By Michael Vermeulen
This year the European Buddhist Union celebrates its 50th anniversary. Those were the days of Flower Power, when young people in the West revolted against traditional values and looked to the East for new spiritual ideas. It was also the time of the worldwide Tibetan diaspora after the failed 1959 uprising against the Chinese occupation. Yet, while many assume Buddhism came to Europe in the 1960s, the roots of Buddhist presence in the West go back to the late 19th century — and the first European Buddhist centres and organisations were founded about a hundred years ago. Before then, contacts between Western and Buddhist cultures were only sporadic, with two notable exceptions: Alexandria in Egypt and Alexandria in the (Indian) Caucasus.
A prequel in antiquity: Buddhists of European descent in the East
It is quite possible that the first contacts between Greek and Buddhist philosophers date back as early as Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE). Pyrrho of Elis (360–270 BCE), one of the philosophers who joined Alexander, is believed by several academics to have been influenced by Buddhist contacts in India. Alexander did indeed go all the way to the Hindu-Kush — known in antiquity as the Caucasus Indicus — where he founded cities such as Alexandria in the Caucasus (present-day Bagram in Afghanistan). This would become one of the capitals of the later Indo-Greek kingdoms of Bactria and Gandhara.
Their descendants created the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, with its typical mix of Buddhism and Hellenism. Here the first images and statues of the Buddha were made — most famously depicting the Buddha with the features of the god Apollo, dressed in a Greek philosopher’s cloak (himation). The Greek king Menander (c. 130 BCE) converted to Buddhism, and the “Questions of Menander” (Milinda Panha) are included in the Theravada Pali canon. Ashoka (274–236 BCE) sent Buddhist missionaries not only to neighbouring regions but all the way to Macedonia and Egypt; one of them, the Greek monk Dharmaraksita, was the first known person of European descent to be ordained.
We do not know if these missionaries reached the West, but Buddhist monks were later present in Egyptian Alexandria, known as “Sarmanaioi from Bactria” (from the Sanskrit sramana, a wandering mendicant monk). Ptolemy (367–282 BCE) — a student of Aristotle alongside Alexander, who became pharaoh after Alexander’s death — founded the famous library, and it is quite possible that some Buddhist writings were added to it. The first hard proof that intellectuals in the West were aware of the Buddha again comes from Alexandria: Church Father Clemens (d. 215 CE) wrote, “Some too of the Indians obey the precepts of Boutta [Buddha], whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours” (Stromata 1:15).
Under the fanatical emperor Theodosius I (347–395) what remained of the library was burned down, and the Roman Empire began isolating itself from non-Christian thought. There seems to have been no significant contact with Buddhism until the days of Marco Polo (1254–1324), whose adventures — recorded in “The Travels of Marco Polo” — contain the first complete narrative on the life of the Buddha in the West. It was not until the 16th and 17th centuries that Jesuit missionaries began studying Buddhism, and only in the 19th century that the first European academics formulated a coherent understanding of it.
Buddhists of European descent in the Far West
While Western academics tried to understand Buddhism in the East, Buddhism itself was also coming to the West. During the 19th-century gold rush, many people migrated from Japan and China to California, forming the first Mahayana Buddhist communities in America and acquainting the West with Zen and Pure Land Buddhism. Towards the end of the century, the talk by the Sri Lankan Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago (11–16 September 1893) made a huge impression and became a symbolic turning point. Days later, on 26 September 1893, the New York businessman Charles T. Strauss received the Buddhist precepts in Chicago in Dharmapala’s presence — the first known person of European descent to convert to Buddhism in the Americas, and, for many, a landmark in the emergence of a Western form of Buddhism.
Influence of Buddhist concepts
Philosophers and artists noticed how radically different Buddhism was from Western metaphysics. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was the first to explicitly integrate Buddhist concepts into his thinking; Heidegger (1889–1976) was well acquainted with Zen. In art, a reverse movement occurred to the historical influence of Hellenism. The French Buddhist philosopher Fabrice Midal reminds us how Western artists were inspired by Buddhism — in particular the ch’i yün (spiritual tonality) of Zen: “The Impressionist and post-Impressionist painters did not only turn to Japan to discover a space based on emptiness rather than on the logic of metaphysical representation. Many of them, such as Van Gogh, Sérusier, Gauguin and Odilon Redon, also painted a portrait of the Buddha… The entire abstract movement has looked to Buddhism — from Kandinsky to Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock” (Le bouddhisme et l’art, 2008).
A century of Buddhism in Europe
In 1924 the German physician Paul Dahlke (1865–1928) founded Das Buddhistische Haus (the Buddhist House) in Berlin — the oldest still-existing Buddhist centre in Europe outside the Russian Federation, and now a National Heritage site. It was also the venue of the very first European Buddhist Conference in 1933, followed by conferences in London (1934) and Paris (1937). One of the projects discussed was the creation of a European Buddhist magazine in three languages. From the early 20th century, European Buddhists organised themselves into ecumenical organisations that included all Asian traditions — now known as the National Buddhist Unions. The Second World War made further pan-European initiatives impossible, and it took until the 1970s before this international dynamic resumed.
1975: The European Buddhist Union
A major change came when Paul Arnold (1909–1992) — a judge of the French Supreme Court and twice a laureate of the Académie Française — realised his bold dream to unite all European Buddhists within one non-denominational, pan-European umbrella organisation. In 1973 he founded a monastery in the Savoy that simultaneously hosted Tibetan, Theravada and Zen traditions. In 1975, “after lengthy and difficult negotiations” between delegates from the National Buddhist Unions of the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy and Austria, the European Buddhist Union was founded in London. On 13 October 1975 the first Annual General Meeting took place in Paris, and Paul Arnold was elected the first EBU president.
One of the EBU’s goals was to restart European conferences for all Buddhist traditions. The first EBU conference took place in 1979 at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris with participants from 15 countries; the 1992 conference in Berlin drew more than 2,000. As Stephen Batchelor observed, “It took the horror of two World Wars… before Buddhist ideas really started to take root in European consciousness… Buddhism appeared to them as a rational religion, another approach to asking the deepest questions of life.” Since its foundation fifty years ago, the EBU has placed Buddhism on Europe’s religious and philosophical map: in 2008 it obtained official participatory status with the Council of Europe, and in 2019 an old dream became reality with the launch of the European Buddhist Magazine — the only pan-European Buddhist periodical for all traditions. In 2022 its seat moved from Paris to the EU capital, Brussels.
Future voices
Some describe the encounter of millennia-old Buddhist teachings with the West as the start of a New Renaissance, comparing it to the rebirth of ancient philosophy and art after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Yet previous “turnings of the wheel” in Asia took centuries to mature, so it is probably too early to speak of a European or Western Buddhism. What is already clear is that women and non-monastics are central to this process, and that — unlike the theistic religions — Buddhism shows no missionary desire to dominate, nor major anxiety in its encounter with modern science. Former EBU president Frans Goetghebeur calls this a gradual process of “harmonious acculturation”: undoubtedly, after a few decades, an original synthesis will grow out of the encounter between Buddhism and the West.
About the author
Dr Michael Vermeulen is a philosopher, medical doctor and religious-studies scholar. From 2011 to 2015 he was the representative of the EBU to the European Union, after which he became chair of the EBU Rainbow Sangha. He has spoken at several UN conferences on Human Rights, Queer Buddhism and Buddhist Environmentalism.
This article first appeared in EBU Magazine #14 – Celebrating 50 Years of the European Buddhist Union (Winter 2025). Download the full issue as PDF or browse all issues.