Buddhism Today

How many Buddhists are there?

About 324 million people identified as Buddhist in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, or 4.1 percent of the world's population.¹² That was 5 percent fewer than the 343 million of 2010, and no other major religious group shrank in number. As the rest of the world grew by 13 percent, the Buddhist share fell from just under 5 percent to just over 4 percent.³

Pew counts people who identify as Buddhist when a census or survey asks their religion.⁴ It notes that this works less well in East Asia, where the word for "religion" often suggests an organized body and Buddhism is closely mixed with folk religion. So its count leaves out people who may take part in Buddhist beliefs or practices without formally calling themselves Buddhist.³

Why did the number of Buddhists fall?

Pew gives two reasons: people raised Buddhist leaving the religion, and an older population with few births. Most of the drop came in East Asia: China had 23 million fewer Buddhists in 2020 than in 2010, and Japan 7 million fewer.³

In surveys from 117 countries and territories, analyzed for its 2025 report, Pew compared the religion adults ages 18 to 54 were raised in with their religion today. For every person who became Buddhist, 1.8 people raised Buddhist had left.¹ South Korea was the only country where the Buddhist share changed by 5 points or more. It fell by about 7 points, to 19 percent.³ In 2020, 36 percent of Buddhists were ages 50 or older, tied with Jews for the highest share of any group.¹

Where do Buddhists live?

About 98 percent of the world's Buddhists live in the Asia-Pacific region, where Buddhism began.³

Region	Buddhists, 2020	Change since 2010
Asia and the Pacific	316 million	down 6 percent
North America	5.0 million	up 27 percent
Europe	2.5 million	up 26 percent
Latin America and the Caribbean	330,000	down 3 percent
Middle East and North Africa	under 100,000	rose (small numbers)
Sub-Saharan Africa	under 100,000	rose (small numbers)

Buddhists are a majority in seven countries, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Laos, and Mongolia, which together hold 47 percent of the world's Buddhists.³¹

Pew's text gives figures for Thailand and China.³ The rows marked "calculated" are this site's figures from Pew's country table, multiplying each country's population by its Buddhist share; Myanmar and Japan come out too close to rank.²

Country	Buddhists, 2020	Share of the country
Thailand	about 68 million	94 percent
China	about 53 million	4 percent
Myanmar	about 47 million (calculated)	89 percent
Japan	about 47 million (calculated)	37 percent
Vietnam	about 23 million (calculated)	23 percent
Cambodia	about 16 million (calculated)	97 percent
Sri Lanka	about 16 million (calculated)	70 percent

The spread map shows how Buddhism reached each region over time.

What do the projections say?

These projections come from a Pew Research Center report of April 2015, which looked ahead from 2010 to 2050 by extending the trends of the time.⁵ It projected that the number of Buddhists would rise from 488 million in 2010 to about 511 million in 2030, then fall to 486 million by 2050. Their share of the world would drop from about 7 percent to 5 percent, because Buddhists are older and have fewer children than other groups.⁶

These projections start from Pew's original 2010 estimates, which it has since revised. Pew now puts Buddhists at 5 percent of the world in 2010, not 7 percent, mainly because it changed its measures of religious identity in China.⁷

How are Buddhists organized?

Each branch, and often each country, has its own leaders and bodies, as the examples below show.

• Theravada. In Thailand, the Sangha Supreme Council, the council of the country's top monks, has upheld the 1928 ban on ordaining women, and the government has defended it.⁸ In Sri Lanka, monks belong to several fraternities, each led by a chief prelate, or mahanayaka.⁹
• Tibetan Buddhism has several schools. The line of Dalai Lamas is linked with the Gelug school, which became the leading school in Tibet and Mongolia.¹⁰ The Gaden Phodrang Trust, the Dalai Lama's office, is the office his 2025 statement names to recognize his successor.¹¹¹²
• East Asian Mahayana is divided into many schools. In Japan these include Zen schools and the Pure Land and Nichiren schools founded between 1185 and 1333. In Japan's Pure Land schools, and in some esoteric, or tantric, schools in Japan and Tibet, it became common for clergy to marry and have families.¹⁰ In mainland China, the Buddhist Association of China, founded in 1953 at Guangji Temple in Beijing, is the national body for Buddhists.¹³
• Newer movements. The Soka Gakkai, a community that practices Nichiren Buddhism, said on its website in 2026 that its members live in 192 countries and territories.¹⁴
• Bodies that link traditions. The World Fellowship of Buddhists was founded in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1950, at a meeting of 129 delegates from 27 countries besides the Sri Lankan hosts.¹⁵

What questions are Buddhists debating today?

Two current debates concern who will choose the next Dalai Lama and whether women can be fully ordained in the Theravada tradition.¹²⁹

The next Dalai Lama. By tradition, a new Dalai Lama is found through a search and recognized as his predecessor's reincarnation.¹² His office says the current Dalai Lama, born in 1935, was recognized at the age of two as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama.¹⁶ China's Foreign Ministry adds that his recognition was granted directly by the central government of the time.¹¹

In a statement released on July 2, 2025, the Dalai Lama affirmed that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue. He added that the Gaden Phodrang Trust alone may recognize his future reincarnation, after consulting the heads of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, among others, and following past tradition. In his words, no one else has any such authority to interfere in this matter.¹²

China's government rejected this the same day. A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Mao Ning, said the reincarnation must follow domestic recognition, the Golden Urn process, a procedure begun under the Qing dynasty in the 18th century, and approval by the central government. She said the rule was written into Chinese regulations in 2007.¹¹

The two sides already disagree over the Panchen Lama, another senior Tibetan teacher. After the previous Panchen Lama died in 1989, the Dalai Lama named a boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, as his reincarnation, and in 1995 China's government named another boy, Gyaltsen Norbu.¹⁷¹¹ Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has not been seen in public since 1995. In 2020, China's government said he was a college graduate with a job, and that he and his family did not wish to be disturbed.¹⁷

Ordaining women in Theravada. In the Theravada tradition, the last evidence of an order of fully ordained nuns, called bhikkhunis, comes from Sri Lanka in the 11th century.⁹ A revival began with an ordination in India in 1996, and ordinations have been held regularly in Sri Lanka since 1998. Bhikkhu Bodhi, a monk who supports the revival on textual and ethical grounds, wrote in an essay posted online by 2008 that it had wide backing among monks and lay Buddhists, but no official recognition from Sri Lanka's government or chief prelates.⁹

Those who oppose the revival argue from the Vinaya, the monastic code. An earlier rule lets monks ordain nuns; a later one requires existing nuns to ordain a woman first, with monks completing the ceremony. Two Theravada monks, Phra Payutto and Thanissaro Bhikkhu, hold that the later rule replaced the earlier.¹⁸¹⁹ As Payutto puts it, in words Bhikkhu Analayo quotes, the most recent version of the rule is binding.¹⁹ With no Theravada nuns left to take part, they hold, the order cannot be revived.¹⁹

Thanissaro adds that the Buddha made no provision for reviving even the order of monks if it died out, so there are no grounds to assume he wanted the order of nuns revived without him.¹⁸

Supporters such as Bhikkhu Analayo, whose study sets out both readings, respond that the two rules cover different situations, so monks may still ordain nuns where no order of nuns exists.¹⁹

In Thailand, an order in place since 1928 forbids the ordination of women, and the Sangha Supreme Council upheld it in 2002 and 2014, Reuters reported in 2019. A full ordination of a woman needs ten bhikkhunis and ten monks, and Thai monks may not take part. The government says the rule reflects long-held tradition, not discrimination, and a spokesman for the National Office of Buddhism said women may be ordained abroad, just not by Thai monks.⁸

Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, a Thai woman ordained in Sri Lanka in 2001, told Reuters, in a story published in January 2019, that there were about 270 bhikkhunis in Thailand, all ordained abroad. She said the social context had changed in the 90 years since the order, but bhikkhunis were still not accepted.⁸ The Branches page describes the Theravada tradition.

Hostility toward Buddhists. Pew Research Center's report for 2023, published in 2026, found that Buddhists were harassed by governments or social groups in 22 of the 198 countries and territories it studied.²⁰ Pew counts a country if its sources report even one incident in the year, whether physical or nonphysical.²⁰ The figure shows how many countries, not how severe the harassment was or how many incidents occurred.²⁰