A year ago I mentioned that the Religious Landscape Survey showed that a majority of American Buddhists believe in God. Some people wondered as to its generality as a finding. Does this apply in Asia? It seems likely. The World Values Survey has data on Buddhists in Singapore, Taiwan and Japan in terms of God belief. Here are the data:
| Buddhist who believe in God, Yes/No | ||
| Yes | No | |
| Taiwan | 83.9 | 16.1 |
| Japan | 56.7 | 43.3 |
| Singapore | 86.3 | 13.7 |
The Japanese data are the most important. The Japanese are a secular people, so if Japanese Buddhists generally believe in God it is a rather good bet that you can generalize this. One could rebut that this only applies to Mahayana Buddhism, but there is a fair amount of ethnographic data that the same tendency toward theism is dominant in Sri Lanka as well.
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