Taking as its focus twentieth- and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels.

They portray the Buddha as a social reformer enlightened to the operation of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities. This portrayal of the Buddha allows black Buddhists to articulate a counter-narrative to hegemonic Western authority while paradoxically constructing their own romantic vision of Asia as the “Other” to the West.