, Korea, Japan, and Burma) coexist in most Western cities, with the integration between them an ongoing project.
The Western Buddhism that has emerged is not Theravada or Mahayana or Vajrayana, but a tradition that draws from all three, holds them in dialogue with science and psychotherapy, takes seriously the ethical and engaged dimensions, and is in the early stages of producing its own distinctive contributions. What it does not yet have is a thousand years of saints. What it does have is a sangha, sutras, teachers, and a beginning — and, as generations of migrating teachers have shown, a dharma that comes from India but is at home anywhere.
