Before the 1960s, North Carolina's cradle and convert Buddhists were few, and those who tried to practice the faith didn't have temples where they might congregate with others. In the middle of the twentieth century some European-American and African-American Buddhist sympathizers and converts pondered newly translated sacred texts from Asia, and some even tried practicing meditation without the aid of Buddhist teachers or institutions. The Beat writer and Buddhist sympathizer Jack Kerouac, who penned part of his famous novel Dharma Bums in North Carolina, described his informal meditation practice during one of his many trips to the state, where he visited his mother in a small frame house five miles south of Rocky Mount. "There are piney woods across the cotton field," Kerouac wrote in a 1956 letter, "where I went every day this spring and sometimes in the middle of the night, without lamp, to meditate on a bed of grass . . ." We don't have any surviving evidence that Asian-American Buddhists during the period--and in 1960 that meant a proportion of the 2,863 foreign-born Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese--meditated beneath Carolina pines on a bed of grass, but we can only assume that some who had been raised as Buddhists chanted alone or with their families at bedroom shrines or living room altars.
 
Starting in 1965, however, a number of cultural factors--including the rise in interregional and transnational migration, the relative decline of the liberal mainline Protestant denominations, and the counter-culture's surging interest in Asian religions--began to transform North Carolina's religious landscape. That transformation accelerated by the late 1970s, when the state's first convert Buddhist centers opened. Between 1977 and 1983 six organizations that attracted small numbers of European-American and African-American converts were founded.

Asian-American Buddhists also grew more numerous and more visible. The 1965 Immigration Act, which did away with the unfair national quota system and permitted more Asians to enter the country, allowed some voluntary migrants to find their way to North Carolina, including immigrants from South and East Asian nations with a Buddhist presence--Thailand, China, Korea, and Japan. And refugees, especially those who were forced to flee from Southeast Asian nations, began to arrive in the state after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Those Vietnamese refugees were joined in the 1980s and 1990s by other displaced peoples from Laos and Cambodia. For example, many of the Khmer-speaking Cambodian refugees that Somsak nurtures now in Greensboro were among the 440 who arrived in 1983 and 1984, when the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement chose that city and Charlotte as sites to establish new Cambodian communities.  Migration from Asia continued in the 1990s, as North Carolina's Asian population rose 73 percent between 1990 and 1997, when the U.S. Census estimated that there were 92,036 Americans of Asian descent in the state.  As those Cambodian refugees in Greensboro did, many of the new Asian American communities decided to build Buddhist temples, which have functioned as both spiritual and cultural centers for the migrants and their children. Between 1984 and 1990 seven Asian American Buddhist organizations formed, and each group either constructed a new place for worship or renovated an existing building. 

Those new temples, as well as the centers that converts have founded, dot the landscape all across the state, although the undergraduate students who researched thirty-three of North Carolina's Buddhist communities found that there were some discernible--and somewhat expected--spatial patterns. Geographers divide the state into four regions: the Mountains, the Piedmont, the Inner Coastal Plain, and the Tidewater. Population growth over the past six decades has been greatest in the Piedmont, the central region that includes three major urban areas.  So it's not surprising that the Piedmont is home to the largest concentration of the state's Buddhist communities.. It's also not surprising that the three metropolitan areas with the largest populations each have several Buddhist temples: The Triad (Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point), Metropolitan Charlotte (Charlotte/Gastonia/Rock), and the Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill).

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 a handful of Buddhist communities, and several 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 newest 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.

As the brief profiles of temples and centers included in this study show, the spiritual landscape has been changing during the past three decades. And we hope that this project provides an angle of vision on that changing terrain for students and teachers, legislators and policy makers, ministers and caseworkers, and for all citizens who want to know more about their new neighbors. Yet because the spiritual landscape is changing so quickly, some of the information gathered here will soon be outdated as new Buddhist communities form and existing communities shift locations, fade away, or change names. We can only hope that this snapshot of North Carolina's Buddhist communities will be helpful to those who pick up where we have left off, those who take up the challenge of  mapping the state's increasing religious diversity.