But the geographical distribution of the state's Buddhist temples and centers is more complicated than that. They are not all confined to the Piedmont. There is now a Tibetan Buddhist convert center, Greenville Karma Thegsum Choling, a short drive southeast of the "piney woods" where Kerouac meditated in the Coastal Plain. The Tidewater region claims seven Buddhist communities, and nineteen more groups take advantage of the wooded splendor of the state's western mountains. Nor are Buddhist temples all in urban areas. Half of North Carolina's population is rural. In fact, only five states have smaller urban populations.  It's not surprising, then, that some of the state's Buddhists established places of worship outside cities--in rural areas, suburban centers, and small towns. So you can find temples and centers not only in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents (such as Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro), but also in towns with only a few hundred. In Cameron, a small community northwest of Fayetteville in the rolling hills of the Carolina and Georgia Sand Hills, Thai Buddhist immigrants have established a temporary temple, Wat Mungme Srisuk. That Buddhist community, which congregates on Sundays in a trailer that rests at the end of a winding country road, expects to construct a permanent building soon. And as that new Buddhist worship site is in a small town, so was the state's first Asian-American temple, Wat Carolina Buddhajakra Vanaram, which rests on twenty-three acres in Bolivia, North Carolina. That Tidewater town, which was named for the South American nation, is less exotic than its name suggests. Most of the several hundred residents are European American or African American Protestants, many of whom gather for worship at Antioch Baptist Church, which is adjacent to Wat Carolina. And even if Buddhists don't predominate in that small Southern town, or in suburbs such as Cary and cities like Charlotte, Buddhism has found its place in North Carolina's landscape.