It is worth remarking, at this point, that there are around 500 million Buddhists in the world. 1 Half of those are in China, where they constitute a minority (a little more than 18 percent). A large proportion of the rest are in several majority Buddhist countries, including Thailand, Myanmar, Bhutan, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, and South Korea. India, where Buddhism began, is less than 2 percent Buddhist. North America has close to 4 million Buddhists—about 1.4 percent. Most of these are from East and South Asia (Japanese Pure Land Buddhism is the largest single denomination), although there are, especially in “spiritual but not religious” precincts, growing numbers of well-off white people who identify as Buddhist.