ABSTRACT
During a rare excursion outside of my bungalow, I was bombarded with images of the Lord Buddha. Movie posters featuring Chow Yun Fat as a Tibetan monk littered the theater walls, a small incense-laden shop on the corner was selling a stack of pillowcases with the Buddha’s face, and fi nally Walmart was displaying a cherry-scented Buddha head candle right next to an “authentic” monastery bell. No, this did not occur in Buddhist-rich Taiwan or Japan but in a small city in upstate New York. Buddhist iconography and paraphernalia is increasingly seen in American pop culture and new media. The Buddhist presence online is growing at a rapid rate, providing users with access to information about the religion, means to contact other adherents, and ways to shop for Buddhist-related items. But how does the increased presence of Buddhist resources online infl uence the interpretation and continued development of American Buddhism? How are adherents harnessing the interactive features of social media to build virtual communities? This chapter will explore Buddhism online, determining who the users are and why they choose to interact with religious information in an online context, and what American Buddhist expression and community looks like as it is developed in an online medium.
