[Buddha-l] Buddhism, the second largest religion in the world

[Jeff Wilson]

Hello, just a note of clarification about the numbers for the Buddhist
Churches of America, since I have seen this organization's numbers
misrepresented many times.  The BCA does not officially count
individual members, it counts member households.  Such units may hold
anywhere from one to seven or eight members.  The same is true of the
Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii, the Hawaiian counterpart to the
BCA.  This is the standard practice of most Japanese-American temples
of whatever denomination, it is derived from the regular dankadera
system of Japan.  So a count of Japanese Pure Land Buddhists in
America is very difficult even with access to the figures of the BCA
and the Hawaiian Mission.

It is made even more complicated when we realize that there are many
people who attend BCA or Hawaiian temples but never register
themselves for household membership, that there are convert-based Jodo
Shinshu groups that have loose BCA affiliation but are not counted in
the official membership tallies, and that there are some temples of
the Higashi Hongwanji sect (sister organization to the Nishi
Hongwanji, which controls BCA and Hawaiian Mission) in America and
have no national organization to count their numbers.

Counting Buddhists is on the whole about as productive as herding
cats, I tend to think.

Sincerely,
Jeff Wilson
Dept. of Religious Studies
UNC-Chapel Hill