AHC: Make Buddhism the 2nd-largest religion in America

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is, with a POD after 1800, to create a scenario in which the second-largest religion in America is Buddhism, with Judaism in 3rd place. Bonus points if you can create a situation where more than 10% of America is Buddhist. Additional points if the majority of those are the descendants of converts to Buddhsim, rather than the descendants of immigrants who brought the religion here.
 
Well do they count all the various christian sects as just "christian" ITTL? Because combining that with lessened or poorly enforced restrictions on Asian immigration can likely lead to a much higher percentage of the population being Budhist. Otherwise though Catholicism will always win the number two spot.
 
Translate more Buddhist text into English. I have a friend who is in Tibet studying the Tibetan langauge and translating text to English. I believe he said less than 10% had been translated to a non-Asian language. don't quote me on that, but you get the gist.
 
Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is, with a POD after 1800, to create a scenario in which the second-largest religion in America is Buddhism, with Judaism in 3rd place. Bonus points if you can create a situation where more than 10% of America is Buddhist. Additional points if the majority of those are the descendants of converts to Buddhsim, rather than the descendants of immigrants who brought the religion here.

Buddhism works best when it has a local folk religion to serve as an add-on pack to e.g. Hinduism in India during the Buddhist period, Hinduism and local folk religions in SE Asia, Chinese folk religion in China, Shinto in Japan. Buddhism taken by itself tends to be very, very austere as a religion for the masses. The trouble is, I can't see the Abrahamic faiths working very well as a substrate.
 
Buddhism works best when it has a local folk religion to serve as an add-on pack to e.g. Hinduism in India during the Buddhist period, Hinduism and local folk religions in SE Asia, Chinese folk religion in China, Shinto in Japan. Buddhism taken by itself tends to be very, very austere as a religion for the masses. The trouble is, I can't see the Abrahamic faiths working very well as a substrate.

Tell that to Kerouac, who was both a devout Catholic and a practicing Buddhist.
 
I have vague memories of Buddhism being described as an "Atheist Religion" and/or a "Science", but that may just be me misremembering a Wikipedia page or two.
 
Tell that to Kerouac, who was both a devout Catholic and a practicing Buddhist.

Oh, I think it works very well for individuals but Kerouac isn't exactly the masses. For it to work on a mass level you're going to have to get the church hierarchies to buy into the idea.
 
I have a friend who converted to Buddhism and I live on the east coast (so does she). Buddhism is totally going to be the new National Religion of the USA. :D A close second will be atheist. :rolleyes:
 

katchen

Banned
I think that for this to work, Buddhism would have to penetrate British (or at least British Colonial) consciousness during the 18th Century -Age of Reason. And this is where a Scottish discovery of the Darien-Truando 2 mile portage to the Pacific Ocean would be very helpful. If the British took over a Darien Colony that posessed the Central Passage into the Pacific Ocean and HELD IT AGAINST THE SPANISH (which in the 1700s, they certainly could), quite possibly turning it into a ship canal by the 1730s, though there IS a lot of digging there, I've read. we would see regular British sea traffic directly across the Pacific to East and Southeast Asia--Buddhist Asia--and a set of British colonies on the Pacific Coast to complement those on the Atlantic Coast. And quite possibly, British breaking down the seclusion wall of Japan early on in the 18th Century and more trade with China and Chinese and Japanese travelling across the Pacific to the British colonies and to the Atlantic colonies as well. That could bring Buddhism to America's shores early on.
 
I think that for this to work, Buddhism would have to penetrate British (or at least British Colonial) consciousness during the 18th Century -Age of Reason.
I don't think this would be incompatible with the various Buddhist Christianities outlined here-in fact, it could well strenghten it with the more Enlightenment-oriented converts being more interested in it as a naturalistic philosophy while more traditionally religious sorts absorb it as a syncretism of their specific faiths, especially among Hasidic Jews and certain strains of less austere Christianity like Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. One could even postulate a sort of syncretic Monotheist Buddhism based in Abrahamic faiths with the Fall taken as God's occasion to institute the earthly incarnation of Buddhas as beings to teach men how to end earthly suffering with Jesus being analogized to Guanyin(complete with paintings of the Ascension showing the angels holding a lotus flower rather than a mandorla around Jesus) and with God's various revelations to humankind simply being different means of teaching the Dharma in the manner most appropriate to any given audience.
 
Well do they count all the various christian sects as just "christian" ITTL? Because combining that with lessened or poorly enforced restrictions on Asian immigration can likely lead to a much higher percentage of the population being Budhist. Otherwise though Catholicism will always win the number two spot.
Number two? Why would you throw all the protestants together and count the catholics separately? The protestant denominations are a pretty heterogeneous bunch, and if you separate people by denomination, catholicism outnumbers the rest by quite a lot.
 
Number two? Why would you throw all the protestants together and count the catholics separately? The protestant denominations are a pretty heterogeneous bunch, and if you separate people by denomination, catholicism outnumbers the rest by quite a lot.

Yeah that was a mistake, catholicism wins a distinct plurality in this scenario.
 
Buddhism works best when it has a local folk religion to serve as an add-on pack to e.g. Hinduism in India during the Buddhist period, Hinduism and local folk religions in SE Asia, Chinese folk religion in China, Shinto in Japan. Buddhism taken by itself tends to be very, very austere as a religion for the masses. The trouble is, I can't see the Abrahamic faiths working very well as a substrate.

Buddhism taken by itself tends to be very, very austere as a religion for the masses.
What I read into this statement is reference to the idea that everyone is answerable for their own karma, no one can rescue you, and the ways to attain salvation are ascetic and your life isn't fun anyway. It's not much of an opiate, and you are probably going to keep being reborn for a long time.

But on the other hand, I thought it was devotional forms of Mahayana Buddhism that seek intervention by bodhisattvas, like especially Pure Land Buddhism, that were in fact the most popular kind of Buddhism now, and that's a kind that's not very onerous for common people.
 
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What I read into this is statement is reference to the idea that everyone is answerable for their own karma, no one can rescue you, and the ways to attain salvation are ascetic and your life isn't fun anyway. It's not much of an opiate, and you are probably going to keep being reborn for a long time.

But on the other hand, I thought it was devotional forms of Mahayana Buddhism that seek intervention by bodhisattvas, like especially Pure Land Buddhism, that were in fact the most popular kind of Buddhism now, and that's a kind that's not very onerous for common people.

Yup- but even beyond that Buddhism had to very drastically modify itself in many ways e.g. through contorting itself to accomodate the chinese value of filial piety which doesn't really square with the buddhist ideal of rejecting the world.
 
Buddhism works best when it has a local folk religion to serve as an add-on pack to e.g. Hinduism in India during the Buddhist period, Hinduism and local folk religions in SE Asia, Chinese folk religion in China, Shinto in Japan. Buddhism taken by itself tends to be very, very austere as a religion for the masses. The trouble is, I can't see the Abrahamic faiths working very well as a substrate.

I have vague memories of Buddhism being described as an "Atheist Religion" and/or a "Science", but that may just be me misremembering a Wikipedia page or two.
FWIW, both Buddhist hospital chaplain colleagues of my wife's are atheist. My mind boggles a bit at the concept of an atheist chaplain, but there you go. They find Dharma and Karma quite sufficient without any Deity, as I understand it. They're even from massively different schools, namely Zen (part of the Mahayana stream) and the other Theravada.

So, yes, it can be an Atheist Religion. Science, no, as you can't disprove hypotheses, but it certainly is a Philosophy.
 
As a Buddhist, I will say that at its core, Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion, which is the reason why it has been adopted as numerous syncretic forms across East and Southeast Asia. That being said, though, there are several main reasons why Buddhism tends to be incompatible with Christianity and Western philosophy in general.

The biggest one is the difference between nirvana and salvation, as the former emphasizes eventually reaching a state of "nothingness," while the latter involves conducting morally beneficial physical or mental deeds in order to eventually ascend to heaven. Granted, both are oversimplifications, but it should highlight the fact that one of them essentially involves gradually cutting off ties with society, and the other concerns forming beneficial links with society, although the rules are significantly modified for laypeople.

The other significant issue is how each belief views life, as Christianity tends to have a linear outlook from life to death, while Buddhism has a circular view, as reincarnation theoretically occurs over and over again until reaching another plane of existence. This is also why karma is often viewed in the Western world as a short-term experience, while within Buddhism, it tends to be considered as an innate existence which spans multiple lifetimes. The latter also discusses multiple planes of existence, each spanning more than trillions of years and various cycles, although this is too complicated to discuss in detail here. In addition, the Bible and the sutras have been developed and revised various times by various sects within different regions and countries for millennia, meaning that their contents must be rearranged significantly in order to be compatible with each other.
 
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