Radical Buddhism in the West

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The history of radical Buddhism in the West differs significantly from its development in Asia. In Buddhist-majority societies such as Japan, China, Sri Lanka, and Burma, radical Buddhist movements generally emerged from within long-established Buddhist institutions as responses to colonialism, imperialism, industrialization, class conflict, or authoritarian rule. In Europe, North America, and other Western societies, by contrast, Buddhism developed primarily as a minority religion among converts, and Western radical Buddhism arose not through the transformation of existing Buddhist institutions but through the encounter between Buddhist philosophy and pre-existing currents of anarchism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism.

For the purposes of the Radical Buddhism Project, radical Buddhism refers to forms of Buddhist thought and practice that identify structural features of society, particularly capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy, as significant causes of suffering, and that therefore advocate systemic social transformation in addition to individual spiritual cultivation. This distinguishes radical Buddhism from the broader current known as engaged Buddhism, whose adherents have frequently accepted the basic framework of liberal democratic capitalism while seeking to alleviate suffering within it. The boundary between the two is analytical rather than absolute, and this article accordingly discusses several influential transitional figures whose work helped shape Western radical Buddhism without fitting neatly within the stricter definition.

Western radical Buddhism has received little scholarly attention as a coherent historical phenomenon, and this article therefore synthesizes evidence from primary writings, organizational publications, and scholarship on individual thinkers rather than relying on an established secondary literature devoted to the subject as a whole.

Buddhism in the West

Although isolated encounters between Europeans and Buddhism date to the early modern period, Buddhism did not become a significant intellectual presence in the West until the nineteenth century, through the translation of Buddhist scriptures, the emergence of Oriental studies, expanding colonial networks in Asia, and the activities of Asian Buddhist reformers such as Anagarika Dharmapala and D. T. Suzuki. The World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, marked an important turning point in Buddhism's public reception in the United States.

The modern expansion of Buddhism in Europe and North America occurred primarily after the Second World War. The Beat Generation stimulated popular interest in Zen, while the arrival of Tibetan refugees following the Chinese occupation of Tibet introduced Tibetan Buddhist traditions to growing numbers of Western practitioners. Immigration reforms in several Western countries also established Buddhist communities representing Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna traditions, so that by the late twentieth century Buddhism had become a permanent feature of the Western religious landscape, sustained by both immigrant and convert communities.

Western Buddhism subsequently diversified into several overlapping currents. The Insight Meditation movement, associated with teachers such as Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzberg, popularized meditation among a broad lay audience, while numerous Zen and Tibetan teachers established enduring institutions throughout Europe and North America. Another influential development was the emergence of secular Buddhism, associated particularly with Stephen Batchelor, which reinterprets or rejects traditional Buddhist cosmology while emphasizing meditation, ethics, and critical historical approaches to early Buddhism. Because its principal concerns lie in philosophical naturalism and personal practice rather than structural critiques of political economy, secular Buddhism as such falls outside the scope of this article, though it becomes relevant below through its intersection with radical politics in more recent work.

From the second half of the twentieth century onward, Western Buddhists became increasingly involved in questions of war, peace, social justice, and the environment. Inspired by Asian Buddhist reformers, including Thich Nhat Hanh, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, and Sulak Sivaraksa, as well as by contemporary Western social movements, engaged Buddhism emerged as one of the most visible forms of Buddhist activism in the West. Engaged Buddhism has never represented a single political position: many of its practitioners have focused on humanitarian service, peace activism, and environmental protection within existing political and economic systems, while others have argued that Buddhist ethics requires a more fundamental critique of the structures responsible for generating suffering. It is this latter, structurally critical current that constitutes the subject of the remainder of this article.

Early Foundations: Buddhist Economics and Buddhist Anarchism

The first clearly radical Buddhist currents in the West emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, as Buddhist ideas encountered the counterculture, anarchism, and increasingly systemic critiques of industrial society. Two figures dominate this early period, representing distinct trajectories: an economist who arrived at a Buddhist-inflected critique of political economy without becoming a Buddhist, and a poet-practitioner who fused Zen with an explicitly anarchist and ecological politics.

E. F. Schumacher and Buddhist Economics

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1911–1977) was a German-born British economist whose critique of industrial capitalism became an important intellectual precursor to Western radical Buddhism, even though he was never a Buddhist himself and converted to Catholicism late in life. His interest in Buddhism developed particularly during his 1955 work as a United Nations economic consultant in Burma, where he grew critical of the imposition of Western development models on societies with different social and spiritual traditions.

The resulting concept of "Buddhist economics," first articulated in an essay published in 1966 and incorporated into Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973), rejected the assumption that economic activity should aim at the indefinite expansion of production and consumption. Drawing on the Buddhist concept of right livelihood, Schumacher argued that an economic system should be judged by whether it promotes human well-being rather than by the volume of goods it produces, and he advocated sufficiency, meaningful work, decentralized production, and "appropriate" or "intermediate" technology in place of unlimited growth.

Schumacher should not be classified straightforwardly as a radical Buddhist: he did not advocate a specifically socialist or anarchist transformation of society, and his thought drew as heavily on Christianity and Gandhi as on Buddhism. He is better understood as an important precursor whose work demonstrated that Buddhist ethical concepts could be used to challenge the basic assumptions of modern political economy, and whose influence subsequently extended into ecological economics, the degrowth movement, and the appropriate-technology movement well beyond explicitly Buddhist circles.

Gary Snyder and Buddhist Anarchism

Gary Snyder (1930–2025) was an American poet associated with the Beat Generation whose 1961 essay "Buddhist Anarchism," revised and republished as "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" in his 1969 collection Earth House Hold, provides the earliest explicit argument in the West that Buddhist practice requires a fundamentally different form of society rather than individual awakening alone. Combining Zen Buddhism with anarchism, ecological thought, and indigenous and pre-industrial models of community, Snyder argued that the ignorance, craving, and suffering analyzed by Buddhism are produced and reinforced by social institutions, so that liberation could not be confined to isolated individuals.

Snyder's political language was explicitly anarchist rather than Marxist: he rejected centralized authority in favor of decentralized communities organized around ecological limits, voluntary cooperation, and direct relationships between people and their environments, framing "the coming revolution" as a transformation of consumption, technology, and human relationships with the non-human world rather than merely a change in the ownership of industrial production. His later work developed these themes through bioregionalism and deep ecology, notably in The Practice of the Wild (1990) and A Place in Space (1995), and profoundly influenced subsequent generations of Buddhist activists, including the founders of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

Institutionalizing Radical Buddhism: The Buddhist Peace Fellowship

The Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) was founded at the Maui Zendo in Hawaii in 1978 by the Zen teacher Robert Baker Aitken (1917–2010), his wife Anne Aitken, and the activist Nelson Foster, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, as a way of bringing Buddhist perspectives into the peace movement and the concerns of the peace movement into Buddhist communities. Aitken, who had trained with Japanese Zen teachers and later established the Diamond Sangha, brought to the organization a longstanding involvement in anti-war and anti-nuclear activism together with a personal commitment to anarchism. Gary Snyder and Joanna Macy were among the prominent early Western Buddhists who became associated with the Fellowship.

Although the BPF has always been ecumenical and politically diverse, and much of its work has taken the form of peace activism, prison outreach, and other forms of social service compatible with engaged rather than radical Buddhism, it has repeatedly served as an institutional space in which more structural critiques could develop. Its newsletter, first published in 1979 and subsequently developed into Turning Wheel, became an important forum for these debates, and in recent decades the organization's public discourse has increasingly framed capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and state violence as institutional manifestations of the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. The BPF's history illustrates a pattern that recurs throughout Western radical Buddhism: rather than developing as a separate movement from engaged Buddhism, radical currents have tended to emerge from within engaged Buddhist organizations as some participants pressed further structural questions.

Systematic Critiques: David Loy and Joanna Macy

By the final decades of the twentieth century, Western radical Buddhism moved beyond its early association with the counterculture toward more systematic philosophical accounts of the structural causes of suffering. Two thinkers, David Loy and Joanna Macy, were particularly important in this development, though their approaches differed considerably in emphasis.

David Loy

David R. Loy (1947–), a Zen teacher and scholar of Buddhist philosophy, developed the most sustained Buddhist critique of institutionalized greed among his generation. In The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory (1997; expanded edition 2003), Loy argued that the three poisons traditionally identified by Buddhism as the roots of individual suffering, greed, ill will, and delusion, can become embodied in social institutions themselves, producing forms of collective suffering that cannot be addressed through individual practice alone. This argument was extended in Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution (2008), which applied it to consumerism, militarism, and ecological destruction, and which Loy framed not as a call for violent overthrow but for the transformation of the institutional assumptions through which modern societies reproduce suffering. Loy generally avoids advocating a single alternative economic model, treating the transformation of institutional conditions rather than the adoption of a particular ideology as his central concern.

Joanna Macy

Joanna Macy (1929–2025) integrated Buddhist philosophy with general systems theory, ecology, and anti-nuclear activism, an approach with roots in doctoral research examining parallels between the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising and systems theory. Her central concept, the "industrial growth society," described not merely capitalist economic institutions but an entire civilizational orientation toward unlimited expansion incompatible with ecological limits, a critique she developed most fully in World as Lover, World as Self (1991). Rather than treating despair at ecological destruction as a problem to be suppressed, Macy developed practices, later known as the "Work That Reconnects," intended to convert grief and fear into capacities for collective action, aimed at what she termed the "Great Turning" toward an ecologically sustainable society. An early member of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Macy occupied an intermediate position between engaged and radical Buddhism: she rarely identified with socialist or anarchist traditions as such, but her critique of the industrial growth society went well beyond the alleviation of environmental problems within existing economic structures.

Black Radical Buddhism

A distinct and increasingly influential current of Western radical Buddhism has developed from the encounter between Buddhism and the Black radical tradition in the United States. Black Buddhist practitioners have often confronted a double marginalization, situated within predominantly white convert Buddhist institutions while also experiencing the effects of racism, mass incarceration, and other structures of racial domination in wider American society; for some thinkers within this current, these experiences have produced a form of Buddhist social thought in which individual liberation cannot be separated from struggles against racism and other forms of collective suffering.

The clearest expression of this current is Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (2016) by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah. Rather than treating racism simply as an external problem to which Buddhists should respond compassionately, the book examines how racism and unequal relations of power are reproduced within Buddhist communities themselves, and calls for a form of Dharma that transforms rather than merely diversifies existing institutions. williams had already developed an explicitly Black Buddhist perspective in Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace (2000); Owens, trained in the Kagyu Tibetan tradition, connects spiritual practice with trauma, power, and queer liberation; and Syedullah, a political theorist working on abolition and Black feminism, brings an explicitly institutional analysis of domination into dialogue with Buddhist philosophy. The book's use of "radical" to mean a willingness to address the roots of social suffering, rather than simply an unusually intense form of practice, makes it a particularly clear contemporary illustration of the distinction between engaged and radical Buddhism used throughout this article.

The scholarly literature on this current remains limited but has grown significantly with Rima Vesely-Flad's Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition (2022), which situates Black Buddhist practice explicitly within the historical Black radical tradition rather than treating it as one instance of engaged Buddhism among others, and which draws attention to the further intersection of this current with questions of gender and sexuality.

Secular, Marxist, and Philosophical Radical Buddhism

From the late twentieth century onward, a further current of Western radical Buddhism developed in increasingly explicit dialogue with secular Buddhism and academic political philosophy, asking directly whether Buddhist ethics could support socialism, Marxism, or anarchism as systematic political programs.

Mike Slott

Mike Slott, a longtime labor and political activist who became a Buddhist practitioner only around 2010, represents one of the clearest attempts to develop an explicitly radical political Buddhism from within secular Buddhism. In "Can You Be a Buddhist and a Marxist?" (2011) and "Secular, Radically-Engaged Buddhism" (2015), Slott argued that a naturalistic approach to Buddhism could be combined with a systemic conception of social suffering, and in "Engaged Buddhists Need Radical Social Theory" (2020) he argued explicitly that problems such as poverty, climate change, and racism cannot be adequately addressed without transforming the structures that produce them, while insisting that such structural transformation must be pursued together with individual psychological transformation. His most comprehensive statement, Mindful Solidarity: A Secular Buddhist Democratic Socialist Dialogue (2024), argues that secular Buddhism and democratic socialism can mutually enrich one another and that individual and social transformation must be pursued together. Slott is also active in the secular Buddhist movement as an editor of the Secular Buddhist Network, and his work is a particularly clear contemporary illustration that secularization need not entail political moderation.

Recent Philosophical Work

Several recent scholars, while requiring no extensive discussion here, have brought comparable questions into professional philosophy. Karsten J. Struhl has explored points of intersection between Buddhism and Marxism and, more recently, has developed a Buddhist ecosocialism. Graham Priest has argued for the replacement of capitalism through an explicit synthesis of Buddhist and Marxist insight in Capitalism—Its Nature and Its Replacement: Buddhist and Marxist Insights (2021). James Mark Shields, whose primary contribution is historical scholarship on Buddhist radicalism in modern Japan, has also written more broadly on Buddhist social philosophy and structural nonviolence. Lajos Brons' A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism seeks to reconstruct and extend the radical Buddhist tradition as a contemporary philosophical project in its own right. Together, this body of work suggests that radical Buddhism remains a living intellectual tradition whose recent development has increasingly taken place within academic philosophy rather than activist organizations alone.

Organizations and Transnational Connections

Radical Buddhist ideas in the West have circulated less through a single institutional center than through overlapping networks connecting Buddhist practitioners to environmental activism, prison abolition, and anti-racist and anti-capitalist organizing. Besides the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, discussed above, the EcoDharma Centre, founded in the Catalan Pyrenees in 2007, represents an explicitly radical development, combining engaged Buddhist practice with activist training and an analysis of ecological destruction as inseparable from social inequality and the growth-oriented economic system; its subsequent Ulex Project extended this work into a more explicitly secular framework for movement-building. The Buddhist Climate Action Network, formed in the United States in 2015, and XR Buddhists, a network of Buddhist practitioners within Extinction Rebellion active since 2019, illustrate a related but generally more moderate current connecting Buddhist practice to organized climate activism, though both networks are better classified as engaged rather than strictly radical Buddhism by the definition used here.

A further, more indirect transnational connection runs through the Triratna Buddhist Community (formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order), founded in London in 1967 by Urgyen Sangharakshita, who had spent nearly two decades in India and maintained a close relationship with B. R. Ambedkar's Buddhist revival before Ambedkar's death in 1956. Triratna's Indian branch subsequently became one of the largest Buddhist organizations working among Ambedkarite communities in Maharashtra, so that ideas from an explicitly anti-caste Asian Buddhist movement came to inform the development of a Western convert Buddhist organization, and vice versa.

Literature in English

• Slott, Mike (2024). Mindful Solidarity: A Secular Buddhist Democratic Socialist Dialogue. Tuwhiri. [The most comprehensive statement of Slott's mature position, arguing that secular Buddhism and democratic socialism can mutually enrich one another.]

• Priest, Graham (2021). Capitalism—Its Nature and Its Replacement: Buddhist and Marxist Insights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [The most systematic contemporary philosophical synthesis of Buddhism and Marxism, arguing explicitly for the replacement of capitalism.]

• Vesely-Flad, Rima (2022). Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation. New York: New York University Press. [The most significant scholarly study of Black radical Buddhism to date, situating Black Buddhist practice explicitly within the historical Black radical tradition rather than treating it as an instance of engaged Buddhism.]

• Loy, David R. (2019). Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. [Develops Loy's Buddhist social theory in relation to climate change, consumerism, and economic growth.]

• Struhl, Karsten J. (2020). "Ecosocialism". In: Sean Sayers (ed.), Marx and Alienation. Palgrave. [Extends Struhl's Buddhist-Marxist analysis toward an explicitly biocentric ecosocialism.]

• Struhl, Karsten J. (2017). "Buddhism and Marxism: Points of Intersection". Journal of World Philosophies 2.1: 84–98. [Argues that Buddhist accounts of craving and Marxist accounts of class exploitation and alienation are mutually reinforcing rather than competing explanations of suffering. Open access.]

• Williams, Rev. angel Kyodo, Owens, Lama Rod, & Syedullah, Jasmine (2016). Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. [The foundational primary and secondary text of contemporary Black radical Buddhist thought, connecting Buddhist practice to the Black prophetic tradition and contemporary struggles against racism and state violence.]

• Struhl, Karsten J. (2015). "The Moral Necessity of Socialism". Radical Philosophy Review 18.1: 1–20. [Connects socialist ethics with Buddhist compassion, arguing that global capitalism cannot adequately address either social atomization or ecological crisis.]

• Slott, Mike (2015). "Secular, Radically-Engaged Buddhism". Contemporary Buddhism 16.1: 196–206. [Combines secular Buddhism with an engaged Buddhism oriented toward systemic social change.]

• Loy, David R. (2008). Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. [Applies Loy's account of institutionalized greed and delusion to consumerism, militarism, and ecological destruction.]

• Macy, Joanna, & Johnstone, Chris (2012). Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library. [A widely read presentation of Macy's Buddhist-inspired ecological activism, particularly influential within climate justice movements.]

• Queen, Christopher S. (ed.) (2000; revised ed. 2019). Engaged Buddhism in the West. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. [The major reference collection on socially engaged Buddhism in the West. Not specifically devoted to radical Buddhism, but essential for understanding the broader field from which it emerged.]

• Loy, David R. (1997; expanded ed. 2003). The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory. Boston: Wisdom Publications. [Argues that the three poisons of greed, ill will, and delusion become institutionalized in social structures, requiring structural as well as individual transformation.]

• Macy, Joanna (1991). World as Lover, World as Self. Berkeley: Parallax Press. [Macy's classic statement of Buddhist ecology, integrating systems theory and Buddhist philosophy into a critique of the "industrial growth society."]

• Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs. [The foundational text of Buddhist economics and, although Schumacher himself was not a Buddhist, one of the principal intellectual precursors of Western radical Buddhist critiques of political economy.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Radical Buddhism in the West". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 8 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Radical_Buddhism_in_the_West.