Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

Buddhism in the United States

2 April 2026 · 5 min read

The funny thing about this is that the phenomenon being pointed to is not actually real, yet the data itself -does- point to another, far more interesting phenomenon.

You see, Buddhism in the United States is unique, I have often said to my chagrin that "Buddhism is not real", this is true. Buddhism is not real.

Buddhism is an ontological framework without epistemology1. This may be confusing if you've -only- ever interacted with Buddhism from a Buddhist epistemological framework, but once inside you see that the epistemology is itself the raft that the Buddha himself speaks about2 that must be discarded. Buddhism's foray into America was unique3 because it infiltrated through a specific vector in three separate waves.

The first wave was the Theosophists like Blavatsky4 who brought over Theravada the second were the Neo-Theosophists like DT Suzuki5 who brought over Chan. What you notice in both Theravada and Chan is that they're not 'Buddhism', both love to claim authenticity, and both are authentic, but neither one nor the other is uniquely true Buddhism. Theravada's Pali textual canon6 -isn't the oldest- despite that claim being repeated as a sectarian myth over and over. Likewise, we have no proof that the original teachings of the Buddha were Mahayana either. The final wave was of course through Tibet7 and Taiwan, via the Communist regime's illegal annexation and subsequent genocide of the former.

Despite this all, we do have a clue in the concept of upaya8, which is where we get the idea of the raft in the first place, skillful means, the idea that epistemology is merely a vessel to ferry you to an understanding of ontology. When you reach that state, the epistemology is abandoned. This is Buddhism's central epistemology, it is self defeating, self burning, self immolatory. You might be inclined to then say, well then how come Buddhism maintained such a coherent ontological presence over 2400 years. The answer to this is simple, because back then Buddhism represented the spiritual arm of Empires. The Chan Buddhists courted favors with the Chinese emperors, the Tibetans embedded themselves into the framework of Mongol and Tatar Khans9. The Theravada became the epistemological framework for the Kingdoms of Sri Lankha and Thailand. In all of these situations the continuity of Buddhism was propelled, entirely, by a monastic system propped up and supported by dynastic rulers. There is no such thing in America.

What happened with Buddhism in America was the epistemology was simply a bunch of fingers pointing at the moon. There was no Japanese Emperor to maintain a tradition of Zen10. There was no Thai King to maintain a tradition of Theravada. There was no Dalai Lama as the King, there was no Chinese Emperor. What you found was a nation of Spiritualists and the Post-Religious, a people who had lived through not one Reformation but FIVE. The Reformation, the Radicalization (that led to them coming to America), the Great Awakening, New Thought and Spiritualism, and finally New Age. Arugably six if you count Post-Modernism.

So what happened? Well Americans received all of these texts along with everything else from Gnosticism to the Dead Sea Scrolls and all of Hinduism and Daoism and Bahaism and everything. We received everything all at once.11 Some Buddhist missions came, and people might have called themselves Buddhists for a time. Yet the idea that Buddhism was not a religion went further, and in a way, it isn't, if a religion needs institutional power to be a religion, then Buddhism in America specifically is not. I have gone to many Buddhist temples, do you know how many people consider themselves Buddhists there? Not many. Yet these institutions keep growing, not closing down. Buddhist temples take over abandoned Churches throughout the decaying Midwest, why is that if Buddhism is declining?

The official Buddhist numbers are immigrants.12 The Tibetans and Chinese who came here en masse fleeing persecution, their children are Americans, they become American Buddhist, which means they are agnostic, atheist, a 'non', or just 'spiritual', and so they don't consider it their 'religion' because they don't have a religious relationship with Buddhism like their parents or grandparents might have.

This would be a good enough argument alone, but there is also something else happening that I gestured to at the start. Buddhism is an ontological belief system, not an epistemological one. I have recommended the book "The Secular Paradox13" many times because it points to a trend that is rather unintuitive for many common people, the idea that society is becoming less atheistic and less materialistic, that people are becoming more religious and more spiritualist14, they're just doing it in ways that are eclectic, secular, and hard to quantify through census visualization.

In the year 2026 people all over the country are doing yoga, meditation, the belief in reincarnation is widespread, the Buddha is as recognizable of a figure as Jesus and many people, especially secular more affluent ones, find more 'inspiration' in him than even their own Jesus. Our entire therapeutic system that propagates psychotherapy like DBT is built upon a secularization of core Buddhist tenets15, and this isn't coincidental, this is something you can simply read about, all of these things are deeply interwoven.

Bay Area tech people ushering in the 3rd Industrial Revolution are doing 'Jhanas' and independently having experiences that they describe as Non-Duality16, the eschatology of the Yudowsky's Witnesses17 is eerily similar to the industrial age Buddhists of China who foresaw the coming age of Maitreya18. People are collecting in groups, creating sanghas, in the congregational manner, they are having "vibe" camps and discussing panpsychism.

People are making entire careers teaching 'tantra' to people and calling it 'spells' and 'manifestation', they're reskinned the entire tantric playbook19 as 'witchcraft' and your little sister scrolling tiktok looking into tantric magic of another name is none the wiser. Don't even get me started on metta. Even the psychadelic stuff and how it is framed and used as therapy and how it all maps 1:1 onto Buddhist phenomenology.

Buddhism's ontological claims infected the affluent American's mind so thoroughly that almost none of the aforementioned folk and their extended circles would answer on a religious census that their 'Religion' was Buddhist, most would likely be openly hostile to the framing as Buddhism as anything more than a philosophy. Yet all of these people are Buddhists and are actively participating in the epistemological formation of a new form of American Buddhism that has its roots in the New Age and ultimately upwards in the genealogy to Congregational Calvinism.

America is a secular nation, it is a pluralistic nation, we are religious about our civic religion which is non-religious in a religious way. Buddhism's degrowth represents an adoption of her core claims into the affluent ruling class and the assimilation of the Buddhist refugees into this 'New Buddhism'. Buddhism isn't dying by any stretch of the imagination, but the epistemology laid out by Shakyamuni Gotama is, and that is a time of rejoicing, the prophecies of old all speak in unison, when the Cowherd's epistemology starts to unravel then would be the age of Maitreya and a new golden age will come.

Now is the age of Maitreya, the Dharma ending age20 is passing before us. Now is the time for celebration.

Notes

By the editor.

  1. By ontology she means the view of what is, and by epistemology the apparatus of doctrine, monastery and method by which people are taught to see it. The apparatus is the raft the Buddha said to leave behind, so the claim is that what remains when it is dropped is the real Buddhism. The same teaching drives her reading of the koan in What Does It Mean to Kill Buddha?. source ↩
  2. The raft is from the Alagaddūpama Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 22), where the Buddha compares his teaching to a raft built to cross a river, for crossing and not for carrying about once across. It follows the water-snake simile, aimed at a monk who had grasped the teaching wrongly. Careful readers add that the sutta also warns against dropping the raft mid-stream, which is the same point as her ‘must be discarded’ once the crossing is done. source ↩
  3. The American story begins in print. In January 1844 Emerson’s The Dial ran ‘The Preaching of Buddha’, the first excerpts of the Lotus Sutra in the United States, rendered from Eugène Burnouf’s French (long credited to Thoreau, now generally to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody). The decisive public moment was the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where Anagarika Dharmapala and the Zen master Soyen Shaku spoke; there Paul Carus befriended Shaku and asked his help in publishing Eastern texts. source ↩
  4. Helena Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott. In 1880 the two took the Three Refuges and Five Precepts in Ceylon, which helped spark Western interest in Buddhism. The Theosophists’ Buddhism was a modern, text-led one, which is why she reads it as a wave that arrived without temples or kings. source ↩
  5. D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966), the Japanese scholar who made Zen widely known in the West through English writings such as Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927–34). He married a theosophist, Beatrice Lane, in 1911 and later joined the Theosophical Society. His teacher Soyen Shaku was the Zen master who spoke at the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago. source ↩
  6. The oldest Buddhist manuscripts found so far are not in Pali. The British Library’s Gandhāran scrolls, written in Gāndhārī and dated to the first half of the first century CE, are the oldest, and they belong to another school, probably the Dharmaguptakas. Richard Salomon, who edited them, says the old model of a single evolving canon had been losing credibility and calls the scrolls the clincher. source ↩
  7. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in March 1959, and some 80,000 Tibetans followed him to India in the next year or so. Their route to America was slow: the Immigration Act of 1990 set aside 1,000 visas for Tibetans in exile, awarded by lottery, and most Tibetans now in the United States came through it in 1992–93 and the family sponsorship that followed. This is the immigrant Buddhism she distinguishes from the American kind. source ↩
  8. Upāya, ‘skillful’ or ‘expedient means’, is the Buddhist teaching that a teacher may adapt a method to the listener’s capacity. The Lotus Sutra’s parable of the burning house illustrates it. She works the idea out at length in What Does It Mean to Kill Buddha?, and her claim here is that Buddhism’s own central teaching marks its doctrines as temporary. source ↩
  9. The Tibetan-Mongol bond is documented. In 1260 Kublai Khan appointed the Sakya lama Drogön Chögyal Phagpa as his state preceptor and soon put him over the Buddhist clergy; in 1264 he formally gave him authority over all Buddhist clergy in Tibet. Phagpa in turn presented Kublai as a chakravartin, a universal wheel-turning king, and designed a script for his empire. It is the priest-and-patron pairing she means by ‘spiritual arm of Empires’. source ↩
  10. The historian Thomas Tweed’s The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912 (1992) reaches the same result from the other side. Although Buddhism drew much attention in the nineteenth century, it built no lasting institutions and few adherents, because even sympathetic Americans stayed Victorians at heart. The faith took root later and elsewhere, which fits her claim that without a throne to prop it up, American Buddhism had to become something else. source ↩
  11. The first drop of that flood was print. The Dial’s 1844 excerpt of the Lotus Sutra, translated from Burnouf’s French, was the first Buddhist scripture many Americans could read, and it set the pattern: Buddhism arrived as texts to be read, not as an institution with a king behind it. Compare her wider claim about many faiths arriving together in How Can Many Religions Be True?. ↩
  12. Pew counts Buddhists at about 1 percent of US adults in its 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, and a 2026 Pew brief puts them at 1.3 percent in 2020. Those figures count people who say Buddhism is their religion. They do not count the much larger group she describes, who meditate or hold Buddhist ideas but would never tick the box. source ↩
  13. The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious (NYU Press, 2022) by Joseph Blankholm. Drawing on years of fieldwork among American secular activists, it asks why nonbelievers often seem religious. It is the book behind her claim that the nonreligious are doing religion under another name, an argument she makes for rationalists in Is Rationalism a Religion? What Is a Religion? and The Monk Knew He Was Religious. source ↩
  14. Pew’s 2023 survey ‘Spirituality Among Americans’ (fielded 31 July to 6 August 2023) found that 22 percent of US adults call themselves spiritual but not religious, 21 percent say they are neither, and about 7 in 10 consider themselves spiritual in some way. That is a large body of belief that no census category for ‘religion’ catches, which is the measurement gap she is pointing at. source ↩
  15. Marsha Linehan, who developed dialectical behavior therapy at the University of Washington, trained in Zen at Shasta Abbey and was later confirmed a Zen master in the Empty Cloud Sangha by Willigis Jäger; she has described DBT’s skills as translations of meditation practices from Eastern spiritual training. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who built mindfulness-based stress reduction in 1979, sat Zen with Seung Sahn and vipassana with Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. Both secularised Buddhist practice for hospitals. source ↩
  16. Jhāna, the deep absorptions of Buddhist meditation, is in her view one form of something older and wider than Buddhism. She develops that in Jhana Is Possession by Kami, or Ur-Sooth, where it is the same family as tantra and the old English ‘sooth’. On that view, people with no tradition behind them reaching the same states is just what one would expect. ↩
  17. A play on Jehovah’s Witnesses, naming Eliezer Yudkowsky (born 1979), AI researcher who co-founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and LessWrong, and co-wrote If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025) with Nate Soares. She treats AI doom as religious thinking that does not know it is religious in The Monk Knew He Was Religious. source ↩
  18. Maitreya (Pali Metteyya) is the next Buddha, and tradition says he will come after Gotama’s teaching has been lost and forgotten. In the Pali canon his name appears in the Cakkavatti-Sīhanāda Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 26), the only sutta that names him, which makes his coming a matter of the Dharma’s disappearance, not of its triumph. Her closing joy rests on that: epistemology unravelling is the sign. source ↩
  19. She argues in Jhana Is Possession by Kami, or Ur-Sooth that tantra, and old English ‘sooth’, name one root practice behind most magic. In What the Ghosts Actually Are ghostsooth is the Sanskrit deity yoga, devatāyoga, the practice of imagining oneself as a deity, and she says it is the root of tantra. So spells and manifestation that follow that outline are tantra by another name, not a corruption of it. ↩
  20. Mappō, the ‘Latter Day of the Law’, is the third and degenerate age in the Buddhist three-ages scheme, in which the teachings remain but people can no longer reach enlightenment through them. Japanese Buddhists reckoned it as beginning in 1052 CE, and the belief shaped the Kamakura-era schools such as Pure Land and Nichiren. Some historians doubt how widely the date was believed in its own time. source ↩