The case-studies are of two of the largest Western convert Buddhist movements in the UK—the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) and Soka Gakkai International-UK (SGI-UK)—and focus on their branches in the multicultural inner-city location of East London. The findings suggest that most Buddhists of colour in these movements come from the second generation of the diaspora.

For the FWBO, there is an apparently hegemonic discourse of middle-class whiteness that people of colour and working class members of this movement have to negotiate as part of their involvement. In contrast, for SGI-UK, the ethos is one of a moral cosmopolitanism that encourages intercultural dialogue thus facilitating the involvement of a considerably more multicultural and international following.

People of colour find that their practices of the techniques of the self provided by each movement enable them to feel more empowered in relation to their quotidian experience of racisms and racialisation, as well as encouraging them in a more anti-essentialist approach to identity that sees it as fluid and contingent.

We had decided to sell up and establish a forest monastery somewhere in the countryside.

How the first, Thai forest monastery came to be established in England.

… although they were wedded to scientific worldviews, science was not seen as offering meaning to them. Buddhism gave them what they needed, offering a scientifically-compatible ethical framework which they could draw upon in their day-to-day decision-making.

A deep, ethnographic study of young adult Buddhists in Britain.

The Lord Buddha bestowed the Sāsana impartially to all human beings. [Buddhism] can become the wealth of people at each and every level depending on the interest they take in it.

A dozen transcribed Dhamma talks delivered during Luangta Mahabua’s June 1974 trip to London.

… the boundary between colonizer and colonized always is dangerously and excitingly permeable

My interest is in the fact that the young Rudyard Kipling’s first exposure to Buddhism was in London, not India or Tibet or Japan; that he wrote the novel Kim for the most part from Rottingdean in Sussex; that most of the textual sources on which he drew were written and published in England, not Asia. My focus is upon the textualized Buddhism fashioned by Englishmen

[which] was, as Max Müller once labeled it, a form of madness, but the madness was not, as he intended, among Buddhists; it was the madness of Westerners confronted with concepts and doctrines so utterly incommensurable with their most cherished ideals that they could not be assimilated.

My analysis begins from the publications of comparative religion starting in the 1850s and 1860s, incorporates the lively dialogue about Buddhism that occurred in the periodical literature soon thereafter, and then focuses on the works of fiction, poetry, religion, and philosophy that emerged especially in the 1870s to the 1890s.

Dhammaloka’s life is a window into the relationships at the heart of empire, a glimpse into alternative possibilities of the struggle against colonialism. It is a way of thinking about the meaning of “Buddhism” at the start of its modern globalization. It is also, of course, a remarkable tale

The biography of a turn-of-the-century, plebeian agitator against the British colonial establishment and one of the first, Western monks.

You can hear an interview with Alicia Turner talking about the book on the New Books Network.

Tudong in Britain had begun.

An account of Ajahn Amaro’s months-long walk across England in the summer of 1982.