In 670 U ̆isang returned to Korea, warning King
Munmu about an impending invasion of Silla by Tang
army forces. In 676 Puso ̆ksa on Mount T’aebaek was
built under royal decree and functioned as U ̆isang’s
main center for the propagation of the Hwao ̆m school
in Korea. Purportedly, U ̆isang gathered more than
three thousand disciples and subsequently founded
other monasteries throughout the country, further
promoting Hwao ̆m studies. U ̆isang’s erudition was
known both inside and outside of Korea. Fazang con-
tinued to correspond with U ̆isang, asking him to cor-
rect his manuscripts.
During the subsequent Koryo ̆ dynasty, CHINUL
(1158–1210) copiously cited U ̆isang’s works and King
Sukjong conferred on him a posthumous title. U ̆isang’s
Hwao ̆m ilsu ̆ng po ̆pkye tois often recited in modern Ko-
rean Buddhist liturgy.
Bibliography
Forte, Antonino. A Jewel in Indra’s Net: The Letter Sent by Fazang
in China to U ̆isang in Korea.Kyoto: Instituto Italiano di Cul-
tura Scuola di Studi Sull’Asia Orientale, 2000.
Lee, Peter H., ed. Sourcebook of Korean Civilization,Vol. 1. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Odin, Steve. Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism: A Crit-
ical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpretation.Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1982.
PATRICKR. UHLMANNUNITED STATES
The American encounter with Buddhism dates from
the start of systematic trade between China and the
United States in 1784, when ships that docked along
the eastern seaboard from Charleston, South Carolina,
to Salem, Massachusetts, began to unload Asian arti-
facts. But during this period Americans, and Western-
ers more generally, had not yet identified Buddhism as
a distinct religious tradition, perused translations of
Buddhist sacred texts, or witnessed large-scale emigra-
tion of Buddhists from Asia. In that sense, the Ameri-
can contact with Buddhism did not begin in earnest
until the 1840s and 1850s. In 1844 transcendentalist
writer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894) trans-
lated an excerpt from a French edition of a Buddhist
sacred text, the LOTUSSUTRA(SADDHARMAPUNDARIKA-
SUTRA), and that excerpt and commentary appeared in
the magazine The Dialas “The Preaching of the Bud-
dha.” In the same year Edward Elbridge Salisbury
(1814–1901), a professor of Sanskrit at Yale, read a pa-
per on the history of Buddhism at the first annual
meeting of the American Oriental Society, a group of
scholars dedicated to the study of Asian cultures. These
two events—Peabody’s translation and Salisbury’s
paper—initiated systematic U.S. contact with Bud-
dhism, and that encounter took on more significance
in the next decade as Chinese immigrants landed on
American shores. This initial period in the history of
Buddhism in the United States would last until 1924,
when Congress passed a restrictive immigration act.
And the most recent era in America’s encounter with
Buddhism opened in 1965, when the immigration laws
loosened to allow more Asians of Buddhist heritage to
settle in the United States.Encounters: 1844–1923
The public conversation, which began in the 1840s and
peaked in the 1890s, included a wide range of voices—
Christian travelers and missionaries, European and
American scholars, as well as Buddhist sympathizers
and converts. Much of the discussion—in magazines
and books, in parlors and classrooms, in churches and
lecture halls—focused on the sources of Buddhism’s
attraction (advocates claimed it was tolerant, egalitar-
ian, and scientific) and the extent of its discontinuity
with mainline Protestant beliefs and Victorian Amer-
ican values (critics found it pessimistic, atheistic, and
passive). In books such as Samuel Henry Kellogg’s The
Light of Asia and the Light of the World(1885) Protes-
tant critics of the Asian religion worried aloud about
the increasing influence of Buddhism and countered
with praise for Christianity. Henry M. King (1838–
1919), a prominent Baptist clergyman who was trou-
bled by the claims that it was “a most favorable time
for the dissemination of Buddhistic views,” even asked
readers of one Christian periodical, “Shall We All Be-
come Buddhists?” King offered a decisive no,and he
and other Christian critics highlighted the ways that
Buddhism seemed to diverge from widely shared be-
liefs and values—theism, individualism, activism, and
optimism. But Buddhist sympathizers defended the
tradition, as Paul Carus (1852–1919) did passionately
in Buddhism and Its Christian Critics(1897).
Carus, one of the most influential participants in
the public discussion, never affiliated formally or fully
with Buddhism, but several thousand European Amer-
icans did during the first Buddhist vogue, from the
1880s to the 1910s. Attracted by Edwin Arnold’s sym-
pathetic life of the Buddha in verse, The Light of Asia
(1879), and fascinated by the lectures and writings ofUNITEDSTATES