two Asian Buddhists who spoke at Chicago’s World
Parliament of Religions in 1893, ANAGARIKADHARMA-
PALA(1864–1933) and Soen Shaku (1859–1919), some
Americans turned East. Some in that first generation
of American converts even traveled to Asia. Henry
Steel Olcott (1832–1907), the first American convert
in 1880, and Marie De Souza Canavarro (1849–1933),
the first female convert in 1897, traveled to Ceylon (Sri
Lanka). William Sturgis Bigelow (1850–1926) and
Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1851–1903) went to Japan,
where they stayed for years and received the bodhi-
sattva PRECEPTSof Tendai Buddhism at Homoyoin
Monastery in 1885.
During this period, most Americans who would
have claimed Buddhist identity never had the chance
to encounter the tradition in Asia, and there were few
Buddhist leaders, translations, and institutions to sup-
port their practice, which focused more on reading
than meditation or chanting. Those who lived in San
Francisco could take advantage of the Dharma Sangha
of Buddha, a small Caucasian group founded in 1900
by Japanese Jodo Shinshu (or True Pure Land Sect)
missionaries, who also published a sophisticated
English-language magazine, the Light of Dharma
(1901–1907), which could boast of subscribers in
twenty-five states. More than a decade earlier some
readers encountered a distinctive blend of Sweden-
borgianism and Buddhism in another periodical, the
Buddhist Ray(1888–1894), which was published in
Santa Cruz, California, by a self-proclaimed convert,
Herman C. Vetterling (1849–1931), who called him-
self Philangi Dasa. Yet most European Americans who
sympathized with the tradition or thought of them-
selves as Buddhists had little support for their practice
during this period.
Asian-American Buddhists, especially the Japanese,
were a little less isolated. Immigrants from East Asia
(China, Korea, and Japan) brought Buddhism to the
United States during this period, starting with the Chi-
nese in the 1850s. They settled along the West Coast
to work as railroad laborers, miners, farmers, and do-
mestics. In the 1850s and 1860s emigrants from China
also landed in Hawaii to work on sugar plantations.
And Buddhism was a part of the religious life of many
of these Chinese migrants on the islands and on the
mainland. It is difficult to say how many, since the
Chinese did not keep clear records, establish vigorous
organizations, or enjoy strong religious leadership.
Further, as in their homeland, Buddhist beliefs and
practices blended with Daoist, Confucian, and folk tra-
ditions in Chinese-American homes and temples. The
Chinese established the first temple in the United
States in 1853, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. By the
1860s, tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants had
some allegiance to Buddhism, and by the 1890s there
were 107,488 Chinese in the United States. They could
visit fifteen San Francisco temples, which enshrined
Buddhist as well as Daoist images. Although no one
could offer fully reliable figures, officials from the U.S.
Bureau of the Census reported in 1906 that there were
62 Chinese temples and 141 shrines in 12 states, many
of them in California.
The Japanese were the next Asian Buddhists to ar-
rive. They began to travel to Hawaii in significant
numbers during the 1860s, and by 1889 a Jodo Shin-
shupriest, Soryu Kagahi, was ministering to Buddhist
field workers there. In the next decade, the 1890s, thou-
sands of Japanese migrants arrived in the American
West, and almost from the start Japanese Buddhists
were more organized than the Chinese. Religious lead-
ers traveled from the homeland and formed religious
institutions to support Buddhist practice. On Septem-
ber 2, 1899, the Honganji True Pure Land Buddhist
organization in Kyoto sent two missionaries—Shuye
Sonoda and Kakuryo Nishijima. By 1906 Japanese Pure
Land Buddhists reported 12 organizations, 7 temples,
and 14 priests in the United States. They also reported
3,165 members, although many more Japanese would
have been loosely affiliated with the religion. Mean-
while, Buddhism continued to flourish among the
Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands, which had become
a U.S. possession in 1898. Chinese and Koreans on the
islands also practiced Buddhism in this early period.
For example, one scholar has estimated that at least
half of the 7,200 Koreans who moved to Hawaii to
labor on sugar plantations between 1903 and 1905
were Buddhists.
But, as they soon would discover, these pioneer
Asian immigrants were not welcomed by all other
Americans. They were, as some scholars have sug-
gested, the ultimate aliens. Not only were they legally
unable to become naturalized citizens, but they also
were racially, linguistically, culturally, and religiously
distinct from their neighbors. If Buddhism provided a
source of identity and comfort, it also set them apart
in a predominantly Christian nation. U.S. lawmakers
targeted first the Chinese and later the Japanese. The
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 set the tone, and by the
time legislators passed the restrictive and racist 1924
immigration act, which included national quotas that
in practical terms excluded Asians, the pattern was
clear for the next period in U.S. Buddhist history.UNITEDSTATES