Buddhism in Boston

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The history of Buddhism in Boston begins in the nineteenth century with the first Chinese presence in the city. In 1870, approximately 150 Chinese workers came to Massachusetts, where they were hired to take the place of striking shoe factory workers in North Adams. In 1875, some of the workers moved to Boston to work on building the Pearl Street Telephone Exchange. The streets where they lived eventually became a part of what is now Chinatown. A backlash against the Chinese workers began in the 1870s and generated the rhetoric that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a ban that suspended Chinese immigration to the United States for over 60 years. The exclusion policy was reaffirmed and expanded to include other Asian immigrants with the Immigration Act of 1924. The Chinese population came to a standstill and many Chinese workers, unable to afford the return to China, were stranded thousands of miles from their families. From 1920 to 1950, the population of Boston’s Chinatown only grew from 1,000 to 1,600. Nevertheless, the Chinese established a number of community organizations during this time, including the area’s first Buddhist temples, which consisted of small home altars and family shrines.

Simultaneously, in the mid-1800s many individuals within intellectual and literary circles of the transcendentalist movement gained interest in Buddhism. Henry David Thoreau translated part of the Lotus Sutra, an important Mahayana Buddhist text, from French into English. Sir Edwin Arnold published a very successful rendition of the life of the Buddha, The Light of Asia, which became the first Buddhist bestseller in the United States. In 1882, several Boston intellectuals, including Edward Morse, Ernest Fenollosa, and William Sturgis Bigelow, traveled to Japan, cultivating a deep interest in Buddhism. In 1885, both Fenollosa and Bigelow received the Five Precepts – the formal initiation into Buddhist lay life, practice, and ethics.

Both Fenollosa and Bigelow, sometimes called the “Boston Buddhists,” greatly contributed to the intellectual and spiritual encounter of the West with the Buddhist tradition. In 1892, Fenollosa read a poem at Harvard University called “East and West” in which he imagined the harmonious blending of Eastern spirituality with Western science. In 1908, Bigelow was appointed Lecturer in Buddhist Doctrine at Harvard. He delivered the Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard Divinity School on “Buddhism and Immortality.” In his bequest, Bigelow left a fund to Harvard University for the advancement of Buddhist studies, stipulating, “I feel strongly the more Buddhism is taught at Harvard the better.” In the early 1900s, the growing intellectual interest in Buddhism at Harvard brought many Buddhist professors and teachers to the Boston area. In 1959, a professorship in Buddhist studies was established, and in the 1980s, a visiting Numata Professorship was established to bring distinguished professors of Buddhist studies to Harvard on a yearly basis.