Zen Statistics: How Many Buddhists Are There Worldwide?

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You have to have a Zen mindset when it comes to counting Buddhists.

In 2004, there was an estimate of 376 million Buddhists worldwide. I stress “estimate” because the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia said that “it is virtually impossible to tell the size of the Buddhist population today. Statistics are difficult to obtain because some individuals may have Buddhist beliefs and engage in Buddhist rites yet maintain folk or some other religion such as Shinto, Taoism or Hinduism; such persons may or may not call themselves or be counted as Buddhists.”

Another complication in counting the Buddhist population is what the Handbook of Religious Denominations in the United States called as a resistance by the religion to “identification of its central teaching with particular cultural, historical or institutional forms.” Frank S. Mead and Samuel S. Hill wrote that although Buddhism openly adopts the “features of the religious environment of the countries to which it has spread,” in the United States the “assumption of forms of religious life characteristic of denominations has not been widespread.” 

According to the World Almanac and Book of Facts, the main concentration of Buddhists is “throughout Asia, from Sri Lanka to Japan.” The Statistical Abstract of the United States reported 401,000 self-described Buddhist adults in the United States in 1990, based on surveys. In 2001, that total had risen to 1,082,000. In “Are We a Nation ‘Under God’?” (American Enterprise, July/August 2004), Samuel Huntington wrote that in 1997 American Buddhists of all ages “numbered somewhere between 750,000 and 2 million.”

Of those American Buddhists, about 15,000 are adherents to the Zen and Soka Gakkai sects of the religion, which lie within the Mahayana branch of Buddhism. The other two branches of the faith are Theravada and Tantrism.

Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhism is the prevalent branch in East Asia. Theraveda (“Way of the Elders”) originated in Sri Lanka, Thailand and other areas of Southeast Asia. Tantric Buddhism, said the Columbia Encyclopedia, shares with Tantric Hinduism the ritual of yoga and mantra (symbolic speech), the use of mandala (symbolic diagrams), the importance of female deities and “cremation-ground practices such as meditation on corpses.”

Both the Zen and Soka Gakkai forms of Buddhism are of Japanese origin. Adherents of Zen meditate in order to gain enlightenment. The pamphlet “Zen FAQ” traced Zen back to the Ch’an School of Buddhism in China, where the teachings of the Buddha blended with those of Taoism. When Ch’an Buddhism came to Japan around 1200 A.D., its name was translated as “Zen.”

Soka Gakkai (“Society for the Creation of Value”) is a lay religious movement of much more recent origin. The Soka Gakkai International website gave the date of its founding as 1930. According to the University of Virginia’s Religious Movements website, the first members of Soka Gakkai in the United States were “some 300 Japanese war brides that joined in Japan and then brought” their form of Buddhism to the United States. 

There was no a Buddhist temple in the United States until 1898, when the Buddhist Mission of North American consecrated one in San Francisco.

Matt Grills, in “For God & Country” (American Legion Magazine, December 2005), said that the Department of Defense registered the Buddhist Churches of America as an ecclesiastical endorsing agency for the armed forces, in 1987, “opening the door for Buddhist chaplains.” In 2005, 3,500 of 280,000 total U. S. Air Force enlistees identified themselves as Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, pagans, druids or shamans.