page_title: Buddhism in the West
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Buddhism in the West / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: The Elephant Gate leads to Das Buddhistische Haus, Berlin Frohnau; Vesak festival flags are present
context_page_description: Buddhism in the West broadly encompasses the knowledge and practice of Buddhism outside of Asia in the Western world. Occasional intersections between Western civilization and the Buddhist world have been occurring for thousands of years. The first Westerners to become Buddhists were Greeks who settled in Bactria and India during the Hellenistic period. They became influential figures during the reigns of the Indo-Greek kings, whose patronage of Buddhism led to the emergence of Greco-Buddhism and Greco-Buddhist art. There was little contact between the Western and Buddhist cultures during most of the Middle Ages but the early modern rise of global trade and mercantilism, improved navigation technology and the European colonization of Asian Buddhist countries led to increased knowledge of Buddhism among Westerners. This increased contact led to various responses from Buddhists and Westerners throughout the modern era. These include religious proselytism, religious polemics and debates, Buddhist modernism, Western convert Buddhists and the rise of Buddhist studies in Western academia.
context_section_description: The 20th century also saw other influential Western converts such as the Irish ex-hobo U Dhammaloka and intellectuals such as Bhikkhu Asoka (H. Gordon Douglas), and Ananda Metteyya. U Dhammaloka became a popular traveling Buddhist preacher in Burma in the early 1900s, writing tracts and confronting Christian missionaries. In 1907 he founded the Buddhist Tract Society in Rangoon to distribute pro Buddhist texts as well as other works such as Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Age of Reason. Another influential figure was Charles Henry Allan Bennett (later Ananda Metteyya), who established the first Buddhist Mission in the United Kingdom, the International Buddhist Society and worked on a periodical called Buddhism: An Illustrated Review as well as two books on Buddhism (The Wisdom of the Aryas and The Religion of Burma). The Buddhist Society, London (originally known as the Buddhist Lodge) was founded by Theosophist and convert to Buddhism Christmas Humphreys in 1924. Anagarika Dharmapala also brought his Maha Bodhi Society to England in 1925.
  Some of the earliest European institutions were also founded in Germany. In 1921, Georg Grimm (1868 –1945) joined Karl Seidenstücker in founding the Buddhist Parish for Germany in Munich. In 1924, Das Buddhistische Haus, was founded by Paul Dahlke in Berlin. Dahlke had studied Buddhism in Sri Lanka prior to World War I. Meanwhile, in France, Grace Constant Lounsbery (1876 –1964) founded a Paris-based group called Les amis du Bouddhisme in 1929 who published a journal, La pensée bouddhique.
  The first Buddhist monastery in Europe was not founded by European converts however, but by Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists of the Tibetan Gelug school led by Agvan Dorzhiev, who founded a temple in Saint Petersburg in 1909–15, Datsan Gunzechoinei. This temple was desecrated during the Russian resolution however, but survived the second world war and is now active.
  Throughout the 20th century, the Pali text society continued to be an influential publisher of Buddhist texts, by 1930 all the five Pali Nikayas had been published by the society (and numerous translations were also published). Buddhist studies also made numerous strides during the 20th century, headed by European academies and seen as comprising three "schools" during this period. Important figures include the scholars of the "Franco-Belgian school", such as Louis de La Vallée-Poussin and his student Étienne Lamotte, the Pali-based Anglo-German school which included figures such as Wilhelm Geiger and Caroline Rhys Davids and the "Leningrad school" of Fyodor Shcherbatskoy and Sergey Oldenburg.
  Various Western converts during this period became influential figures through their Theravada Buddhist translations and writings, including the German monk Nyanatiloka Thera who founded the Island Hermitage in Sri Lanka and translated many important Pali texts into German. His disciple, the elder Nyanaponika, was a co-founder and president of the Buddhist Publication Society and author of the influential book on meditation, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. The English Ñāṇamoli Bhikkhu was another influential author associated with the Island Hermitage, known for his numerous translations of Pali texts into English. In 1954, Nyanatiloka and Nyanaponika were the only two Western-born monks invited to participate in the Sixth Buddhist council in Yangon, Burma. Nyanaponika read out Nyanatiloka's message at the opening of the council.
  During the 20th century, there was an exponential increase in publications on Buddhism. The first English translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead was published in 1927, by Walter Evans-Wentz. He credited himself as the compiler and editor of these volumes, with translation by Tibetan Buddhists, primarily Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup. The reprint of 1935 carried a commentary from Carl Jung. The book is said to have attracted many westerners to Tibetan Buddhism. Also published in English in 1927, Alexandra David-Néel's "My Journey to Lhasa" helped popularized the modern perception of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism at large. During the
caption: Das Buddhistische Haus, a Theravada Buddhist vihara in Berlin, Germany completed in 1924. It is considered the oldest Theravada Buddhist center in Europe.[48]
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