History's Most Significant Buddhists

      Okay, here is proof that in creating such lists we are not limited to Jews. Although on this one I did have to make use, here and there, of ChatGPT4o.

      Below is a list of the 15 most significant Buddhists, ranked, more or less, in increasing order of overall cultural importance or importance to Buddhism itself—with, admittedly, a very strong “our-generation,” American bias.

      The Buddha, there being no reliable evidence that he existed, did not make the list—just as neither Abraham nor Yahweh made our list of the most significant Jews.

      Whom did I overlook or rank too high or low?

15.  Herbie Hancock (born 1940)

      The jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, from his website: “One night on a certain tour in mid-1972. . . [T]he bassist Buster Williams starts playing this introduction. And what came out of him was something I’d never heard before. And not only had I not heard it from him, I’d never heard it from anybody. . . .

     When we finished, many people ran up to the front of the stage and reached up their hands to shake ours. Some of them were crying . . . .

      I knew that Buster was the catalyst for all of this, so I took him into the musicians’ room, and I said, “Hey, Buster, I heard you were into some new philosophy or something and if it can make you play bass like that, I want to know what it is.”

      And then his eyes lit up and he said, “I’ve been chanting for a way to tell you about this.”. . . [It] came through the music, which was the only way to kind of reach my heart at the time . . . .So, that was when he first told me about Buddhism and about chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo , which is the primary thing we do. It’s the sound of the essence of everything.”

14.  Tina Turner (1939-2023)

      “I have never separated my spiritual practice from my life as a rock singer,” Turner has explained. “When I was going through the hardest times of my life, I was chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. And chanting helped me and changed my life for the better. I’ve left a good body of work as a rock singer, and I’ve always made it very clear that it was all because of my spiritual practice.”

13.   Dōgen (1200–1253)

      A deep Zen thinker and the founder of Sōtō Zen in Japan. He emphasized "practice as enlightenment" and laid the foundation for much of modern Japanese Zen.

12.  Leonard Cohen (1934–2016)

      This accomplished singer-songwriter and poet long suffered from depression. Buddhism seemed to help.

     Cohen practiced Rinzai Zen for decades and lived as a monk for five years at the Mount Baldy monastery in Los Angeles. His Japanese Buddhist name was “Jikan,” which means “ordinary silence.”

      Might we see a Buddhist influence in one of the more enlightening Leonard Cohen lines: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

11.  Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926–2022)

     A peace activist and founder of "Engaged Buddhism," he brought “mindfulness” to the West in practical, secular form and became a leading spiritual teacher around the world.

10.   Tiger Woods (born 1975)

      Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest golfer of all time, has credited his Buddhist upbringing, particularly his mother's Thai Buddhism, as helping him achieve focus and balance, and learn restraint—on the golf course.

9.     Queen Anula of Sri Lanka (reigned, maybe, between 47–42 CE)

      She was possibly the sister-in-law of the king of Sri Lanka or she was the first Buddhist queen or maybe even the first female head of state in all of Asia or, at least, the first female head of state in Sri Lanka.

      And Anula became the ruler of Sri Lanka by poisoning, one by one, a handful of the kings to whom she had been married. Or maybe Anula was just a particularly devout Buddhist member of the royal family in Sri Lanka, who, despite her gender, was ordained and achieved enlightenment.

       It can indeed be difficult today to separate truth from legend in India almost two thousand years ago.

8.    Richard Gere (born 1949)

      Richard Gere, a practicing Buddhist, has been a prominent activist for Tibetan rights and an ambassador for Buddhism in the West. He has tried to use his fame as an actor to bring the compassion to be found in Buddhism and the injustice of the Chinese occupation of Tibet to a global audience.

7.    Alan Watts (1915-1973)

      Many of us in the the 1960s and 1970s followed this path to, at least, an interest in Buddhism: We read Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums then tried to lose ourselves in Allen Ginsberg’s mantras, which then led us to Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. Watt’s book became a bestseller—a bestseller about Buddhism.

      And Watts, who styled himself a "philosophical entertainer" wrote 26 other books—many of which also popularized Buddhist ideas and practices.

6.    B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956)

      B. R. Ambedkar was the architect of India's constitution, a civil-rights hero, and the leader of a mass conversion movement that revived Buddhism in India among millions of oppressed Dalits.

5.    Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

      Gary Snyder, a Beatnik poet, had an extensive relationship with Buddhism. Jack Kerouac, a better-known Beatnik writer, also underwent a Buddhist phase and wrote about it in a novel, The Dharma Bums. However, it was their friend, Allen Ginsberg—the Beatnik poet and political activist—who became perhaps the most visible exponent of Buddhism in the United States in the second half of the 20th century.

      The full-bearded Ginsburg—looking very much like a guru—could be seen at demonstrations, marches, with Bob Dylan, even at the Woodstock festival, sitting cross-legged on the ground and chanting. Ginsberg also worked Buddhist and other Eastern mantras into his poetry.

4.    D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966)

         Raised in Japan in impoverished circumstances, D. T. Suzuki’s hunger for knowledge and spiritual understanding caused him to learn Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, and several European languages. He became one of the world’s most influential Buddhist scholars and contributed as much as anyone to renewing global interest in Buddhism around the world in the 20th century.

3.    The 14th Dalai Lama (born 1935)

      The current Dalai Lama was selected as the reincarnation of his predecessor in 1937, when he was two years old and one of seven children in a farm family in Tibet. After a rebellion against Chinese rule was crushed in 1959, the Dalai Lama left Tibet for India, and has not returned.

      But as the global face of Buddhism this Dalai Lama became and has remained an eloquent spokesman for Tibetan rights and human rights—he also has displayed a surprising fascination with science.

      The Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

2.     Steve Jobs (1955–2011)

      He was known more as an SOB than as a saint during his two remarkably successful stints at Apple.

      But after dropping out of college Steve Jobs and a friend had traveled to India and he returned with a shaved head and an interest in Buddhism that would last until his death at the age of 56. The Dalai Lama appeared in one Apple “Think Diffferent” commercial. And a Buddhist monk presided at Jobs’ wedding.

      And while he was revolutionizing global technology—initially with the Apple II, the Macintosh and the iPod—Jobs employed aesthetics and insights informed by Zen principles of simplicity, impermanence, and intuition.

       How can I rank Steve Jobs higher than the Dalai Lama? Because his involvement with Buddhism has resulted in almost 1.4 billion people in the world today now constantly carrying around with them what is in some ways a totem of Buddhism: that simple-looking, intuitive font of impermanence: the iPhone.

1.    Ashoka the Great (c. 304–232 BCE)

      Ashoka is said to have been the emperor of Maurya, which under his rule became, in the 3rd century BCE, the first empire to stretch from one side of the Indian subcontinent to the other.

      Ashoka is said to have himself converted Buddhism and converted the empire to Buddhism and to have spread awareness of the Buddha’s teaching well beyond that empire. He is also said to have, under the influence of those teachings, stopped conquering and innovated methods of running an empire based on principles of nonviolence.

      Trustworthy records from this early in the history of India are scarce and unreliable, but, if some of this is true, Ashoka may indeed have been the most significant Buddhist ever—with the exception of the Buddha himself, if he actually existed.