Immigrant Buddhism in Switzerland: Thai and Vietnamese Temples

Research by Martin Baumann
The Pluralism Project, Harvard University

Buddhism in Switzerland was only able to gain a firm foothold since the 1980s . Though earlier developments date back to 1910 with German-born monk Nyanatiloka striving to establish Theravada Buddhism in Switzerland, and to Max Ladner and his circle during the 1940s and 1950s in Zurich, lasting organisations and institutions came about only later. As in other western countries, Buddhism is constituted by a variety of traditions, schools, orders and transnational organisations. Current estimates reckon the figure of migrant or Asian Buddhists to be about 17,000 to 20,000 people whereas western convert Buddhists may number up to 3,000 to 5,000 people. Numerically, Thai people, many of them women married to a Swiss husband, are strongest, totalling up to some 9,000 people. Vietnamese people, the majority of them Buddhists, number about 5,000 people. Tibetan people were invited to come during the 1960s and 1970s, they number about 2,400 people. Furthermore, some hundred Chinese and Taiwanese as well as Korean and Japanese people stay in Switzerland.

The pictures provide impressions from the purpose-built Thai temple and monastery in Gretzenbach (NW Switzerland) and from the Chua Phat temple of Vietnamese Buddhists, situated in an ordinary middle-class house in the outskirts of Lucerne (central Switzerland).

For more information, please see the Wat Srinagarindravararam's websites at http://www.wat-thai.ch/ or at http://www.wat-srinagarin.com/

Information on the various convert and migrant Buddhist traditions, centers and groups in Switzerland is given at the Swiss Buddhist Union's website at http://www.sbu.net

More information about the history and state of affairs of Buddhism in Switzerland is given in the online article "Buddhism in Switzerland" by Martin Baumann, Journal of Global Buddhism, 1, 2000, 154-159 (www.globalbuddhism.org/1/baumann001.pdf).

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