American Buddhist Congress

The American Buddhist Congress was founded in 1987 and calls upon individual Buddhists and Buddhist societies throughout America, to come together and join hands to put their message and beliefs across to the rest of America. This is the purpose of the ABC:


1. Promote the development of an American Buddhism by adapting and blending the American linguistic and cultural traditions and values and the Tripitaka in ways loyal to the Buddha's basic teachings, but also identifiable with American ideals and values.

2. Bring together American Buddhist organizations and individuals of all traditions to encourage cooperation for the common good.

3. Promote appreciation and understanding of each other's traditions and values among the various Buddhists groups and within American society.

4. Cooperate with other organizations to promote peace and harmony.

5. Assist in implementing worthy projects of Buddhist organizations of varying traditions,
6. To help encourage the development of a uniquely American Buddhist culture to include new liturgies and music.

7. To work toward the founding of an American Buddhist Seminary for the training of Dhamma Teachers and monks.


They have been gifted the Bodhi award which is bestowed upon them for the tireless teaching of wisdom and compassion. This shows how seriously they take their teachings and how much they believe in promoting their religion throughout America.










The intensity in which they go about spreading the world of their religion is representative of them believing that they don't really fit in that well with the rest of America. This is probably largely to do with the high majority of Christians within America, and as the immigration rates of the Hispanic population carry on to increase, it also means the prevalence of the Catholic religion will grow and become dominant within the country- meaning Buddhist's power and the percentage of the population that they hold will lessen. At this current point in time, 0.7% of America are Buddhist, although this sounds very low, the population of America is around 300million, meaning approximately 3 million people in the country are buddhist, which is a relatively high number of people- meaning that the messages that they are trying to promote could potentially be quite easily spread.