Lausanne World Pulse – A Focus on South Asia: 340 Least-Reached Buddhist/Other People Groups Remain
Then, in 1192, Muslim invaders began conquering India. These invaders sacked Buddhist monasteries, killing monks or forcing them to flee. This loss of leadership caused the extinction of Buddhism in most of India. By 1300, only a few Indian villages in the Himalaya Mountains still had Buddhist majorities. The Muslim armies had bypassed these villages. Today, these are the regions of South Asia where Buddhism remains strong. Buddhism did not resume spreading in India until the 1890s, when the religion took root among India’s untouchables. There was another wave of untouchables who converted to Buddhism in 1956.
Buddhism in the West
For most of its existence, Buddhism had been an Asian religion. Around 250 BC, Buddhist missionaries had reached Greece and Egypt, but they had won few converts. Years later, Roman era writers mentioned the existence of small Buddhist communities in the Eastern Roman Empire, but those communities quickly died out.
The real spread of Buddhism into the West began after 1800 AD, when European scholars began studying Buddhist documents. Some of these scholars took these documents back to their home countries and translated them into European languages. But for most of these scholars, Buddhism was only a matter of intellectual curiosity. There was no thought of converting to Buddhism.
In 1895, Frederick Nietzsche became the first Western scholar to practice Buddhism. However, only a few scholars living in university towns practiced Buddhism prior to 1960. In the United States, Buddhism arrived with the first Chinese immigrants to California around 1850, when the railroads employed them to build the Trans-Continental Railroad. The arrival of Japanese immigrants in California around the 1880s brought a second group of Buddhists to America. Heavy discrimination by the Caucasian majority prevented the spread of Buddhism beyond these Asian ethnic communities.
That changed after 1945, when American servicemen who had fought in Japan or in Korea brought home Buddhist teachings. After 1960, Buddhism took root among some members of the Boomer generation. Today, there are Buddhist temples in every major city of America. Seeing Caucasian Americans within these temples is common, even though Buddhists comprise less than one percent of America’s population. Asians make up the majority of most American Buddhist congregations.
Buddhism Today
Today, Buddhism is the majority religion of a large part of Asia, from Myanmar to Japan and from Mongolia to Thailand. It also has a strong presence in the Asian minority communities of North America and Europe, along with a few Western devotees. Many of the least-reached peoples live in the remote, mountainous regions of India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. These are the peoples that we will lift in prayer this month.
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