Buddhism Reaches the United States

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Sze Yap Company, a Chinese American fraternal association, built the first Buddhist temple in the United States in San Francisco in 1853, serving the growing community of Chinese immigrants who had arrived on the West Coast during the Gold Rush years. The community's places of worship multiplied quickly after that first temple: eight stood in San Francisco alone by 1875, and by 1900 roughly four hundred existed along the coast, almost all of them serving Chinese immigrant congregations rather than a wider American public.

Buddhism's broader visibility beyond those immigrant communities came four decades later, at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. There the Rinzai Zen teacher Soyen Shaku and the Sri Lankan Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala presented the tradition to a wide non Asian audience for the first time, addressing a national gathering rather than a single immigrant congregation and introducing Buddhist teaching directly to Americans who had never encountered it.

What this changed for Buddhism's spread was the tradition's establishment on two separate tracks within a single American generation: first as a lived faith carried west by Chinese immigrants and built into hundreds of coastal temples, then as a subject of American religious and intellectual interest following Chicago in 1893, the two tracks converging on the same country from very different directions.