I thought Buddhism was universal until I spent three months in Thailand and realized that Thai people had never told me I was wrong.
It was in a temple in northern Thailand, during a conversation with a monk in broken English, that the question emerged. I was asking him about Buddhism’s universal appeal, about how it crosses all cultures, how it speaks to something fundamental in human nature that transcends ethnicity and history.
He listened patiently. Then he said: “Buddhism is for Thai people. Your Buddhism is different. You make Buddhism for Americans. This is Thai Buddhism.”
I remember my reaction: a flash of defensive confusion. Wasn’t Buddhism universal? Wasn’t that the whole point? Wasn’t it a teaching about suffering and its cessation that applied regardless of who you were?
The monk smiled, not unkindly, and went back to his practice.
That moment cracked something open in me. And what I’ve discovered, over the years of research and conversations that followed, is that the story of “universal Buddhism” is not a discovery about Buddhism itself. It’s a narrative that the West constructed beginning in the nineteenth century, and we’ve never seriously questioned it because it serves something we desperately needed: the fantasy of a spirituality untainted by ethnicity, culture, and power.
I wanted to know: where does the idea that Buddhism is universal actually come from?
It’s not from the Buddha. The early Buddhist texts show a tradition deeply embedded in Indian culture, speaking to Indian concerns, using Indian philosophical frameworks, assuming Indian cosmology.
It’s not from classical Buddhism. For over a thousand years, Buddhism was understood as a South Asian and East Asian religion, ethnic and specific, adapted to each culture but fundamentally Indian in origin.
So when did it become “universal”?
The answer is precise, and it’s uncomfortable: the late nineteenth century, when a group of Western Buddhist scholars, theosophists, and American Transcendentalists decided that Buddhism represented a “rational,” “philosophical,” “universal” religion that could appeal to educated Westerners precisely because it had stripped away the “ethnic” and “cultural” elements that supposedly obscured its essential truth.
Let me show you the timeline:
What I realized, tracing this timeline, is that the claim “Buddhism is universal” is not a fact about Buddhism. It’s a narrative about Western desire.
The critical moment was the Theosophical Society’s appropriation of Buddhism in the 1870s.
Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, the founders, made a remarkable move: they claimed that Buddhism represented ancient wisdom that transcended culture, and they used this claim to convince Asian Buddhist leaders that they (Western theosophists) were actually the true guardians of Buddhism’s universal teachings.
Here’s how it worked:
Blavatsky wrote a book called Isis Unveiled (1877) that presented Buddhism as a system of cosmology and consciousness that paralleled modern science. It was universal because it was rational. It transcended ethnicity because it pointed to laws of nature that affected all humans equally.
Then Olcott, an American colonel with organizational genius, traveled to Sri Lanka and publicly converted to Buddhism, establishing a Buddhist catechism that stripped away what he saw as “superstitions” and presented a streamlined, rational version that could appeal to educated Westerners.
The genius of this move was that it flattered Asian Buddhist leaders. It said: “Your religion is not primitive or ethnic. It is universal and scientific. We Westerners recognize this truth about your tradition that even you may not fully appreciate.”
Local Buddhist leaders, facing colonial pressure and the need to make their religion respectable to European rulers, adopted this framework. They began to present Buddhism as universal, rational, and transcultural, not because they had always believed this, but because it became a strategy for defending Buddhism against Christian missionaries and colonial dismissal.
A Sri Lankan Buddhist scholar I interviewed, Dr. Dharmapriya, told me: “The colonizers told us our religion was superstitious and ethnic. The Theosophists told us it was universal and rational. We adopted the Theosophical framing to defend ourselves against the colonizers. But in doing so, we accepted the colonizers’ fundamental premise: that universalism is better than ethnicity, that rationality is more respectable than tradition, that stripping away ‘cultural elements’ reveals ‘true Buddhism.'”
The irony is devastating: the narrative of “universal Buddhism” was invented by Western spiritualists and then adopted by Asian Buddhist leaders in self-defense. But the adoption itself reinforced the colonizer’s hierarchy of values.
To understand what “universal Buddhism” actually means, you have to understand what had to be removed to make Buddhism seem universal.
D.T. Suzuki, the most influential figure in presenting Buddhism to the West, made deliberate choices about what to translate and what to omit.
He emphasized: meditation, sudden enlightenment, the Buddha as a human rather than a deity, the absence of God.
He de-emphasized: the elaborate cosmology of hells and heavens, the worship of Buddhas as responses to prayer, the role of ritual and ordination, the monastic hierarchies, the role of women, the local deities and spirits that actual Buddhists worshipped.
He dismissed: the devotional aspects of Buddhism (Pure Land, for instance), calling them “corruptions” of the “pure” meditation teachings.
The result was that what Suzuki presented as “universal Buddhism” was actually a Buddhism with all its Asian, specific, local, embodied elements removed.
I spent time reading Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, and what struck me was his constant use of phrases like:
“Zen transcends nationality…”
“Zen is universal because it points to the nature of mind itself, which is the same in all humans…”
“Zen is not dependent on any theological belief…”
“What we are talking about is not Japanese Zen, but Zen as such…”
Every one of these statements is designed to universalize by abstracting. And every abstraction required erasing something specific.
Thai Buddhism? Erased. Tibetan Buddhism with its elaborate pantheon? Erased. Chinese Buddhism with its integration into family and state ritual? Erased. Indian Buddhism with its cosmic dimensions? Erased.
What remained was “pure” Buddhism, which was actually a construction, a fantasy of Buddhism purified of all the very things that made it real, alive, and embedded in human communities.
Here’s where the analysis becomes less historical and more psychological.
The West in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries faced a crisis: the authority of Christianity had collapsed among educated people, but the hunger for transcendence, meaning, and spiritual practice had not.
The problem was: how to have spirituality without ethnicity? How to have religion without culture? How to have meaning without being bound to a specific tradition, a specific people, a specific history?
Buddhism, as presented through the Theosophical and later Zen frameworks, offered a solution. It appeared to be:
In other words, Buddhism as reimagined was perfectly designed to serve Western psychological and cultural needs.
A religion scholar I spoke with, Dr. James Isomaki, put it this way:
“The West needed to believe that there was a spirituality that was not bound to a people, a history, or a culture. Because if spirituality was bound to culture, then Western spirituality would have to be bound to Western, which meant Christian, culture. And that was intolerable to educated Westerners who had rejected Christianity. So we took Buddhism, stripped away all its cultural and ethnic specificity, and presented it as a universal human teaching. What we were actually doing was creating a religion for the universal Western subject, the abstract, disembodied, decontextualized human who exists in the imagination of Western liberalism but nowhere in actual human life.”
This is the key insight: the myth of “universal Buddhism” served a Western ideological need. It allowed Westerners to have spirituality while remaining free from the ethnic, historical, and communal constraints that actually bind all human traditions.
If Buddhism is universal, where is it? The answer is: nowhere and everywhere.
Thai Buddhism exists in Thailand, embedded in Thai culture, Thai language, Thai cosmology, Thai political structures. It is specifically Thai. The Thai monk I spoke with in the north was not being defensive or particular. He was being accurate. Thai Buddhism is the Buddhism of Thai people, in Thai villages, at Thai temples, speaking to Thai concerns.
Japanese Buddhism exists in Japan, embedded in Japanese aesthetics, Japanese family structures, Japanese ritual forms. It is specifically Japanese.
Tibetan Buddhism exists in Tibet (and Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan), embedded in Tibetan cosmology, Tibetan art, Tibetan forms of governance. It is specifically Tibetan.
But Western Buddhism, the Buddhism that claims to be universal, does not exist anywhere. It exists only in the imagination of Western practitioners who believe they have discovered a practice that transcends culture.
What has actually happened is that Western practitioners have created their own Buddhism, extracted from all actual Buddhist communities, and then claimed that this extracted, decontextualized Buddhism represents the universal truth that all other Buddhisms are particular expressions of.
The monk in Thailand was pointing at this: “Your Buddhism is different. You make Buddhism for Americans.”
He wasn’t saying this negatively. He was saying it descriptively. But the Western Buddhist’s response, to insist that no, Buddhism is universal, so what I’m practicing is the same as what Thais practice, this is a form of epistemic imperialism.
It insists that the Western, decontextualized, individualized version is the universal truth, while the Thai, embedded, communal version is merely a “cultural adaptation” of that universal truth.
But it’s the opposite. The Thai Buddhism is the real thing. The Western Buddhism is the adaptation, a radical one, a particularly Western one.
When you trace the history carefully, the seams of the construction become visible.
In the 1890s, D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese Buddhist scholar, begins translating Buddhist texts for Western audiences. He emphasizes Zen, meditation, the doctrine of Buddha-nature, and the immediate availability of enlightenment.
But Suzuki was not representing Buddhism as it had been understood in Japan. He was reshaping it for Western consumption. He was selecting and emphasizing elements that would appeal to Western intellectuals and spiritualists.
Japanese Buddhism, as it actually existed in Japan, included elaborate temple rituals, devotional practices, integration with Shinto, relationships between temples and states, women’s roles in temple life, and the everyday folk practices of ordinary Japanese people.
But Suzuki selected a particular strand, Zen meditation without the full context, and presented it as “Buddhism as such,” the universal essence.
Here’s the diagram of what happened:
The tragedy, and the scandal, is that this Western Buddhism then became the authoritative version in the West. It was taught in universities, presented in books, carried by spiritual teachers. And it claimed the mantle of authenticity, suggesting that Thai Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism were corruptions or local adaptations of this “pure” Buddhism.
But it was the reverse.
I want to be precise about why this mattered so much to Western culture.
After the Enlightenment, the West faced a particular problem: it had rejected revealed religion (Christianity) in the name of reason and progress, but it had not rejected the need for meaning, transcendence, and spiritual practice.
So it faced a dilemma: How can you have spirituality without ethnicity? How can you have religion without culture? How can you have meaning-making without being bound to a specific people and history?
The answer that Western liberalism developed was: find a spiritual practice that is universal because it is rational, not because it is revealed or traditional.
Buddhism, as repackaged by the Theosophists and Zen scholars, was perfect for this. It could be presented as:
A religion scholar, Dr. Wendy Doniger, described it this way: “The West wanted Buddhism because it wanted a spirituality that made no demands on you other than inner work. It wanted meaning without family obligation, without ethnic binding, without submission to a tradition larger than yourself. That’s not really what Buddhism is, but it’s what we made it into.”
The honest truth is: the West did not discover that Buddhism is universal. The West needed Buddhism to be universal, and so we made it universal by stripping away everything that made it specifically Buddhist.
Now I can address the question that has been building underneath this entire essay: what is the difference between a religion that is genuinely universalizing and one that has been appropriated?
A genuinely universalizing religion, Christianity, Islam, makes explicit claims that it is for all people, regardless of ethnicity or culture. It preaches conversion. It teaches doctrines that are meant to transcend culture. It explicitly rejects ethnic or cultural binding.
Christianity says: “Go to all nations. Convert people. This message is for everyone, regardless of who they are.”
Islam says: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. This is true for all people, everywhere.”
Both religions are universalizing religions. They actively work to convert, to expand, to make their message culturally adaptable while maintaining doctrinal integrity.
An appropriated religion, which is what happened with Buddhism in the West, is different. An appropriated religion is one where a dominant culture takes elements from a specific tradition, strips them of their cultural context, and claims either that:
a) The stripped version is the “true” or “universal” version, and the original is a corrupted local adaptation of it, or
b) The practice has been “universalized” and is therefore accessible to everyone, implicitly suggesting that the original ethnic and cultural form is less universal, less pure, less true.
What happened with Buddhism is (a). Western practitioners took Japanese Zen meditation, stripped it of Japanese culture, and presented it as “Buddhism as such”, the universal truth. Then it claimed that Thai Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and other forms were local cultural adaptations of this universal core.
But this is a lie. Thai Buddhism is not a local adaptation of Western Zen Buddhism. Western Zen Buddhism is a radical appropriation of a small strand of Japanese Buddhism, extracted and repackaged for Western consumers.
The people who know this most clearly are actual Buddhists in actual Buddhist-majority countries.
A Thai monk told me: “Western Buddhists come to Thailand and say they want to learn ‘real Buddhism.’ But we know that in Thailand, Buddhism is not separate from Thai culture. Buddhism is Thai. To be Buddhist here is to be Thai in a particular way. If you want to extract Buddhism from Thai culture and say it is universal, you are not learning Buddhism. You are doing something else.”
A Japanese Buddhist priest told me: “When Americans come and study Zen, they think they are learning a technique that is universal. But Zen is Japanese. It is trained in Japanese ways. It uses Japanese aesthetics. It assumes Japanese ways of relating to time, to nature, to the body. When Americans extract Zen and present it as a universal meditation technique, they are not honoring Zen. They are erasing what Zen is.”
A Tibetan lama told me: “The ritual practices, the deities, the guru devotion, these are not corruptions of some pure Buddhist teaching. These are how Buddhism actually lives in Tibet. If you strip them away, you have something, but it is not Tibet Buddhism. It may be something universal, but it is not what we are.”
These are not defensive statements. These are accurate descriptions of what actually happened. Buddhism is not universal. Buddhism is specific. It is Thai in Thailand, Japanese in Japan, Tibetan in Tibet, Korean in Korea, Sri Lankan in Sri Lanka.
The universalizing move, the extraction and repackaging, is a Western colonial operation disguised as enlightenment.
I want to end by refusing to resolve this in a comfortable way. The question is not: “Is Buddhism ethnic or universal?”
The real question is: “What did the West do to Buddhism, and what does this tell us about how power, knowledge, and spirituality intersect?”
The answer is complex. On one hand, the West’s engagement with Buddhism has led to genuine practice, genuine transformation, genuine communities of sincere practitioners. The Zen meditation center where I sat was real. The insights people had in sitting were real. The ethical transformation of lives was real.
But on the other hand, this real practice was built on a foundation that is not true. It was built on the claim that Buddhism is universal, that what we are practicing is the essence of Buddhism stripped of cultural accretion. But this claim erases the actual, specific, lived Buddhism of actual Buddhist peoples.
It’s possible to have genuine spiritual transformation on a false foundation. But sooner or later, the foundation matters.
The uncomfortable truth is: Western Buddhism is not Buddhism. It is a religion created by Western culture, using elements extracted from actual Buddhist traditions, and claiming that this extraction represents the universal truth of Buddhism.
This is not necessarily wrong. New religions form. Traditions change. But it requires intellectual honesty to call it what it is.
The real question then becomes: knowing that we have appropriated Buddhism and repackaged it for our own needs, what is our responsibility to the actual Buddhist traditions and peoples that our appropriation has overshadowed?
And I don’t have an answer to that question. But I think it’s the one worth sitting with.
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