Famous People Who Are (or Were) Buddhist

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 4 June 2026 · Updated 4 November 2026

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Plenty of well-known public figures have practised Buddhism — but the honest list is shorter than the internet suggests, and it pays to separate a committed practitioner from someone merely “influenced by” the dharma.

Below are people with a well-documented Buddhist practice or self-identification, organised by tradition, with each claim drawn from reputable sources. Where someone is better described as Buddhist-influenced, we say so plainly.

A note on how this list was made

It is very easy to wrongly call a celebrity “Buddhist.” A single yoga retreat, a meditation app, or a quotable line about impermanence is not a religious commitment. So this page applies one rule: a person appears here only if their practice or self-identification is documented in credible biographical sources — and we distinguish the committed (a sustained, openly described practice, often within a named tradition) from the merely interested or influenced. We have also left out anyone whose Buddhist label rests on rumour alone.

For the great teachers and masters — the Buddha, Nagarjuna, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh and others — see our companion guide to the most influential Buddhist teachers in history. This page is about public figures who practise or practised, not about the lineage founders.

Zen practitioners

Steve Jobs

The Apple co-founder is the most famous lay student of Zen in the tech world. As a young man Jobs read Shunryū Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and for much of his life he studied with Otogawa Kōbun, a priest of the Japanese Sōtō Zen school who had come to teach in California. Kōbun was close enough to Jobs to officiate his wedding to Laurene Powell according to Zen ritual. Biographers consistently trace Jobs’s obsession with simplicity and clean design back to this Zen training. The fair description is long-time student, not monk — he was never ordained — but the influence was deep and lifelong.

Leonard Cohen — with an important caveat

The singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen went further than almost any celebrity: in 1996 he was ordained as a Rinzai Zen monk and given the Dharma name Jikan (Tricycle glosses it as “silent one”). He spent years living at the Mount Baldy Zen Center near Los Angeles as personal assistant and cook to his teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, rising before dawn to meditate. (The New Yorker reported in October 2016 that Sasaki, toward the end of his life, “was accused of sexual misconduct”: some former students said that he had “sexually groped or coerced many Buddhist students and nuns,” and, according to the New York Times, an independent Buddhist panel “determined that the behavior had been going on since the seventies.” He “was never charged with any crime.”)

And yet Cohen is the clearest case of why labels need care. He insisted he had not converted. “I never became a Buddhist, to tell you the truth,” he told Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2006. Asked by Rolling Stone in 2001 whether he was now a Zen monk, he answered: “Technically, yes. I was never looking for a new religion. I was perfectly happy with the religion I was born into.” When Allen Ginsberg asked how he reconciled Judaism and Zen, The New Yorker’s David Remnick recounts, Cohen gave the same answer; in Remnick’s summary, Zen “made no mention of God,” and for Cohen it “was a discipline rather than a religion, a practice of investigation.” His rabbi in Los Angeles, Mordecai Finley, recalled in the Jewish Journal after Cohen’s death that Cohen had told him Zen Buddhism, “at least the kind that he practiced, was not a religion. It was a tuning fork for consciousness.” He kept a menorah in his cabin on the mountain, and in his later years spent many Shabbat mornings at Finley’s synagogue, Ohr HaTorah, on Venice Boulevard. Tricycle’s 2017 obituary note put it differently, saying he “considered himself both a Jew and a Buddhist”; in his own interviews, though, Cohen presented himself as a Jew with a serious Zen practice: ordained, devoted, but not a convert.

Gary Snyder and the genuinely Buddhist Beats

Among the Beat writers, the poet Gary Snyder made a lasting commitment to Zen: he went to Asia, he told Lion’s Roar, “with the goal of studying with a Zen teacher,” made his way to Japan and “stayed there for twelve years,” partly in monasteries. The poet Allen Ginsberg also formalised a Buddhist commitment: he began studying with the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa in 1972 and took refuge in Buddhism under his guidance, and in 1974 he helped found the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, after Trungpa asked him, Anne Waldman and others to “take part in founding a poetics school.” (The Daily Times-Call reported in February 2024 that Trungpa was accused of physically beating and sexually assaulting women and girls, having sex with his students and abusing substances including alcohol, tobacco and cocaine; Naropa’s president, Charles Lief, said the university had “no basis to determine whether the allegations are true or false”. See Chögyam Trungpa.) (Their friend Jack Kerouac is a more complicated case — see below.)

Nichiren / Soka Gakkai Buddhists

One particular tradition — Nichiren Buddhism, in the form of the lay movement Soka Gakkai International (SGI) — accounts for a striking number of famous practitioners. Its central practice is simple and portable: chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of the Lotus Sutra, understood not as a prayer to an outside deity but as a way of awakening one’s own buddha-nature. That accessibility is part of why it took root among performers.

Tina Turner

The rock-and-roll legend Tina Turner is perhaps the most moving example. Introduced to the practice in 1973, she chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo daily for roughly fifty years, crediting it with giving her the strength to leave an abusive marriage and rebuild her life and career. “Buddhism literally saved my life,” she told USA Today, “and I’ve been happily chanting every day for about 50 years now.” She remained a practising SGI Buddhist until her death in 2023.

Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter

Two giants of jazz were longtime SGI members. The pianist Herbie Hancock, who took up the practice in 1972, has said he chants every day, “primarily in the morning and the evening” — and three times before stepping on stage, “to get in sync with the moment.” His longtime collaborator, the saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, practised Nichiren Buddhism for nearly fifty years; Tricycle’s 2023 tribute records that he was chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo up to “the last moments of his conscious life.” He died in March 2023. Both spoke often about how the practice shaped their music toward compassion and human connection.

Orlando Bloom

The actor Orlando Bloom discovered Nichiren Buddhism as a teenager and is a practising member of Soka Gakkai. He has spoken openly and repeatedly about chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to steady himself — before auditions, on set, and through the ordinary difficulties of life — describing it as the through-line in much of what he does.

Tibetan Buddhists

Richard Gere

Probably the world’s best-known lay Tibetan Buddhist, the actor Richard Gere has practised for over half a century. He began in Zen as a young man, then, after meeting the Dalai Lama in India, became a practitioner of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. Gere refers to the Dalai Lama as his teacher and has spent decades as an outspoken advocate for Tibet — a commitment that, by his own account, cost him roles and standing in Hollywood. His Buddhism is not a private hobby but the centre of his public life.

Adam Yauch (Beastie Boys)

Adam Yauch, “MCA” of the Beastie Boys, turned to Tibetan Buddhism in the early 1990s. Rolling Stone reported that he became interested in Tibet’s plight while hiking in the Himalayas in 1992, after meeting Tibetan refugees; he told Tricycle in 1994 that on a second trip to Nepal he “was exposed to Buddhism more,” and that back home he started reading the Dalai Lama’s books. He said he had taken the bodhisattva vow, after something the Dalai Lama said at his 1993 teachings in Arizona settled his hesitation, and that his daily practice included meditating in the morning and before he went to sleep — though he was frank that the label did not sit neatly: “Sometimes I’ll say I’m a Buddhist in interviews, and sometimes I’ll say I’m not.” He founded the Milarepa Fund “to focus attention on Tibet’s struggles under Chinese domination,” as Rolling Stone put it, and the Beastie Boys were, in Lion’s Roar’s words, “the organizers and driving force behind” the Tibetan Freedom Concerts; the June 1996 concert in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park drew 100,000 people. Reaching the young was the point: of the Tibetan monks the band brought on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour, he said, “If we can touch those kids, it’ll be worth the effort.” He died of cancer in 2012; Lion’s Roar remembered him as “a practicing Buddhist.”

k.d. lang

The singer k.d. lang is a practitioner in the Nyingma lineage — the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism. In an interview with Melvin McLeod about her album Watershed, posted by Lion’s Roar in 2009, she said she had taken refuge “about seven years ago” and that her teacher was Lama Chödak Gyatso Nubpa, a Los Angeles teacher “from the Nyingma lineage of Tibet”; she was then on the board of Ari Bödh, the American Foundation for Tibetan Cultural Preservation. “I’m very proud to be a Nyingma practitioner,” she said. The Canadian Press, interviewing her in 2026, dates her becoming a Buddhist to “around the turn of the millennium.”

“Influenced by,” not “a convert to”

Some famous names belong in a different category — genuinely shaped by Buddhism, but not committed practitioners of it. Honesty means keeping them distinct.

• Phil Jackson, the NBA coach who won eleven championships, is famous for a “Zen” approach: he took up Zen meditation in the mid-1970s, while still a player, and Tricycle described him in 1994 as “a Buddhist practitioner for twenty years.” But Jackson, raised in a strict Pentecostal home, told Tricycle in the same interview, “I use the term ‘Zen Christian’ to describe my personal beliefs,” and he also drew on Native American spirituality, placing Lakota Sioux artifacts in the Bulls’ meeting room — a personal synthesis, not a conversion to Buddhism.

• Jack Kerouac studied Buddhism intensely in the mid-1950s and wrote The Dharma Bums, which introduced a generation of Americans to the dharma. Yet he drew back from it. In a later letter to Philip Whalen, Kerouac wrote that he would be too embarrassed for Whalen and Gary Snyder to see him, admitting, “I’m not a Buddhist anymore.” Raised a Catholic, he increasingly framed himself in Catholic terms — in 1969, in interviews with the St. Petersburg Times that are thought to be his last, he said, “I’m not a beatnik. I’m a Catholic.” He is best understood as a Catholic writer profoundly influenced by a few Buddhist years — unlike his friends Snyder and Ginsberg, who stayed the course.

The honest takeaway: real, long-term Buddhist practice among public figures is genuinely there — Tina Turner’s fifty years of chanting, Richard Gere’s decades of Tibetan practice, Wayne Shorter chanting to the end. But it is also frequently overstated. When in doubt, the careful question is not “Is this person Buddhist?” but “What, specifically, do they practise, and how do they describe it themselves?” Unfamiliar terms on this page are explained in the glossary; for the teachers and masters behind these traditions, see the most influential figures in Buddhist history; see also Buddhist documentaries and films.