Exclusions: 1924–1964
From the 1920s to the 1960s borders were closed to
Asian immigrants, and interest contracted among
European-American sympathizers and converts. Very
few new Asian Buddhists arrived. The Chinese popu-
lation fell, thriving Chinatowns declined, and some
temples closed. Jodo Shinshu, Sotoshu, and Nichiren-
shu temples formed during the several decades after
the Japanese arrival in the 1890s, but the immigrant
population did not grow. The Japanese also suffered
internment during World War II, when President
Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 incarcer-
ated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in as-
sembly centers and internment camps in the Western
states. Some Japanese stopped practicing Buddhism for
fear of being labeled un-American, although most con-
tinued their religious practice and the Jodo Shinshu
mission, renamed the Buddhist Churches of America
in 1944, survived the camps.
Japanese Buddhism even expanded between the
1920s and the 1960s. Soto and Rinzai Zen leaders be-
gan to build on the foundations constructed earlier.
Soen, the first Zen teacher in America, had made a lec-
ture tour in 1905 and 1906 and then published Ser-
mons of a Buddhist Abbot(1906), the first book on Zen
in the English language. Between 1925 and 1931 two
of Soen’s students—Nyogen Senzaki (1876–1958) and
Shigetsu Sasaki (later known as Sokei-an)—went on to
establish Zen centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco,
and New York. Other East Asian teachers, including
Shunryu Suzuki, later founded Zen centers. Suzuki ar-
rived in San Francisco in 1959 to serve the elderly
Japanese-American congregation at Sokoji, the Soto
Zen temple that Hosen Isobe had built in 1934. Suzuki
later established the San Francisco Zen Center and Tas-
sajara Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen monastery
in America. In 1960 SOKAGAKKAI’s president, Daisaku
Ikeda, brought the practices of that Japanese religious
movement to American shores.
If these and other teachers helped to build the in-
stitutions that nurtured Buddhist practice among con-
verts and sympathizers after the 1960s, another
Japanese Buddhist, D. T. SUZUKI(1870–1966), gener-
ated interest, especially in Zen, among intellectuals and
artists. Suzuki, who had penned articles for theLight
of Dharmaand served as Soen’s translator at the Par-
liament and during his 1905 speaking tour, first
stepped into the spotlight in 1927 when he published
Essays in Zen Buddhism.Through his writings, trans-
lations, and lectures over the next four decades he in-
fluenced musicians, poets, choreographers, painters,
theologians, and psychologists, including John Cage,
Erich Fromm, and Thomas Merton—as well as Beat
movement writers Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and
Jack Kerouac, who looked to Buddhism as a spiritual
alternative to their inherited traditions.
Another influence on the Beat generation was
Dwight Goddard (1861–1939), a Baptist missionary
who sailed for China to save the “heathen” and re-
turned as a Buddhist convert committed to spreading
the Asian tradition in the United States. It was God-
dard’s anthology of Buddhist scriptures, The Buddhist
Bible(1932), that Kerouac’s “dharma bums” carried
with them on their spiritual journeys in Eisenhower’s
America. But neither Goddard, who had proposed an
American Buddhist monastic community as early as
1933, nor Suzuki, who popularized Zen, could secure
an enduring institutional foundation for Buddhist
practice among converts. That would happen only af-
ter 1965.Crossings: After 1965
Many things changed after 1965, even if cultural shifts
in the preceding decades had helped prepare the way.
Not only did the number of American converts swell,
but more Buddhists arrived from Asia. All Buddhists
also enjoyed increased support for their practice as
more temples and centers dotted the American land-
scape. At the same time, Buddhism grew in visibility
as it shaped elite and popular culture. There were mul-
tiple reasons for the changes. Cultural discontent dur-
ing the tumultuous 1960s had opened Americans to
new spiritual alternatives just as new translations of
Buddhist texts made their way to bookstores and re-
vised immigration laws opened the gates for Asian im-
migrants, including Buddhist teachers and followers.
Starting in the 1970s, war-weary Buddhist refugees
from Southeast Asia also began to settle in America af-
ter escaping political disruptions in their homelands.
So by the opening decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury the United States was home to every form of
Asian Buddhism—THERAVADA, MAHAYANA, and VAJ-
RAYANA. Cradle Buddhists, those born into the faith,
and convert Buddhists, those who embraced it as
adults, could practice in more than fifteen hundred
temples or centers. No one knows for certain how
many Americans think of themselves as Buddhists,
since the U.S. census no longer gathers information
about religious affiliation. Recent estimates range
from 500,000 to over 5 million, with the average esti-
mate about 2.3 million. Surveys in 2000—the General
Social Survey (GSS), Monitoring the Future (MF), theUNITEDSTATES