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

[L.S. Cousins]

Richard,

Yes, these are precisely the figures which I have been reacting 
against for some time. And the Vipassana Institute is perhaps 
over-reacting; even so I think their figures are more accurate than 
these. By that I mean that they are inflating figures for Buddhists 
in the way that figures for (especially) Christianity are inflated at 
Adherents. com and elsewhere. So, broadly speaking, the VI figures 
are probably equally inaccurate for all religions !

>Yes, the counting methods on the Vipassana Foundation website are 
>flawed, or at least rest on questionable assumptions. There is 
>another website with quite different statistics. 
>http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html claims that the 
>total number of Buddhists in the
>world is around 376,000,000 (about 6% of the world's population). 
>For the sake of comparison, the total number of Christians is 
>estimated to be 2,100,000,000 (33% of the world's population), 
>Muslims 1,300,000 (21%), Hindus 900,000,000 (14%), and Jews 
>14,000,000 (0.21%). The number of people claiming to have no 
>religion or to be
>atheists comes to about 16% of the world's population. I have no 
>idea what assumptions are being made here, but the figures are close 
>to those published in a United Nations source a few years ago.

The EB list which is followed here counts 249 million Christians in 
North America and 550 million in Europe. It states how it defines 
'Christian': "Followers of Jesus Christ affiliated with churches 
(church members, including children: 1,791,227,000) plus persons 
professing in censuses or  polls though not so affiliated." It 
doesn't explain how it defines "Buddhist".

These figures are perhaps correct for the U.S., I don't know. They 
are correct for Europe in a very broad sense if you talk about 
'belonging to a historically Christian culture' or something like 
that. But by such a criterion the figures for Buddhism are massively 
too low.

Adherents.com gives the following source:
>A major source for these estimates is the detailed 
>country-by-country analysis done by David B. Barrett's religious 
>statistics organization, whose data are published in the 
>Encyclopedia Britannica (including annual updates and yearbooks) and 
>also in the World Christian Encyclopedia (the latest edition of 
>which - published in 2001 - has been consulted).

If you look up the source, you find that David B. Barrett works at 
the World Evangelization Research Center, Richmond, Virginia.
That speaks for itself.

You will also find that if you look at the various editions of the 
widely cited CIA World Factbook that it is using essentially the same 
statistics.

Note that this includes some remarkable anomalies including a very 
low (or even zero) figure for Buddhists in North Korea.

But of course, the crunch question is always China. We have no 
reliable figures from inside Mainland China, but that means we have 
to use Census and other figures from Taiwan and Singapore. That 
produces vastly higher figures for those who in a Census claim to be 
Buddhist. This is an honest way to calculate.

Lance Cousins
formerly in the Dept of Comparative religion at Manchester University.