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What many Americans and Europeans understand by “Buddhism” is actually a hybrid of a number of Buddhist traditions that have cross-fertilized with the dominant discourses of western modernity, especially those rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism, and Protestant Christianity. The popular western picture of Buddhism is neither unambiguously “there“ in ancient Buddhist texts and lived traditions nor merely a fantasy of an educated elite population in the West, an image with no corresponding object. It is, rather, an actual new form of Buddhism that is the result of a process of modernization, westernization, reinterpretation, image-making, revitalization, and reform that has been taking place not only in the West but also in Asian countries for over a century.

This chapter argues that ritual needs to be given greater attention in the historiography of American Buddhism. The popularity of mizuko kuyō points to a significant turn toward appreciation of ritual in convert Zen since the 1980s, as women have taken a greater role in leadership and Zen’s own success has led to a diversification of views. Furthermore, ritual has always existed to a larger extent than previous studies acknowledged, but it was partially obscured by uncritical acceptance of Zen practitioners’ descriptions of normative practice. Future studies should try to focus on neglected areas that may bring this wider range of practices to light; possible foci include places, material culture, bodies, and emotions, all of which have been insufficiently accounted for in previous research.

The postscript reviews the arguments and evidence of the preceding chapters and calls for a more comprehensive approach to studying the Americanization of Buddhism that includes both multiple Buddhist communities and the contributions of non-Buddhists. It also points out how rituals need not be performed in order to have effects: imagining, learning about, or discussing rituals can in some cases be as important and effective as actual performance.

This chapter lays out a basic approach to studying regionalism in American Buddhism. It first provides a brief historiography of Buddhism in America and explains why American Buddhist regionalism has been overlooked in American religious studies. This chapter suggests five modes of investigation to provide better understanding of the Buddhist regions of the United States: (1) regional distribution patterns within American Buddhism, (2) impact of regions on Buddhism, (3) Buddhist impact on regions, (4) regional differences within the same Buddhist lineage, and (5) difference between built environments.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and intensifying between the 1940s and 1960s, a complex transcultural process allowed decontextualized Buddhist beliefs, practices, and artifacts to circulate widely among Americans, especially those who did not themselves identify with Buddhist traditions. After the “Zen boom” of the 1950s, Buddhism during the Vietnam Era became associated with conflict and violence. Yet Buddhism's Asian and American popularisers managed to break that representational link, and the tradition emerged as a tolerant spiritual alternative and an adaptable cultural implement. Liberated from the constraints of precedent and released from tradition's inertial force, Buddhism could become almost anything in the transnational flow of representations. A proper discussion of American pluralism needs to assess not only the number of followers a religion accumulates but also its cultural impact. By that metric, Buddhism's influence has been so great since 1945 that one may fairly talk about the “Buddhification of America.”

This chapter suggests that to understand recent patterns and turns in American meditation-based convert Buddhism, one has to go beyond theories of modernity and explore what has come after it—as indicated by sociocultural signifiers such as postmodern, postcolonial, and postsecular. As the case studies have shown, new developments often explicitly and implicitly assert pressure on modernist characteristics and cannot be fully explained within the parameters of Buddhist modernism. The chapter then reviews a number of frameworks that either change the category of Buddhist modernism slightly or introduce a new analytical paradigm, and considers how well these alternatives attend to and account for emerging trends identified in this book.

This book argues that people in different parts of America experience Buddhism through lenses and circumstances supplied by the surrounding culture, and Buddhism impacts how those people navigate their regional culture. Its themes of pluralism and regionalism calls for attention to place (body, artifact, room, building, neighborhood, region) and movement in the study of American Buddhism. In this conclusion, final thoughts on American Buddhist places are presented. It also provides additional details for how regionalism can be explored in American Buddhism, including possibilities for future research.

The Buddhist Geeks project is an online Buddhist media platform launched in 2007 by two self-identified millennials who wanted to combine their passion for Buddhism with their “geeky skills.” It quickly gained a wide audience for its pioneering explorations into the convergence of Buddhism, technology, and global culture. Through an analysis of the Buddhist Geeks project and a consideration of its replacement, Meditate.io., this chapter explores the impact of technology and digital culture on American convert Buddhism. It draws on discourse analysis, formal interviews with some of the main players of the Buddhist Geeks project, informal interaction with multiple Buddhist Geeks participants, and participant observation at three annual Buddhist Geeks conferences from 2012 to 2015.

Through a focus on the Zen sex scandals, this chapter redirects attention to practice communities to provide a more nuanced consideration of intersections between American Buddhism and psychotherapy. The scandals provide a useful focus for a number of reasons. First, they reveal under what particular conditions psychotherapy has been incorporated into certain Zen communities. Second, they show which psychotherapeutic discourses have become dominant and the specific ways they have been adopted. Third, they illustrate how the introduction of psychotherapy has been legitimated within a wider Buddhist hermeneutic, which has produced new Buddhist discourses, practices, authorities, organizational structures, and even soteriological models.

This chapter introduces the historical cultural antecedents to the contemplative movement, showing that mindfulness builds upon the rhetoric and logics of prior religious liberal and spiritual thought in the United States. Americans were exposed to Buddhism, and its emphasis on cultivating inner spiritual life through solitude and reflection, in the mid-nineteenth century from the Transcendentalist literature of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the late nineteenth century, the Theosophists and the World’s Parliament of Religions meetings brought additional attention to Buddhism, aligning it with science. Interest in Zen and solitary, reflective Buddhist practices surged in the mid-twentieth century based on the influence of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and the politicized literature of the Beats. These romanticized portrayals of Buddhism were then more widely popularized with the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The contemplatives built upon the work of these prior streams of Buddhist-inspired American spirituality.

Incarcerated Christians frequently thanked God for giving them the strength to endure the incarceration and developed a variety of faith communities to provide additional support. The focus of Chapter Four turns away from church leaders to examine how lay (non-ordained) Christians experienced camp life. Buddhists joined Protestants and Catholics to organize interfaith memorial services for Nikkei soldiers killed in action, while pacifists and others resisted the military draft. This chapter expands the book’s focus to highlight Christian youth culture at a camp in Arizona and the hardships at Tule Lake, where incarcerees attacked Japanese Christians for cooperating with camp officials. The roots of Asian American theologies began growing in the camps in response to this rejection and suffering.