To understand Buddhism in the United States, it helps to start with an ancient Buddhist story. A group of blind men describe an elephant. One, who feels the elephant's tail, describes it as a rope. Another feels the head, and says the elephant is like a boulder. The other blind men, after feeling its tusks and its belly, describe the elephant as like a long staff or a large urn. The lesson: it's complex, and depends on which part of the elephant you examine.
Buddhism first came to the United States via immigrants from Asia, and people of Asian descent still comprise the vast majority of American Buddhists, who are said to number anywhere from a million to five million. In 1965, immigration laws changed and more Asians immigrated to the U.S.. They brought with them their ancestral worship patterns, including Buddhist practices of Chinese, Japanese and, later, Vietnamese traditions. While that family and tradition-rooted Buddhism has grown, much scholarly attention has been focused on what has been called “white Buddhism,” or those Americans of European ancestry who have embraced its tenets.
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