Chapter 2. The transmission of Buddhism to the West¶

The preceding chapter examined Buddhist modernism's characteristics from the perspective of intellectual history. The present chapter turns to the geography of Buddhism's spread from Asia to Europe, North America, and Oceania over the past century and a half. It examines how Buddhism took root in those places and the forms it developed there.

Buddhism spread through multiple routes and waves, as different Asian traditions entered the West in overlapping movements. Each grew in Western cultural soil, influencing and competing with the others.

1. Waves of transmission¶

The first wave, from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century: scholarly discovery and symbolic encounters.

The Buddhism that first entered Western public awareness was a product of scholarship. German and British Orientalists translated large quantities of Buddhist literature in Pāli and Sanskrit; the preceding chapter analyzed this construction and its problems. The most influential early vehicle for reaching the Western public was Edwin Arnold's long poem The Light of Asia (1879). Describing the Buddha's life in Victorian poetic language, it went through at least a hundred editions in Britain and America, bringing a highly idealized image of the Buddha, stripped of ritual, to a wide readership.¹

The 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago marked the first wave's high point. Several Asian Buddhist representatives addressed Western audiences in person, including Dharmapāla from Sri Lanka and Shaku Soyen (1860 to 1919), D. T. Suzuki's teacher, from Japan. Symbolically, this was the first occasion on which Asian Buddhist traditions participated as equals in public religious dialogue in the West. Very few Westerners actually converted to Buddhism in this period; intellectual contact and Romantic longing were more common.

The second wave, from the 1950s to the 1970s: Zen encounters the counterculture.

Zen did most to bring the Western public into contact with Buddhist practice, especially through Suzuki's English writings, discussed in the preceding chapter, and the American "Zen boom."

The Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, used Zen as a spiritual resource against mainstream American culture: consumerism, political conformity, and Christian conservatism. Their Zen was mostly romanticized and detached from institutions, but it made the word "Zen" widely popular in Western mass culture for the first time.

Alan Watts (1915 to 1973) was the period's most influential popular writer on Buddhism. He explained Zen and the Dao to Western readers in vivid language and emphasized direct experience. His books sold in enormous numbers. He had institutional standing, having been ordained an Anglican priest in 1945 and formally served for five years. He subsequently taught at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. What he lacked was authorization to transmit the Dharma in Zen. After the age of forty-two, he was no longer employed by any institution and described himself thereafter as "philosopher-at-large, free-lance, gyrovagus, unaffiliated." He was an independent itinerant speaker; gyrovagus means a wandering monk. He likened himself to a shaman who acquires his powers alone in mountains and forests, as distinct from a priest whose office comes through a succession of ordination by the laying on of hands. Speaking from his own experience without institutional guarantees was itself a stance of Western Buddhist modernism.²³

The third wave, from the 1970s to the present: institutionalization and diversification.

From the 1970s, large numbers of actual lineage holders from Asia came to the West, establishing organized practice centers and centers of transmission. Three principal strands developed at the same time:

• Theravāda insight meditation: represented by the Insight Meditation Society (IMS, 1975).
• Tibetan Buddhism: represented by Trungpa Rinpoche's Shambhala system from the 1970s onward, along with several Nyingma, Gelug, and Kagyu lineages.
• Japanese Zen: represented by the Zen Center of San Francisco, founded in 1962.

2. Zen takes root in the West¶

Shunryu Suzuki (1904 to 1971) arrived in San Francisco in 1958 and founded the San Francisco Zen Center. He should be distinguished from D. T. Suzuki, whose influence came chiefly through writing. In 1967 Shunryu Suzuki established Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Big Sur, California, the first center in the United States devoted to specialized Zen training. The record of his teachings, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970), remains one of the best-known works of Zen literature in English.

Philip Kapleau (1912 to 2004) practiced for many years in Japan. After returning to the United States, he founded the Rochester Zen Center and wrote The Three Pillars of Zen (1965). It was the first English-language Zen book to describe practice systematically and in detail, including kōan practice and specific records of instruction. The book had an important influence on Western Zen practitioners.

Zen's institutionalization in the West differs systematically from its original Asian forms. Asian monastic Zen encompasses a complete monastic life, including clothing, food, accommodation, daily activities, communal services, and the institution of ordination. Most practitioners at Western Zen centers, by contrast, are laypeople who periodically attend intensive practice (sesshin) while otherwise living secular lives. The predominance of lay practitioners creates considerable institutional distance between Western Zen and Asian traditions.⁴

Zen's cultural influence in the West also extends beyond practice communities. In psychotherapy, contemporary art, architecture, and design, Zen's influence as a cultural symbol extends far beyond the number of its adherents. Extracting Zen as an aesthetic and philosophy of life, detached from religious practice, is itself one of Buddhist modernism's most characteristic operations.

3. Western forms of Theravāda insight meditation¶

Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield founded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts, in 1975. It is the institutional core of the Western insight movement, as discussed in detail in Chapter 9.5. In 1981, Kornfield established a separate center in California, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, creating two principal bases on the East and West Coasts.

The insight tradition derives its spiritual inspiration from Thailand's Ajahn Chah and Burma's Mahāsi Sayadaw. Its Western forms of practice nevertheless differ considerably from the original Asian tradition. Most participants are laypeople who have not taken monastic ordination. Intensive retreats, usually lasting one to ten days, are the main format, while commuting, work, and family remain part of normal life.

Ajahn Sumedho (born 1934) represents another strand. An American disciple of Ajahn Chah, he founded Amaravati Buddhist Monastery in Britain in 1984, the country's most important center of Theravāda transmission. Ajahn Brahm, who also trained under Ajahn Chah, co-founded Bodhinyana Monastery with Ajahn Jagaro in Serpentine, Western Australia, in 1983, extending the tradition into Oceania.⁵ Its distinctive feature is a complete monastic institution, closer to the traditional Theravāda monastery model.

4. Tibetan Buddhism in the West¶

Tibetan Buddhism spread in the West chiefly from the 1960s onward, alongside the formation of Tibetan exile communities.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939 to 1987), mentioned in Chapter 11.8, gave up monastic robes and taught in the West as a layperson. He established the Shambhala system and Naropa University, founded in 1974 as Naropa Institute. Naropa was one of the most influential early Western institutions of higher education with a Buddhist background. Combining Buddhist studies with poetry, dance, psychology, and other disciplines, it became an important center of alternative spiritual culture in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. His drinking and sexual conduct provoked extensive controversy in his later years, making him an early case in the problem of abuses of authority by Buddhist teachers in the West.⁶

Lama Yeshe (1935 to 1984) and Lama Zopa Rinpoche (born 1945) founded FPMT, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition. It is one of the largest international networks transmitting Gelug teachings in the West, with practice centers in more than thirty countries.

Part of Tibetan Buddhism's distinctive appeal comes from its preservation of a complete system of practice, from the four preliminary practices to Highest Yoga Tantra. Its thangkas, ritual implements, and ceremonies are visually rich, and it has explicit systems for authenticating transmission through empowerment and oral transmission. These features are particularly attractive to Western practitioners seeking a tradition with roots and depth.

5. Buddhism in immigrant communities: The neglected other half¶

Academic discussion and public attention concerning Western Buddhism often focus on "Western converts," people who have actively chosen Buddhism. Yet they represent only one half of Western Buddhism.

The other half is Buddhism in immigrant communities. Immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, and elsewhere in Asia brought their Buddhist traditions to the West. Their temples generally place more emphasis on maintaining the forms of their Asian homelands, including languages, rituals, calendars, and festivals, and serve particular ethnic communities. They are almost invisible in Western media, yet their adherents may outnumber Western converts within the overall Buddhist population.

Jan Nattier proposed three types of Western Buddhism in a short essay in 1997 and an academic article in 1998:

Nattier points out that the "baggage" type, immigrant Buddhism, is almost invisible in both media and scholarship. Yet in its number of adherents and depth of Buddhist practice, it may be closer to the original forms of Asian traditions. Excessive attention to the "import" type has distorted the Western understanding of Buddhism and its image of "Western Buddhism."⁷

6. Shared features of Western Buddhism¶

Despite the enormous diversity within Western Buddhism, several recurring features across traditions deserve attention:

Psychologization. Western Buddhism commonly translates the language of practice into psychological language. Suffering (dukkha) is described as "existential anxiety," and practice as "cultivating mental health." Nirvāṇa is described as "full psychological functioning." The use of psychological terms has made dialogue between Buddhism and psychotherapy one of the most active exchanges across fields.

More horizontal structures of authority. Western societies' deep suspicion of hierarchy affects relations between teachers and students. Western students expect to question teachers' instructions and to find some mechanism of accountability within a lineage community. Their expectations create profound tension with Tibetan Buddhism's strong emphasis on the guru's authority. The tension has erupted most dramatically in several teachers' sexual scandals, discussed in the following section.

Women's status. Western Buddhism has moved more quickly than most Asian traditions in women's participation and leadership. The principal teachers in many Western Buddhist communities are women, including Sharon Salzberg and Pema Chödrön, among others. Some of the impetus in the West for women's ordination (Chapter 9.5, Section 4) comes from women practitioners and supporters in Western communities.

The separation of mindfulness. Western Buddhism's widest influence may have come through mindfulness's entry into a broad range of nonreligious fields, including medicine, psychotherapy, education, and corporate training. In those settings, mindfulness has largely been detached from Buddhism and developed into interventions extracted from Buddhist techniques to serve secular goals, as discussed in Chapter 9.5.

Race and class. From the 2010s, the overwhelmingly white and middle-class composition of Western convert Buddhist communities began to be discussed more openly. The questions include who can afford a ten-day retreat, whose Buddhist experience is treated as typical, and how to include the experiences of Asian American Buddhists, who are often cast as outsiders in discussions of "American Buddhism." The continuing discussion has already helped produce several racially diverse practice communities and encouraged related scholarship.

7. Abuses of authority, accountability, and the crisis of trust¶

One of the gravest internal problems facing Western Buddhism in the twenty-first century has been the exposure of a series of sexual abuses by Buddhist teachers. The cases are individual moral failures, but they also reveal systemic institutional vulnerabilities:

• Trust in an "enlightened guru" can be almost unconditional, without mechanisms of accountability.
• Certain tantric interpretations that place the relationship between teacher and student beyond ordinary morality have been abused to justify misconduct.
• A culture of silence, in which the guru is not criticized, makes it difficult for victims to speak.
• Independent bodies for investigation and discipline are absent.

Representative cases include Sogyal Rinpoche, whom several former students accused of decades of sexual misconduct and psychological manipulation. In 1994, he settled out of court a lawsuit seeking ten million dollars; similar accusations by female students continued afterward. Following the publication of a jointly signed letter of allegations in 2017, he resigned as Rigpa's spiritual director; he died in 2019. Zen teacher Eido Shimano was accused by several female students of sexual misconduct and other inappropriate conduct over forty years and was ultimately forced to resign from his position at Dai Bosatsu. Trungpa Rinpoche's successor, Ösel Tendzin, continued to have unprotected sex with several students after contracting HIV and transmitted the virus to one of them. That student and his girlfriend later died of AIDS, as did Tendzin.⁸

The cases prompted wide discussion in Western Buddhist communities about how to establish effective accountability for those in authority. No institutional solution has yet gained general acceptance. Some constructive institutional changes have nevertheless followed. Several groups have established codes of conduct and grievance procedures, and some lineages have begun requiring more systematic ethical training for teachers.

8. An overview of contemporary Western Buddhism¶

After a century and a half of transmission, Western Buddhism is now highly diverse and full of tensions:

The four periods in the diagram summarize the chapter's changing themes. They do not replace the three waves outlined in Section 1. Asian immigrant communities and their temples run in parallel throughout, rather than forming a fourth wave beginning in the 1990s.

Western Buddhism's most fundamental tension is between depth of transmission and breadth of access. The more fully traditional forms are maintained, the fewer people they reach. Adapting to Western culture by becoming less institutional, more individual, and more secular brings Buddhism to more people, but also takes it further from the original transmission. The tension has no simple solution. It is a challenge that any tradition entering a new cultural setting must face, and Buddhism's transmission to the West has made it especially clear.

The next chapter examines how modern academic Buddhist studies have changed our understanding of Buddhist history and philosophy. It also considers how those changes in turn affect Buddhism's understanding of itself.

Further reading¶

• Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. New York: Weatherhill, 1970. (One of the most important works of Zen literature in English.)
• Ann Gleig. American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. (A contemporary synthesis of twenty-first-century American Buddhism, addressing scandals, women, race, and related questions.)
• Martin Baumann. "Global Buddhism: Developmental Periods, Regional Histories, and a New Analytical Perspective." Journal of Global Buddhism 2 (2001): 1–43. (An analytical framework for the global history of Western Buddhism.)

References¶