Zen in the United States expositor of Zen Buddhism and its unofficial ambassador to Western readers until his death in 1966. His 1949 book, "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism", featured a thirty-page introduction by Carl Jung, an emblem of the deepening relationship between Buddhism and major Western thinkers. One American who attempted to establish an American Buddhist movement was Dwight Goddard (1861–1939). Goddard was a Christian missionary to China when he first came in contact with Buddhism. In 1928, he spent a year living in a Zen monastery in Japan. In 1934, he founded "The Followers of Buddha, an American Brotherhood," with the goal of
Zen aware of Zen as a distinct form of Buddhism, the visit of Soyen Shaku, a Japanese Zen monk, to Chicago during the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 is often pointed to as an event that enhanced the profile of Zen in the Western world. It was during the late 1950s and the early 1960s that the number of Westerners other than the descendants of Asian immigrants who were pursuing a serious interest in Zen began to reach a significant level. Japanese Zen has gained the greatest popularity in the West. The various books on Zen by Reginald Horace Blyth,