The sociocultural context in which religious conversion occurs, in addition to the ways in which the religious institutions function, influences personal constructions and understandings of conversion and religious identity. Drawing from the author's reflexive angle of growing up in a Taiwanese-American Buddhist household, this paper looks at different ways that Buddhism as an institution, religion, spiritual practice, and community influences conversion in two different contexts. It takes a comparative approach to the phenomenon of religious conversion to forms of Buddhism in India and the United States in today's world in order to better understand both how Buddhism is constructed in each setting as well as how the processes of conversion perform different functions. Through a series of textual accounts, it uses an examination, inspired by archival ethnography, of Buddhist conversion to understand lines of thinking behind identity formation, political statements, social mobility, and community-seeking, among others, embedded in the process of religious conversion. From this investigation, the paper proposes a set of theoretical underpinnings on contemporary conversion based on these cases and their respective contexts, providing the start to a comparative anthropological understanding of Buddhist conversion.
