The Parliament sat for seventeen days in September 1893, in the newly built hall on the lakefront that is now the Art Institute, as one of the congresses attached to the World's Columbian Exposition. Nothing on that scale had been attempted: delegates of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, Islam, Judaism and a long list of Christian bodies addressed the same audience from the same platform, and the proceedings were published and read far beyond the city.
Two things are usually remembered about it. The first is the reception of Vivekananda, a young Bengali monk with no delegation behind him, whose opening address was received with an ovation and who spent the following years lecturing across the United States, founding the first Vedanta societies in the West. The second is that the meeting introduced an American public to Buddhism through speakers including Anagarika Dharmapala of Ceylon and the Rinzai abbot Soyen Shaku, whose connection to Chicago publishing later carried D. T. Suzuki to the United States.
The Parliament's frame was less neutral than its billing. It was organised by liberal Protestants, opened and closed with Christian prayer, and its chairman assumed that comparison would demonstrate the superiority of his own tradition. The Archbishop of Canterbury declined to take part on the ground that Christianity is not one religion among many. Delegates from Asia used the platform to answer missionary accounts of their traditions directly, which is a large part of why the event mattered.