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When I was reading this, it was explaining the movement of the Zen Buddhist and how it was established in different places at different times. As time passed, Buddhism began to spread a lot during the late 1900's.

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Throughout the late 20th century, the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana streams of Buddhism grew rapidly in the United States. American and Asian Buddhists built institutions and communities of practice spanning multiple generations.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Zen Buddhist movement began to establish centers and develop a more rooted community life. The San Francisco Zen Center (Shunryu Suzuki-roshi) was established in 1961, the Cimarron Zen Center in Los Angeles (Joshu Sasaki) in 1966, the Rochester Zen Center (Philip Kapleau) in 1966, the New York Zen Studies Society (Eido Tai Shimano-roshi) in 1968, Shasta Abbey in Northern California (Jiyu Kennett) in 1970, and the Zen Center of Los Angeles (Taizan Maezumi-roshi) in 1971. Many of these centers developed corresponding mountain retreats and became significant practice centers where longer-term Zen training could take place.

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition in the United States dates to the late 1950s, when Ngawang Wangyal opened a Buddhist monastery in Washington, New Jersey to serve the Kalmyk immigrant community. Tibetan Buddhism spread further in the 1970s, with the arrival of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche of the Karma Kagyu lineage. Trungpa developed an approach that fused Tibetan Buddhist thought with practical pop psychology that appealed to young American professionals of the time. The first Tibetan Dharmadhatu centers were founded in rural Barnet, Vermont and in Boulder, Colorado and a network, united by the Vajradhatu organization, grew to include dozens of centers in every part of the country. Tarthang Tulku of the Nyingma lineage began the Nyingma Meditation Center in Berkeley in the 1970s. Within two decades there were centers of virtually every Tibetan monastic lineage in the United States-the Sakya centers in Silver Spring, Maryland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gelugpa centers in Washington, New Jersey and Ithaca, New York.

Interest in Tibetan Buddhism exploded in the 1990s. The tradition has an active support network of student organizations on college campuses, refugee and convert practitioners in temples, and prominent celebrity devotees like Richard Gere and Orland Bloom. With dozens of books, numerous speaking engagements, and diplomatic visits with American presidents, the Dalai Lama has raised the profile of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States in the last three decades.

Finally, the vipassana or "insight meditation" of the Southeast Asian Theravada tradition also began to take root in the United States. The 1960s and 1970s found many young Americans in India and Thailand undertaking the serious practice of Buddhist meditation with some of the leading meditation masters of the Theravada tradition. Joseph Goldstein, a graduate of Columbia University, went to Thailand with the Peace Corps in 1962 and stayed to study vipassana in Bodh Gaya, India with Anagarika Munindra, a student of the Burmese master Mahasi Sayadaw. Jack Kornfield studied with the forest monk Achaan Chaa in Thailand. The two met during the first year of the Naropa Institute's summer school in 1974, in Boulder, Colorado and began teaching together. In 1976, a group of vipassana practitioners bought a large Catholic monastic house in rural Barre, Massachusetts, and created the first major Theravada retreat center in America, the Insight Meditation Society. In 1985, Jack Kornfield and others on the West Coast started Insight Meditation West and began the Spirit Rock Center in Marin County, California. Today there are dozens of vipassana meditation centers across the United States, large and small.

Central to all three of these streams of Buddhism is the emphasis on Buddhist practice. While Buddhism had been understood and received sympathetically by readers of D.T. Suzuki and other popular writers, it was not until the 1970s that Euro-American Buddhism focused intently on the discipline of meditation practice and began to build the communities and centers to sustain such practice. In 1988, when the first edition of Dom Morreale's Buddhist America: Centers, Retreats, Practices was published, it included descriptions of 148 Mahayana centers offering instruction in some form of Zen practice; 67 Theravada centers with vipassana meditation practice; and 160 Tibetan or Vajrayana centers.

Not surprisingly by the end of the 1980s, there emerged a number of American-born and American-trained students of Buddhist teachers who received Dharma transmission and who can be said to be "second-generation teachers." As centuries-long Asian lineages were passed for the first time to Americans, these teachers came to represent the first step in truly indigenizing and "Americanizing" Buddhism.

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Throughout the late 20th century, the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana streams of Buddhism grew rapidly in the United States. American and Asian Buddhists built institutions and communities of practice spanning multiple generations.

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This article explains that as Buddhism was spreading, the lineage of the Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche arrived and fused pop psychology with Tibetan Buddhism to try to appeal to younger American professionals. I assumed he had tried to do that because he wanted to spread the religion of Buddhism all over the country. After some time, there were lots of Dharmadhatu centers.

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"The 1960s and 1970s found many young Americans in India and Thailand undertaking the serious practice of Buddhist meditation with some of the leading meditation masters of the Theravada tradition."

I find this to be interesting because as an American myself, I feel like it would be hard to practice since this is a practice where you have to be in the present moment. I try to be in the present moment, but it always leads to me being worried about the future. Another thing is also understanding the rising and passing away of all things. But to me, death is a hard concept for me to grasp.

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I had read another article relating to Buddhism in the US and as I read, an American Essayist and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, said he had translated the Lotus Sutra from French into English. In it, he wrote "I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing."

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On the East Coast, interest in Buddhism rose in the 1870s through the influence of prominent figures like Henry David Thoreau and H.P. Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Steel Olcott. Many of these East Coast Buddhists drew spiritual inspiration from what they considered "exotic" or "ancient" Buddhist texts and ideas.

Meanwhile on the East Coast, Buddhist ideas sparked an intellectual conversation among a number of Euro-Americans. In the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau is said to have translated part of the Lotus Sutra from French into English. His regard for the Buddha is evident in his essay "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac," where Thoreau writes: "I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing..." In the 1870s, Edwin Arnold's famous rendition of the life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, crossed the Atlantic and became the first Buddhist bestseller in America.

Quite a number of intellectuals and spiritually-minded people took a keen interest in Buddhism in the late 19th century. Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, along with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founded what they called the Theosophical Society in 1875, "to study ancient and modern religions, philosophies and sciences, and to investigate the unexplained laws of Nature and the psychical powers latent in man." It was an eclectic band of New Yorkers, with interests in everything from the mysteries of ancient Egypt and Greece to the religions of the East.

In 1878, Olcott and Blavatsky went to India and then to Sri Lanka, where both of them took the five lay precepts of Buddhism-perhaps the first Americans to do so. While Blavatsky had a wider taste for the occult in general, Olcott persevered as a student of Buddhism, speaking widely in Asia and the West. Seeing how little Buddhists knew of one another in Asia, he became especially concerned about pan-Buddhist unity, eventually drafting a Buddhist Catechism in an attempt to articulate what he thought to be the clear, basic principles of Buddhism, and designing a six-colored Buddhist flag.

Paul Carus, a German immigrant and freethinker, was also attracted to Buddhism, primarily because to his mind it could be understood rationally and in terms compatible with science. He edited The Open Court, a journal which pioneered in investigating religion and science. His book The Gospel of Buddhism, published in 1894, compiled passages from various Buddhist scriptures in a single accessible volume. By 1910, this sympathetic and compelling portrait of the tradition was in its 13th edition. A young Japanese student, D.T. Suzuki, translated the book into Japanese and subsequently came to work with Carus in Illinois. Suzuki worked in the late 1890s translating the Daodejing and stayed in the United States until 1908-an invaluable period of education for the man who was to become the premier translator of the Zen tradition into the language of Western thought.

Finally, there were those attracted initially to the aesthetic dimensions of what seemed to be "exotic" Buddhist culture and art, especially that of Japan and Tibet. In the 1880s, Bostonians William Sturgis Bigelow and Ernest Fenollosa spent years in Japan, cultivating a deep appreciation of both Buddhism and Japanese art. Fenollosa was the tireless art collector, Bigelow the cultured financier. Bigelow had been a doctor at Harvard Medical School, but his soul was seized by Japan and its arts, and especially by Buddhism. In 1885, both Fenollosa and Bigelow received the precepts and were formally initiated into Buddhist life, ethics, and practice, at Homyoin Temple on Lake Biwa in Japan.

In the late 1880s quite a number of Bostonians-including Isabella Stuart Gardner, whose home later became a museum, the writer Henry Adams, the artist John LaFarge, and Bishop Phillips Brooks of Trinity Church-came to know Japan and gain some insight into Buddhism through the hospitality of Fenollosa and Bigelow. In 1890, when both Bigelow and Fenollosa returned to Boston, much of the Japanese art they had collected became the core of the Museum of Fine Arts Far Eastern collection, and Fenollosa became its first curator. In 1904, Okakura Kakuzo, who had worked with Fenollosa in Japan, became assistant curator of the collection. Okakura wrote The Book of Tea, a widely celebrated appreciation and interpretation of the Japanese tea ceremony and its aesthetic.

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On the East Coast, interest in Buddhism rose in the 1870s through the influence of prominent figures like Henry David Thoreau and H.P. Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Steel Olcott. Many of these East Coast Buddhists drew spiritual inspiration from what they considered "exotic" or "ancient" Buddhist texts and ideas.

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When he had written that, before I had read past that, I really liked what he had said. He knew that some people wouldn't like what he had said, but said it anyway. I grew up in somewhat of a toxic religious household and ever since I was a kid, my mom had told me that being Christian was the only correct religion and that all other reiligions were sinful since they didn't obey "the one true God". For a while, I had believed that Christianity was the only religion that would send you to heaven and I tried to convert my friends who were any other religion or atheist to have them be Christian.

It was until I had reached around 8th grade, that the other religions weren't wrong or sinful. People just had other beliefs. The friends I had in middle school had filled me in on things I didn't know and taught me surface level things about their religions. That's when I had started to be more open about religion.

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But since I grew up in a household where my mom would only fill my head saying that being Christian is the only way, I ended up becoming more open in learning about other religions since she was pushing the Christianity onto me so hard. My beliefs on religion became conflicted when I had also realized that my mom was solely Christian, but my mom's side of the family was fully Buddhist, along with my grandparents on my dad's side. But my dad's siblings were all atheist.

Whenever I was around my mom's side of the family in Korea, we would be visiting the temple they went to every other day, and I'd be so interested that I would join them. My mom's side of the family never really talked about their religion, but I was aware of how religious they were. My mom on the other hand who was heavily religious and incredibly reliant on the Bible, had always tried to bring up God or Christianity into a conversation whenever she could. It got to a point where I started to favor Buddhism a lot more, not really knowing much of it, but started to really feel negative feelings towards my mom's religion.

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However, as I grew older, during the summer of 9th grade, I realized that due to so many things heard between specifically Christianity, but also Buddhism, it became too conflicting and had converted to Atheism. I hadn't told anyone since my brothers and my mom's side of the family wouldn't agree at all. But when I did tell them, they were disappointed, but still told me that they had loved me. To this day, my mom is still trying to make me convert back to Christianity.

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Relation between course articles and chosen article

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Relation between course articles and chosen article

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As I was reading Buddhism in the United States in the textbook, it brought up a few similar points in the passages I've read. One of the few points it brought up was Henry David Thoreau. In the textbook, it mentioned how he compared "their Christ" to "my Buddha"

In the textbook, it mentioned a bit about immigration from Asia. As the White converts were learning about Buddhism, all the immigrants from Asia started to define what Buddhism was on their own. The Chinese came to the US from Asia and they had brought their religion with them leading to them building their first Chinese temple, combining multiple influences.

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Buddhism in the US in relation to the Birth of Gautama

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Buddhism in the US in relation to the Birth of Gautama

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Based on the article I had read, (Building "American Buddhism") American Buddhism is correlated to Gautama's birth since the Buddhist teachings started with him. It first started in Asia, and it still continues to spread throughout the West. His teachings shows the flexibility of the Buddhist principles.

They also showed that his teachings were the foundational inspiration for all types of Buddhism, including American Buddhism. But for American Buddhism, they used those to make them fit their cultural context in the US.

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"After his enlightenment, he is called the Buddha. " the enlightened one", and addressed as Bhagavan "the Lord.", Buddha, when speaking of himself..." (pg. 72, Beth Wright)

This quote from the course reading would symbolize the start of his spiritual journey and how it shows his adaptability, allowing it to flourish in many different settings, including the US

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I did the first draft of my work, but then used Grammarly AI to make suggestions.

I fixed grammar and spelling with the use of Grammarly AI.