Around 324 million people are Buddhists, most of them in East, Southeast and South Asia. China holds the largest number, though counting there is unreliable, because religious affiliation in Chinese practice is not exclusive and much observance is not registered as membership of anything. Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos and Bhutan have Buddhist majorities; Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Mongolia and Nepal have large Buddhist populations.
Buddhism largely disappeared from the land of its origin. By about the thirteenth century it had ceased to exist as a significant institution in India, for reasons still debated: the loss of royal patronage, the absorption of its practices by other traditions, and the destruction of the great monastic universities of the north all figure in the accounts. It returned in the twentieth century, most visibly through the conversion of B.R. Ambedkar and large numbers of his followers in 1956.
The same century carried Buddhism to Europe and the Americas, where it exists both in immigrant communities practising the forms of their countries of origin and in convert communities, which are typically centred on meditation and less closely tied to monasticism. Secular derivatives, notably mindfulness practices detached from the doctrinal framework, have spread far more widely than the religion itself; practitioners assess that very differently depending on whether they regard the framework as essential to what is being practised.
In several Asian countries Buddhism is closely bound to national identity, and that has drawn it into political conflict, including communal violence, in ways that sit uneasily with the tradition's own account of itself.