This book offers a comprehensive examination of the historical development, institutional diversity, and contemporary dynamics of Buddhism across Latin America and the Caribbean. It brings together original chapters and translations of articles originally published in Portuguese and Spanish by a group of scholars whose pioneering work addresses a significant gap in the study of global and transnational Buddhism by focusing on a region that has received comparatively limited attention in the fields of Religious Studies, Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, and Latin American Studies.

Organized into three parts, the book combines a regional overview with country-level analyses and thematic case studies. Chapters explore Buddhist communities and institutions in Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and other countries of South America, highlighting the role of Japanese migration, ethnic Buddhist traditions, religious transplantation, conversion, and institutional formation. The volume also analyzes processes of adaptation, glocalization, self-orientalism, religious legitimation, and intercultural exchange, as well as the intersections of Buddhism with literature, philosophy, science, ritual practice, food, and popular religiosity.

Combining fieldwork, archival research, comparative analysis, and sociological perspectives, Buddhism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Trajectories, Regional Perspectives and Case Studies demonstrates how Buddhist traditions have been reinterpreted within diverse Latin American and Caribbean contexts while maintaining connections to wider transnational networks. By bringing together regional surveys and detailed empirical studies, it provides an important resource for understanding the place of Buddhism in contemporary Latin American religious landscapes and contributes to broader discussions on religious mobility, globalization, and cultural transformation.

Some chapters in this book are translations of articles originally published in Portuguese and Spanish. The translation of these articles into English was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

Frank Usarski, PhD in the field of the Study of Religion, is a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil. He is the coordinator of the research group CERAL (Centro de Estudos de Religiões Orientais no Brasil) that is investigating the history and contemporary situation of Buddhism and other traditional and “new” Eastern religions in Brazil and Latin America. He is the founder and editor-in-chief both of the periodical "REVER – Revista de Estudos da Religião", the first fulltext online-journal on Religious Studies in Latin America, and of the International Journal of Latin American Religions.

Catón Eduardo Carini is an anthropologist who received his BA from the National University of La Plata (2004), his MA in Social Anthropology from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO, 2009), and his PhD in Anthropology in 2012, with a dissertation on Zen Buddhism in Argentina. He is currently Professor at the School of Psychology of the National University of La Plata and an Independent Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET, Argentina). His research interests focus on the anthropology of religion, particularly the sociological, historical, ritual, and symbolic dimensions of Buddhist centers established in Argentina in recent decades. He has published articles in national and international peer-reviewed journals, as well as book chapters published in Argentina and abroad.

Rafael Shoji holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), is a researcher at the Center for the Study of Oriental Religions (CERAL) at Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo and also serves as the managing partner of Eval Digital, specializing in applied cryptography and generative AI. He was a research fellow at the Japan Foundation from 2006 to 2007 and at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture (Nagoya, Japan) from 2010 to 2011. As a scholar in religious studies, he focuses on and has published extensively on Buddhism and Japanese religions in Brazil, as well as on the transformation of religions through technology.