Alan Wolfe writes about worldwide religious market share in the March issue of The Atlantic:

Hindus and Buddhists together make up 20 percent of the world’s people, and high birthrates in the countries in which they are dominant suggest that this proportion will grow.

There’s not much more on Buddhism, but there is an interesting graphic plotting countries relative to wealth (the x-axis) and religiosity (y). As usual, much of the preoccupation of the article is with the rapid growth of Islam and the United States’ atypical religiosity compared to western Europe. Does secularism grow as wealth increases? It doesn’t seem to in this country, anyway.

Buddhism has had rocky times in communist Vietnam, but now the state-sanctioned church is flexing its muscles at the expense of Catholics.

But it’s very different in London, where Cambodian Buddhists use a two-bedroom flat as their temple and community center. They now have no place to gather, after a recent fire.

In India, the government set up a Buddhist center in Kashmir and cited the religion’s influence on Mahatma Gandhi, and value as an antidote to the extremism that plagues the region.

And in gratuitous celebrity news, Orlando Bloom’s squeeze Miranda Kerr discusses the couple’s mutual love of Buddhism.

The Tibetan language is said to be under siege by deliberate Chinese policy:

The Chinese government is neglecting and actively undermining the Tibetan language as part of continuing efforts to dilute the region’s unique culture, a human rights group said on Thursday.

Schools are forcing Tibetan children to learn China’s national language, Mandarin, at a younger and younger age and are failing to support use of Tibetan in official fields, the Free Tibet Campaign said in a new report.

“China’s insistence on Chinese language in Tibetan schools has failed a generation of Tibetans who now lag behind the rest of China in terms of basic literacy,” the group’s Matt Whitticase said in an emailed statement.

Beijing hits back.