Week 1: Introduction to the Course, Historical Overview of Global Buddhism, and Buddhist Modernizers

As the Californian teacher Larry Yang, a leader in the development of multicultural Buddhism in the US, notes, history is a form of awareness, as it deeply influences how we perceive the present. The initial part of this course will provide a broad historical foundation of Buddhism from its founding to the present, and this week will place particular emphasis on the rise, and in some instances, decline, of various approaches in different parts of Asia, then multiple strands of Buddhist modernism which arose in the 19th and 20th centuries in response to colonialism and the scientific and industrial revolutions, and finally the four (and a half?) routes through which Buddhism has become established in the US: Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities starting in 1850, Zen in the 20th century through missionary efforts into urban centers such as New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Insight starting in the 1970s from the Burmese populist traditions, and Tibetan through the post-1959 Tibetan diaspora, and finally some late 20th century influence from the Vietnamese exile Thich Nhat Hanh.

Suggested reading:

Link to slides (pdf file)

Other resources

Note the dates on these: some, e.g. Huxley, Watts, Suzuki, are primarily useful for getting a sense of how various ideas gradually came to the US and as such, they are not necessarily reflecting contemporary practice or understanding.
  • Joseph Goldstein. One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism. (2003)
  • Charles Prebish. "Forum: Book Power: How the publishing industry is influencing Buddhism in the West." (September-2007: obviously a bit dated but an interesting reflection on just how quickly things have changed) https://www.lionsroar.com/forum-book-power/
  • Seth Zuiho Segal. "In Search of 'True' Buddhism", Tricycle Winter 2024. Gist: it's always evolving and culturally contextual. https://tricycle.org/magazine/seth-segall-buddhist-path/
  • Kate Crosby. Esoteric Theravada (2020), specifically the historical, mostly chapters 1, 6, 7
  • Rick Fields. How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (1992)
  • Aldus Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
  • David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008)
  • Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal talks on Zen meditation and practice. (1970)
  • Alan Watts. The Way of Zen. (1957)
  • Donald S. Lopez. The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History & Teachings. (2009)
  • Donald S. Lopez. Buddhism: A Journey through History. (2025).
    [these two books appear to cover the same material but have different publishers; first is now out of print so guessing Lopez—a distinguished professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan—provided an update, now with a university press. The 2025 version effectively presupposes that the reader already knows a lot of the basic concepts but is excellent at showing the very wide range of implementations of Buddhism across millennia, cultures, and historical circumstances.]

Web resources

The use of Lion's Roar as the source of the readings is an historical artifact of Lion's Roar being the only Buddhist magazine providing unlimited access to its archives when I was first putting together these resources. Since that time, Tricycle magazine—Boomers can think of their different-but-very-similar parallel existence (I read both) as comparable to Time and Newsweek back in the day—has also provided access comparable to that of Lion's Roar—digital starting at $8/month—and it also has a wealth of resources.

Beyond these publications, both now encompassing a vast range of podcasts, videos, courses and other media beyond articles, there is now a huge and ever expanding ecosystem of Buddhist material on the web. Here are a few general sources: various institutions such as Insight Meditation, Lingmincha, Soka Gakkai International etc also maintain very large collections of material specific to their lineages.

  • Wisdom Experience: tends heavily towards Tibetan approaches—more than a few interviews start of fond reminiscences of learning Tibetan at UVA—but is general
  • Shambhala Publications: traditional book publisher out of Boulder, CO
    • .
  • Dharma Seed: Massive and continually updated collection of recorded talks (starting around 1974) and guided meditations, currently with over 42,000 entries. Some are restricted to participants in retreats but many are free.
    • .
  • Wisdom of the Masters: extensive series of readings, mostly English versions texts from a very broad span of time in a variety of traditions, recorded by two nuns at the Viveka Hermitage in Australia. Designed for meditation; these also have transcripts if you dig far enough through YouTube (or ask a 15-year-old who will find this in ten seconds)
    • .
  • Because they were trained on the web, the large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and LLama generally give surprisingly good answers to questions about Buddhism. See this link (may be paywalled) for a quirky discussion by a confirmed techy using ChatGPT to learn meditation; discussion starts around the 38:50 time point.

In all of these cases except the last, it's useful to note that articles written by Buddhist practitioners will frequently give you quite a different perspective than articles by academics who have read a great deal but don't have a practice (many, of course, do both, but not all): while there is a huge proliferation of Buddhist texts, even in traditions such as Zen and advanced meditation practices such as dzogchen for which the limitations of language are a major concern, it is primarily concerned about orthopraxis—right practice—rather than orthodoxy (right belief)

Podcasts

Uh, yeah, there be podcasts: at some point I thought I'd provide podcasts for every week but the potential material is just too overwhelming: that's what search engines are for. But I'll leave these in here.

Contemporary issues in U.S. Buddhism

The 2023 version of this course, which ran for nine weeks rather than six, had a week focused on contemporary issues in the U.S. convert Buddhist communities, specifically ethnic diversity (or lack thereof), adapting contemporary gender expectations to generally patriarchal historical practices, and the role of service and social activism. The following were the suggested readings; I've not updated these but looking through the past few years of Lion's Row and Tricycle magazine (digital starting at $8/month) will provide ample contemporary discussions.
  • Michael Haederle. "Women in Buddhism Study Initiative, University of Hamburg" (May 2014) [Discussion of Bhikkhu Analayo's work on the topic as well as this initiative more generally] https://www.lionsroar.com/profile-women-in-buddhism-study-initiative-university-of-hamburg/
  • Ann Gleig. "Beyond the Upper Middle Way" (September 2019) https://www.lionsroar.com/beyond-the-upper-middle-way/.
    More generally, Ann Gleig's American Dharma: Buddhism beyond modernity is somewhat dated (published 2019 but due to typical academic publication delays, most of the research was over a decade ago) but still the best book-length overview of U.S. convert Buddhism I'm aware of. Gleig has also done substantial research on sexual abuse in Buddhist communities—another topic about which, alas, much can be said— and this site from November-2024 is a useful entry to that topic.
  • Ruth King. "Healing the Broken Body of Sangha." March-2017 https://www.lionsroar.com/healing-the-broken-body-of-sangha/
    Ruth King is based in Charlotte and has given quite a few talks in the Charlottesville area; she is one of the most senior of the Black female dharma teachers.
  • Lion's Roar panel "The Road to Diversity" (2012) (Note the date: this is interesting as it occurs in the middle of Spirit Rock dealing with diversity and just as the East Bay Meditation Center was hitting its stride. Also nice discussion of socially engaged Buddhism) https://www.lionsroar.com/road-to-diversity/
  • Bhikkhu Bodhi. "The Need of the Hour." (Fall 2011) https://tricycle.org/magazine/bhikkhu-bodhi/
    Bhikkhu Bodhi's Buddhist Global Relief has subsequently developed into a substantial NGO, with a specific focus on empowering women in less developed countries. The chaplaincy and hospice training programs of Roshi Joan Halifax's Zen Upaya Institute are also of note; Halifax and Upaya have a long-standing relationship with UVA's School of Nursing,
  • David R. Loy. "What's Buddhist about socially engaged Buddhism?" http://www.zen-occidental.net/articles1/loy12-english.html
  • Emily DeMaioNewton. "I Was Raised by American Buddhists. Here's Why I Left. The story of an unusual apostasy." (Feb-2023)" https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/02/what-it-was-like-to-be-raised-by-american-buddhists.html
    This is a pretty brutal assessment, but I think captures multiple layers of contemporary issues with convert Buddhism—socioeconomic privilege, Orientalism, assumption of the superiority of the Western materialist worldview—so give it a go.