A Brief History of UK Buddhism
The earliest Buddhist influence on Britain came through its imperial connections with South-East Asia, and as a result the early connections were with the Theravada traditions of Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. To start with, 150 years ago, this response was primarily scholarly, and a tradition of study grew up that eventually resulted in the foundation of the Pali Text Society, which undertook the huge task of translating the Pali Canon of Buddhist texts into English. The Buddha himself became well known as a moral and spiritual hero with the publication in 1879 of Sir Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia. Alongside this came the start of interest in Buddhism as a path of practice. This was pioneered by the Theosophists, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, and in 1880 they became the first Westerners to receive the refuges and precepts, the ceremony by which one traditionally becomes a Buddhist.
Through the early twentieth century the Theosophical and Theravadin influences continued, particularly with the foundation in 1924 of London’s Buddhist Society. A slow trickle of westerners travelled to Asia to take monastic ordination, mainly as Theravadin monks; and a few Asian monks came to live in Britain.
The rate of growth was slow but steady through the century, and the 1950s saw the development of interest in Zen Buddhism. However, it was not until the 1960s that the trickle of people returning to the West became a flood. In 1967 an Englishman who had spent 20 years in the east as a Theravadin monk founded the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, the first home-grown Buddhist movement. He was followed by other westerners who had studied in the East, and by Eastern teachers, particularly refugee Tibetan Lamas, and under the influence of these teachers a large and diverse British Buddhist world has emerged. In the mid 1990s academic researchers estimated that there were between 30,000 and 50,000 British people who had become Buddhists, and a large but indeterminate number who felt a significant connection with Buddhism. In addition there were around 100,000 people of Asian origin who practised Buddhism within the context of their ethnic community.