Good introductions to other Japanese Buddhist schools are Ryūichi Abé, The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse (1999); James C. Dobbins, Jōdo Shinshū: Shin Buddhism in Medieval Japan (1989); Galen Amstutz, Interpreting Amida: History and Orientalism in the Study of Pure Land Buddhism (1997); and Paul Groner, Saichō: The Establishment of the Japanese Tendai School (1984, reissued 2000).
An important study dealing with Buddhism in the early modern period is James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (1990, reissued 1993). The best study of a new Buddhist movement in Japan is Helen Hardacre, Lay Buddhism in Contemporary Japan: Reiyūkai Kyōdan (1984). Buddhism in Tibet and Neighbouring Areas
Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (1993), is quite controversial but presents the best overview of the development of Buddhism in the Tibetan cultural area.
The great majority of more specific studies of Tibetan Buddhism have been oriented toward doctrine, and many have focused on the way Tibetan Buddhists continued and developed Indian Buddhist traditions. The best examples of such works include David L. Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors, 2 vol. (1987); Georges B.J. Dreyfus, Recognizing Reality: Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy and Its Tibetan Interpretations (1997); and John J. Makransky, Buddhahood Embodied: Sources of Controversy in India and Tibet (1997). José Ignacio Cabezón, Buddhism and Language: A Study of Indo-Tibetan Scholasticism (1994), is a superb comparative study.
Studies that are oriented toward practice include Stephan Beyer, The Cult of Tārā: Magic and Ritual in Tibet (1973, reissued 1978; also published as Magic and Ritual in Tibet: The Cult of Tara, 1988); Sherry B. Ortner, Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978); and David N. Gellner, Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and Its Hierarchy of Ritual (1992). Rebecca Redwood French, The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (1995), reconstructs traditions that were in place prior to the Chinese invasion of 1959. Melvyn C. Goldstein and Matthew T. Kapstein (eds.), Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity (1998), is a balanced treatment of a controversial topic.
A variety of Tibetan Buddhist texts are available in English, including Dge-lugs-pa philosophical texts such as Tson-kha-pa Blo-bzan-grags-pa, Tsong Khapa’s Speech of Gold in the Essence of True Eloquence: Reason and Enlightenment in the Central Philosophy of Tibet, trans. by Robert A.F. Thurman (1984; also published as The Central Philosophy of Tibet: A Study and Translation of Jey Tsong Khapa’s Essence of True Eloquence, 1991); and Mkhas-grub Dge-legs-dpal-bzan-po, A Dose of Emptiness: An Annotated Translation of the sTong thun chen mo of mKhas-grub dGe-legs-dpal-bzang, trans. by José Ignacio Cabezón (1992). Better-known texts include Karma Lingpa (Karma-glin-pa), The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo, trans. by Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa (1975, reissued 2000); and Gtsan-smyon He-ru-ka, The Life of Milarepa, trans. by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa (1977, reissued 1992). Buddhism and the West
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. from Japanese (1982), is an expression of the Kyōto school of Japanese Buddhist thinkers who have taken Western philosophy very seriously. Gunapala Dharmasiri, A Buddhist Critique of the Christian Concept of God (1974, reissued 1988), is a Sri Lankan Buddhist’s more polemical engagement with Christian theology.
Charles S. Prebish, American Buddhism (1979); and Louise H. Hunter, Buddhism in Hawaii: Its Impact on a Yankee Community (1971), are among the first serious studies of Buddhist communities in the West. In the 1990s even greater scholarly attention was paid to Buddhism in the West in works such as Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (1992, reissued 2000); Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, 3rd ed., rev. and updated (1992); Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka (eds.), The Faces of Buddhism in America (1998); and Charles S. Prebish, Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (1999). Two excellent books that are more narrowly focused are Paul David Numrich, Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples (1996); and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (1998), a very sophisticated and readable study. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Baumann (eds.), Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia (2002); Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish, Buddhism in the Modern World (2003); David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008); and Nalini Bhushan, Jay Garfield, and Abraham Zablocki, TransBuddhism: Transmission, Translation, Transformation (2009), are excellent studies of Buddhism’s engagement with Western intellectual traditions and popular culture. Richard Hughes Seager, Encountering the Dharma: Daisaku Ikeda, Soka Gakkai, and the Globalization of Buddhist Humanism (2006), is a study of an originally Japanese Buddhist movement that rapidly gained popularity in Western countries from the late 20th century. Stephen R. Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (1996), is a landmark biography of the first prominent American convert to Buddhism. Donald S. Lopez The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica