Buddhism in America: History, Numbers and Communities

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 28 October 2026

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Buddhism in America goes back to the Chinese temples of the 1850s, and today, Pew Research Center finds, most Buddhists in the United States are immigrants and most are Asian by race. Pew estimates that about 4.4 million Buddhists lived in the US in 2020, 1.3% of the population, children included; about half of Buddhist adults were born in Asia. Japanese Shin missions followed in Hawaii and California, and numbers grew again after the 1965 immigration law and the refugee arrivals of 1975.

How many Buddhists are there in America?

Pew Research Center counts in several ways, and each figure answers a different question.

Language matters: 21% of Asian Buddhists in the Survey of Asian Americans chose to answer in a language other than English, and Pew says a poll in English and Spanish alone “may have missed” Buddhists not proficient in either. For its March 2026 analysis Pew therefore combined the two surveys to represent Buddhists’ “racial and immigration characteristics”; the race and birthplace figures below come from that combination.

The number of Buddhists rose 22% between 2010 and 2020, against 9% for everyone else, and conversion did not drive it: from its Religious Landscape Study, Pew counts 0.5% of all US adults as converts to Buddhism and 0.7% as former Buddhists, and concludes that “immigration, not religious switching, has driven the growth.” Separately, about 3% of US adults consider themselves Buddhist “aside from religion”, which, Pew says, might mean they identify with Buddhism ethnically, culturally or because of their family background. Among Asian Americans, 21% consider themselves close to Buddhism for reasons aside from religion, almost twice the 11% who identified as Buddhist in the Survey of Asian Americans. For world totals, see how many Buddhists there are and Buddhism around the world.

Who are American Buddhists?

Pew’s 2026 analysis puts it in one line: “Most U.S. Buddhists are immigrants, and most are Asian by race.” An estimated 52% of US Buddhist adults were born in Asia; the commonest birthplaces of those born abroad are Vietnam, China and Thailand. Some 64% are Asian, 21% White and 8% Hispanic, and 46% live in the West, against 24% of all US adults. For single states, Pew’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, conducted in English and Spanish only, puts Buddhists at 5% of adults in Hawaii and 2% in California, against 1% nationally; state samples are small (Pew gives a margin of error of ±8.1 points for Hawaii), so these are rough figures.

Among English and Spanish speakers, conversion is common. In the Religious Landscape Study, which reached only those speakers, 48% of current Buddhist adults were not raised Buddhist, while 55% of Americans raised Buddhist no longer identify that way.

Among Asian Americans, Buddhism varies by heritage. The 2022-23 survey found that 37% of Vietnamese Americans identify as Buddhist, as do 38% of those tracing their origin to Southeast Asian countries other than Vietnam and the Philippines. Only 19% of Japanese Americans identify as Buddhist, yet 62% express some connection to it, and 30% have no religion but feel close to Buddhism.

Practice is often domestic. Among Asian American Buddhists, 63% use an altar, shrine or religious symbol at home, while 17% attend services at least monthly; half are aged 50 or over. For race and belonging inside American sanghas, see Buddhism and social justice.

How did Buddhism come to America?

Chinese temples of the Gold Rush era

Pew writes that Chinese migrants “working in the gold rush and building railroads brought their Buddhist beliefs and practices with them.” The National Park Service’s theme study describes the buildings more closely. Chinese settlers built “Taoist temples and altars as well as Buddhist temples”, often called “Joss Houses”, and community members usually looked after them because ordained priests were rarely available. “Buddhist religious practice,” the study says, “first appeared in some of the early Chinese temples built in the 1850s.”

Not every “Joss House” was Buddhist: California State Parks calls the Weaverville Joss House, built in 1874, “This Taoist temple”. Some popular timelines date the first Buddhist temple in America to 1853 in San Francisco; we found no primary or scholarly source for that date.

Japanese Shin Buddhism in Hawaii

Among Japanese immigrants, the Shin tradition’s own course on its American history says, “by far the largest and best organized” Buddhist bodies were the Hongwanji branches of Jōdo Shinshū, the Shin school of Pure Land Buddhism. By the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii’s account, Rev. Soryu Kagahi held the first Shin service in Honolulu on 3 March 1889, in what was then the Hawaiian Kingdom, and that September founded communities in Honolulu and Hilo. The National Park Service study dates “the first Japanese Buddhist temple”, at Paauhau, to 1896. The two dates measure different things: a first service, then a first building.

The same course describes the temples as social centres and a consolation for immigrants on plantations and farms, and notes that Hawaii temples early on adopted organs, pews, hymns and Sunday schools. In 1907 the Territory of Hawaii recognised the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii’s incorporation.

San Francisco and the mainland missions

In San Francisco, a Young Men’s Buddhist Association formally established on 30 July 1898 became the seed of the Buddhist Church of San Francisco. Revs. Shuye Sonoda and Kakuryo Nishijima arrived on 1 September 1899, sent by the Hongwanji. The Buddhist Churches of America dates its predecessor, the Buddhist Mission of North America, to 1914, not 1899 as some secondary accounts have it. By 1941 the mission had 44 affiliated temples.

Zen came the same way, to serve Japanese communities. Sotoshu, the Soto Zen school’s headquarters, records Zenshuji in Los Angeles (1922) as the first Soto temple in North America for the Japanese American community, and Sōkōji in San Francisco (1934). The 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, which the Japanese Zen teacher Shaku Sōen attended, is covered in Buddhism in the West.

What happened to Buddhists in World War II?

Religion shaped the first arrests. The scholar Duncan Ryuken Williams, interviewed in Tricycle in 2017, says that after Pearl Harbor the FBI arrested hundreds of Buddhist and Shinto priests “(but almost no Christian ministers)”; the first person arrested was the senior Nishi Hongwanji priest in Honolulu, at 3 p.m. on the day of the attack. The Hawaii Hongwanji records that the next day its temples were closed and its ministers interned.

In February 1942 President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, and the National Archives says that from late March to August “approximately 112,000 persons were sent to ‘assembly centers’”, nearly 70,000 of them American citizens. In the camps, Williams says, Buddhism “ended up thriving because the dharma offered a viewpoint about suffering, loss, and death”; in the same sentence he gives the reason, that during the first winter many babies and elderly people died in the poorly built barracks.

The camps also changed the institutions. Williams says they pushed Buddhists toward English-language “hymns” and toward cutting ties with headquarters in Japan. At a meeting at the Topaz Buddhist Church, in the camp in Utah, on 28-30 April 1944, the Buddhist Mission of North America renamed itself the Buddhist Churches of America, a name meant, Williams says, “to emphasize that its new home was rooted in America.” In 1988 the Civil Liberties Act acknowledged the injustice, apologised, and paid $20,000 to each person incarcerated. On Japanese American Buddhist soldiers, see can Buddhists be soldiers?

After 1965: immigrants, refugees and new temples

The Immigration and Nationality Act, signed on 3 October 1965, ended the policy of limiting immigration by national origin. The House of Representatives’ history office notes that it “created new opportunities for immigrants from Asian nations to join relatives in America.”

Theravada temples and refugees

Wendy Cadge’s history of American Theravada (University of Chicago Press, 2004) traces the first temples:

• The Washington Buddhist Vihara, directed by a Sri Lankan monk and founded jointly by Asian and American-born people, held its first meeting in December 1966.
• Wat Thai Los Angeles dedicated its main hall in 1979, the year it hosted the first Theravada higher ordination on US soil.
• Thai temples grew from five in 1980 to more than seventy-five by the end of 1999. See Buddhism in Thailand.

After the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, the US military evacuated about 130,000 refugees, according to a National Park Service essay; refugees from Cambodia and Laos followed. The Khmer Rouge had killed Buddhist monks systematically, Cadge writes, and a few survivors helped build the first Cambodian temples. Cambodians in the US rose from 16,044 in the 1980 census to 147,411 in 1990, and Ven. Maha Ghosananda came in 1981 to head the Cambodian Buddhist community in Rhode Island. For the Vietnamese tradition at home, see Buddhism in Vietnam.

Chinese, Taiwanese and Tibetan communities

The Dharma Realm Buddhist Association of the Chinese Mahayana master Hsuan Hua bought the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in California in 1974, by the association’s own account, and Hsuan Hua founded Dharma Realm Buddhist University in 1976. Hsi Lai Temple, whose name means “coming to the west”, belongs to Taiwan’s Fo Guang Shan order, founded by Master Hsing Yun in 1967. It was inaugurated in Hacienda Heights on 26 November 1988, after six public hearings and 135 coordination meetings, by the temple’s own account. See Buddhism in China.

In 1990 Congress made a provision of its own for Tibetans: section 134 of the Immigration Act set aside 1,000 immigrant visas for “qualified displaced Tibetans” living in India or Nepal. See Tibetan Buddhism.

Convert centres

Convert communities grew alongside. San Francisco Zen Center was established in 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki, who had come to lead the Japanese American temple Sōkōji, and his American students. The Insight Meditation Society, founded in 1975 by young teachers including Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield, opened on 14 February 1976; Cadge calls it the first Theravada organisation “founded completely by non-Asians”. Chögyam Trungpa, whose page sets out the serious allegations about his conduct, founded the Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1974. SGI-USA’s newspaper, the World Tribune, recounts Daisaku Ikeda’s first overseas journey, which began on 2 October 1960 and took in seven US cities, from Honolulu to New York, as well as Canada and Brazil; many of the members he met were Japanese women married to American servicemen. The fuller convert story, including D.T. Suzuki’s influence on how Westerners saw Zen, is in Buddhism in the West; see also Thich Nhat Hanh, secular mindfulness and secular Buddhism.

American Buddhist communities today

The Pew surveys above do not break Buddhists down by tradition. When its 2012 survey of Asian Americans asked, 49% of Asian American Buddhists named no particular tradition, calling themselves “just a Buddhist”; Pew warned that survey did not represent US Buddhists as a whole. The figures below are what each community or a scholar reports.

Some communities mix in ways no table shows. At a Thai temple in Chicago and a Sri Lankan temple in Los Angeles, Paul Numrich found what he called “parallel congregations”: Thai and Sri Lankan members came for weekend ceremonies and white people mostly for weekday meditation, under the same monks, and, as Cadge summarises, “the two groups rarely interacted.” Cadge notes that researchers do not know how numerous such congregations are. SGI-USA calls itself “the most diverse Buddhist community” in the country; that is its own description.

If you plan to visit a temple, see temple etiquette.

Buddhists in American public life

• Military recognition. Williams says the service of Japanese American Buddhist soldiers secured the “B” for Buddhism on military dog tags, Buddhist chaplains, and dharma wheels on national-cemetery headstones. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ list of headstone emblems today includes a Buddhist emblem, and separate ones for SGI-USA and Nichiren Shoshu Temple.
• Chaplains. Lt. j.g. Jeanette Shin of the Navy took her oath of office at the Pentagon on 22 July 2004; the Military Women’s Memorial records her as the Defense Department’s first Buddhist chaplain. (The Army’s first, and the argument over Buddhists in uniform, are on can Buddhists be soldiers?.) On 11 September 2022, the BCA reported, a Buddhist pennant flew aboard a Navy ship for the first time, on USS McFaul.
• Congress. Pew records that Mazie Hirono and Hank Johnson became the first Buddhists elected to the House, in 2006, and that on 6 November 2012 Hirono became the first Buddhist elected to the Senate. Pew counted three Buddhists in the 119th Congress at its start in 2025.

Heritage and convert: the American argument over who counts

The general convert-and-heritage model is explained in Buddhism in the West. The American debate has its own history, traced by Wakoh Shannon Hickey in the Journal of Global Buddhism (2010):

• Charles Prebish, 1978. He coined “two Buddhisms”, but for more and less serious students, not ethnic groups.
• Prebish, 1993. He moved to three categories: “ethnic”, “export” and “new”.
• Jan Nattier, 1995. In Tricycle she sorted American Buddhism by how it arrived: “elite”, “ethnic” and “evangelical”. In a 1997 essay she warned that all three groups were “unwittingly engaged in the practice of defining large groups of our fellow Buddhists out of existence.”
• Paul Numrich, 1996 onward. He used “two Buddhisms” to make an ethnic distinction.

The argument began with a 1991 Tricycle editorial by Helen Tworkov, which said the spokespeople for Buddhism in America had been “almost exclusively, educated members of the white middle class”; Hickey notes that the editorial “was actually lauding pluralism”. Members of the Buddhist Churches of America answered that they had been building an American Buddhism for more than a century, and Rev. Ryo Imamura, a Shin priest, wrote to Tworkov in 1992, in letters later published in a BCA newsletter, that it was Asian Buddhists “who welcomed countless white Americans into our temples, introduced them to the Dharma”.

Hickey argues that these typologies miss hybrids and change over time. The BCA, she writes, remains “overwhelmingly Japanese and Japanese American” but after four or five generations “is neither an immigrant community nor composed primarily of converts”. Shunryu Suzuki and Taizan Maezumi were sent as missionaries to Japanese communities, not “imported” by white elites, and only later turned to converts. In her reading, both Tworkov and her critics made “essentializing statements” about racial groups, and the dispute reveals systemic racism affecting all American Buddhists. The publisher of Chenxing Han’s Be the Refuge (2021), which draws on 89 Asian American Buddhist interviewees, presents it as “both critique and celebration, calling out the erasure of Asian American Buddhists.” The BCA has looked at itself too: its president wrote in 2024 that the temples’ role as a “refuge” also “promoted an ‘exclusive’ community that created barriers for others outside of the Japanese American community to be part of our Sanghas”, a challenge “which can still be felt today.”

The scholars, editors and communities do not agree, and this page takes no side. The numbers settle something narrower: most Buddhists in the United States are Asian by race. For the wider family of schools, see the branches of Buddhism.