The seeds for the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) were planted in the late 1960s when an eccentric Russian American woman traveling in India asked the Tibet-born Lama Yeshe (and his young Nepali-born disciple Lama Zopa Rinpoche) to teach her about Tibetan Buddhism. Lama Yeshe and his disciple – who were in India due to the Chinese occupation of Tibet – soon began taking on students, mostly American and European hippies, backpackers, and other searchers. Since FPMT officially incorporated in 1975, it has grown into something of a transnational Buddhist empire with over 150 centers and projects all over the world. I did fulltime ethnographic research on FPMT between 2005– 7 and periodically thereafter (mostly in India, but also at centers and events in the US). FPMT's transnational breadth invites us to dwell upon the issue of enculturation and identity in global Buddhism, and this chapter will address the puzzle of how scholars ought to refer to an increasingly diverse slate of people and practices.

FPMT is currently running study centers for all ethnic groups, monasteries and nunneries for non-Western (for example, Tibetan, Mongolian, Nepali) sangha (Buddhist communities), voluntary charitable projects, giant construction projects, educational initiatives, language training efforts, a college in the US, as well as a magazine, and other projects. Although the organization is very diverse, the very large majority of FPMTers are practitioners who were not enculturated into Buddhism growing up. These FPMTers chose Buddhism as adults and thus I would call them “nonheritage Buddhist practitioners” of FPMT's unique transnational Buddhism. As I wrote about FPMT's diverse transnational Buddhist practitioners, I was obligated to engage and struggle with extant categories of Buddhists and Buddhisms in the West. Buddhist scholars have long agonized about how to write about communities of Buddhists, especially outside of Asia, and how to categorize different kinds of Buddhist informants and interlocutors – some of our previous categories are fraught, exclusionary, or inaccurate.

This chapter's critical reflection on Buddhist categories was primarily born from a place of self-criticism and doubt about my own early writing on this topic.