property that would eventually become Dhamma
Dena in Joshua Tree, and in 1988 Kornfield helped to
establish another teaching, retreat, and training center
at Spirit Rock, in Marin County.
Although W. Y. Evans-Wentz translated the TIBETAN
BOOK OF THEDEADin 1927 and Geshe Wangyal in-
corporated the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in
New Jersey in 1958, larger numbers of converts started
turning to Vajrayana traditions only in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, when teachers such as Tarthang Tulku
Rinpoche (1935– ) in Berkeley, California, and Chog-
yam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–1987) in Boulder, Col-
orado, established practice centers associated with the
four main orders or schools of Tibetan Buddhism:
BKA’ BRGYUD(KAGYU), SA SKYA(SAKYA), RNYING MA
(NYINGMA), and DGE LUGS(GELUK). And because the
number of Tibetan exiles in the United States remains
relatively small, Vajrayana traditions are represented
in America mostly by European-American converts
and the Tibetan (or, increasingly, American) teachers
who guide their practice.
Since the 1960s American converts also have prac-
ticed in centers associated with forms of Mahayana
Buddhism. Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a lay or-
ganization within Nichiren Shoshuuntil the bitter split
in 1991, grew from its American origins in 1960 to at-
tract approximately thirty-six thousand devotees, who
chanted the title of the Lotus Sutrain homes and cen-
ters across the United States by the turn of the century.
Asian-born Zen teachers—Shunryu Suzuki (1904–
1971) and Taizan Maezumi (1931–1995)—built on
the foundations established earlier in the century, and
their American-born “dharma heirs” went on to lead
existing centers and found new ones. Philip Kapleau
(1912– ), Robert Aitken (1917– ), Maurine Stuart
(1922–1990), John Daido Loori (1931– ), Richard
Baker (1936– ), and Bernard Glassman (1939– ) all
played important roles, and by 2000 their lineages had
been extended, with later generations of American-
born Soto and Rinzai teachers, including many women,
assuming positions of leadership.
Finally, Vietnamese Zen teacher THICH NHAT
HANH(1926– ) attracted sympathizers and converts,
who are guided by the fourteen mindfulness trainings
of his “ENGAGEDBUDDHISM.” He founded the Order
of Interbeing (Tiep Hien) in the mid-1960s, when he
was an internationally known peace activist, but the
“core community” (the ordained) and the “extended
community” (the unordained) began to grow in num-
ber and influence during the 1980s and 1990s through
the writings and visits of the founder, who conse-
crated the Maple Forest Monastery in Hartland, Ver-
mont, in 1997.
Nhat Hanh, the DALAI LAMA, and many other
Asian- and American-born Buddhist teachers also
shaped elite and popular culture. They filled bookstore
shelves with accessible introductions to Buddhist prac-
tice that were read by tens of thousands of sympathiz-
ers who do not sign membership lists or formally take
refuge in the Buddha but still find the tradition’s teach-
ings attractive. Buddhism also inspired American
painters, architects, and sculptors. It shaped modern
dance and contemporary music, from Philip Glass’s
new music to the Beastie Boys hip-hop. The pop star
Tina Turner reported that chanting, a practice she
learned from Nichiren Buddhism, granted her peace
and prosperity. Buddhism influenced the sports world
too: Phil Jackson, the professional basketball coach,
credited Zen with his success in the game. How-to
books promised improvement in everything from sex
to business, if only readers would apply the principles
of Zen or Tantric Buddhism. Inspired by Nhat Hanh’s
Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation(1975)
and other texts and teachers, Duke University Medical
Center and many other hospitals offered classes in
“meditation-based stress reduction.” Advertisers,
fashion designers, scriptwriters, and filmmakers also
used Buddhist images to move an audience or sell a
brand. After celebrities confessed Buddhist affiliation
and four films during the mid-1990s highlighted Bud-
dhist themes (Heaven and Earth, Little Buddha, Kun-
dun,and Seven Years in Tibet), a 1997 cover story in
Timemagazine celebrated “America’s Fascination with
Buddhism.” A century after the peak of Victorian-
American interest, a more intense and widespread
Buddhist vogue seemed to have set in.
But cultural vogues come and go, and it is not yet
clear whether the baby boomer converts will success-
fully pass on Buddhism to the next generation. So in
many ways, the most culturally significant shift after
1965 has been the increased visibility and numbers of
Buddhist immigrants and refugees from Asia. The 1965
revision of immigration laws swelled the foreign-born
population. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 28.4
million Americans (10.4% of the population) were
born outside the nation. Of those, 7.2 million emi-
grated from Asia, and approximately 665,000 foreign-
born Asian Americans might be Buddhist, if we apply
and extend the findings of the ARIS. In any case, if the
same proportions hold as in that 2001 survey—61 per-
cent of Buddhists were Asian American and 67 percentUNITEDSTATES