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

[L.S. Cousins]

In fact, Richard, I think this is a welcome corrective to the wildly 
inaccurate figures now frequently circulated by US government 
sources. There we constantly see figures for nominal adherents to 
Christianity and Islam set against figures for nominal adherents to 
other world religions. This nicely polarizes the situation but is 
surely incorrect.

>By the way, I think the estimates of the number of Buddhists in the world is
>wildly exaggerated on that web site. Not only that, but their reasoning is
>about the worst I have ever seen. About the only thing I can conclude from
>this website is that Vipassana practice must lead to severe brain damage.

Here are some comments I put on Wikipedia:

The source for this is something like: 
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35396.htm

"Buddhists make up the largest body of organized religious believers. 
The Government estimates that there are more than 100 million 
Buddhists, most of whom are from the dominant Han ethnic group. 
However, it is difficult to estimate accurately the number of 
Buddhists because they do not have congregational memberships and 
often do not participate in public ceremonies. The Government reports 
that there are 16,000 Buddhist temples and monasteries and more than 
200,000 nuns and monks."

This makes it clear that the source is a government which 
deliberately lists only the highly committed. This is fair enough but 
should not be included in lists which give nominal figures for e.g. 
Christians. A comparable figure for actual practising Christians in 
the U.K. might be about 15% rather than the 60% actually given for 
Protestants.

The only fair way to give a figure for Mainland China is to assume 
that the percentage of Buddhists is the same as for Taiwan i.e. 25% 
or for Singapore i.e. 42.5%. Although Buddhism might have grown in 
popularity in Taiwan more than it has on the Mainland, this is 
counter-balanced by a number of largely Buddhist minority areas 
(Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchu, Sipsong panna) included as part of 
China.

What is at all events clear is that the largest body of 'organized 
religious believers' will have a further large number of 
sympathizers. 78% is possible, allowing that many would also consider 
themselves Confucianists, Taoists or just Chinese traditionalists. 
Compare the Census figures for Japan. 30% seems a reasonable 
compromise.

Lance Cousins