Tricycle | Awake in the World

Can you describe the progression of American Buddhism over the last four decades? What new trends are you seeing? When I first started, we were talking about American Buddhism and whether there was such a thing at all. That’s clearly developed to the point where we are starting to see a distinctly Western form of Buddhism. Now even that is almost passé. When I first started studying American Buddhism, we used the telephone. Today there is the internet. Buddhist communities everywhere in North America and the world are so networked that I started using the phrase “global Buddhist dialogue” to talk about a worldwide Buddhism rather than just an Asian, European, or American one. Western Buddhism is increasingly only one part of global Buddhism.