Buddhism, Immigrants, and Refugees

The title “Buddhism, Immigrants, and Refugees” appeals to a distinctly modern context where states take the form of sovereign territories defined by borders whose crossing legally marks a person as “immigrant” and, in certain cases, “refugee.” For most of Buddhism’s history, states as they are known in the twenty-first century did not exist, and the people who carried Buddhism across cultural and geographical space inhabited many roles. They were monks, merchants, emissaries, exiles, brides, pilgrims, missionaries, and students; their movement was motivated by invitation, by command, by crisis, by opportunity, or by visions. As they lived and moved, their traditions lived and moved with them––and the places where they settled changed in response. While migration and cultural adaptation have been woven into the fabric of the Buddhist tradition from its very beginnings, the categories of “immigrant” and “refugee” are relatively new to Buddhist experience. This article overviews scholarship on “Buddhism, Immigrants, and Refugees” primarily in the modern era of bordered states, which is deeply intertwined with scholarship on globalization (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Globalization”). It includes sources that describe Buddhist experiences of movement, exile, and acculturation as well as sources that investigate the political, ethical, social, and psychological dimensions of immigration from Buddhist perspectives. This article is limited by its reliance on Anglophone scholarly literature, which disproportionately treats Anglophone contexts of Buddhist immigration (explained in part by the large number of Asian Buddhist immigrants to the United States and Canada in the twentieth century). Although the title of this article omits the term “internally displaced people” (people who are uprooted from their homes and communities, yet do not cross state borders), this article includes sources that address internally displaced people who are construed as immigrants by those in power as a technique of marginalization. Additionally, this article includes sources that address not only immigrants, refugees, internally displaced people, host communities, and aid organizations who serve them, but also governments and militaries who regulate state borders and who choose whom to include and exclude, often with violent consequences (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Buddhism and Nationalism”).

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